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Monday, May 09, 2005
Publishing, Popper, Piper
Take the weekend off and come back and there's flame inside and out. Ah, well. First, something I didn't anticipate: the Valve has been criticized for advertising itself as a 'little magazine' but really being a blog. I am sorry for confusion caused, if any, but the original post didn't say we were a little magazine, just that we hoped to serve the function Trilling said the little magazine served: namely, improving circulation for ideas when circulation is down. I take the contemporary academic humanities to have circulation problems. But, yes. We are a blog, as per our statement of purpose. I am sorry if I seem to have been concealing this fact from innocent readers.
But come off it: admit it's a bit silly to call yourself 'editor'. ("Why does The Valve look so ridiculous? Maybe for the same reason that an elephant driving a clown car looks ridiculous.") Ah, that piece of trickery. Well, OK. First, I'd like to point that anyone driving a clown car looks ridiculous, so it's no fair blaming the elephant - that's me. Doing my best Henry James 'elephant picking up a pea in the corner' routine. But seriously. The idea is get readers, get popularity, get Hollywood's attention and turn the whole thing into a reality TV show. BUT ON THE INTERNETS! Every week, readers will be able to vote off one author from our roll. And that author will be obliged to make a post containing a low quality webcam movie of themselves crying. So our readers will be able to savor the sweet ambrosia of their humiliation. And I'll get RICH and be able to compel my enemies to bow down before me voluntarily. Because it's that sort of a world.
No, seriously. I didn't explain this before because we haven't done it yet, but the idea is 1) to get readers. We did pretty well first month: 100,000 hits. As John Bruce and Conscientous Objector have been pointing out, the stuff we write is pretty unappealing. We academics are too used to having captive audiences for our bloviations. This is true, but we solved the problem with a few simple plugins which force people to come read our posts like fearful undergraduates whose grades depend on our whims.
As I was saying: the point of having readers, above and beyond the fact that it feeds our Galactus-like hunger, is to be able to deploy the fuel of our readership - this high-octane clowncar of a first-stage rocket - in the service of novel academic publishing projects, which are all just blueprints right now. As editor, my job is to herd cats on behalf of these plans. Often this is tedious and my efforts come to naught. One problem I am having is that some folks apparently assume - probably on the basis of 'everything the internet touches turns to crackpot' - that I can't be proposing anything that is academically legit, so why bother? Well, we will see.
If near-term plans come off, first will come round-table reviews of academic books. Sort of like that China Miéville thing we did at CT. Get publishers to agree to release a significant portion of a given book online as PDF downloads. 'Teaser' stuff, from a publicist's point of view. Get several folks - some Valve authors, some others - to do a distributed group review, crawling all over the work in question. Give the author(s) complete right of response, i.e. make them guest authors themselves. Go around as long as people care to. Have a vigorous mini-conference/maxi-review. Then release the results under CC. Maybe collect a year's worth of these and call 'em a book and get 'em an ISBN number and the little ALSC whirligig on it, or not; call it The Valve Press, or not; but don't bother trying to get the stuff between covers on acid-free paper. Leave it as an online resource.
Having lots of readers means being able to offer tasty publicity to publishers. It makes us look like we are worth the trouble of working with. Plus blogging is fun!
Now it will be objected that it is vain of me to turn my hobby into a feather in my CV cap: a publication, an editorship? John Bruce and Conscientous Objector both see trouble. Why not do it for the love? Well, I hope I am a loving soul. (Is it so terrible to try to arrange things so that you can do what you love?) But basically I am also an academic concerned to correct to some small degree what seem to me irrationalities in the publishing system. There is no reason non-academics should give a damn, really, but at least they shouldn't regard it as infernally suspicious that, as an academic, I do give a damn.
Exhibit A: expensive scholarly books produced at great expense and vast investment of effort that just sit stupid on the shelves. No one reads them. This is understandable because they are so often bad, because they are overproduced. But it isn't healthy to have a system where the sensible thing to do with a strange book is NOT to read it, because life's too short to be reading articles puffed into monographs so someone could get tenure. And so the actually good books suffer undue neglect. As I said in my inaugural post, every book worth publishing deserves a comment box - deserves one of these little events I'm hoping to stage, not to put too fine a point on it. The only way to get this to happen, regularly, is to recalibrate the incentive structure so people can get credit for doing what actually needs to be done - e.g. contributing to a lively conversation. (You get credit for giving papers at conferences and writing reviews. Why not this? Plus the books need it.) So that's what I'm doing. Trying to arrange these sorts of things. Again, it may be that non-academics won't really find this interesting. That's why you have a back-button.
Another thing I want to do is ... well, we'll leave it at that. I have other plans. (Honks red nose in elitist way.)
OK, another thing. Jonathan and acephalous and I were having what I took to be a bit of mostly harmless fun, ribbing John Bruce for what we took to be some very over-the-top accusations against the Valve. As to how it all began, CO explains: "Seems to me the Valvsters could use some bluff, gruff advice explaining why some people are just gonna want to give each and every one of them a swirlie." Oh for the sweet love of wedgies, does he think it is our first day of school and we don't understand John Bruce's motivations?
At a certain point I left. John Bruce interpreted this as fear that if I stayed my Bradley money would be cut off. At first I thought he had finally discovered irony. But apparently he is serious. I know I shouldn't get mixed back up in this, but there are some sort of interesting general issues in the area, so I'll try to cram in some content.
From a post entitled "corrupt, uncritical, luddite conformists with bad, elitist motives" (my phrase, intended to highlight a certain absurdity to his stance, but Bruce evidently liked it) [sorry for no direct link; Bruce's permalinks seem bloggered. Scroll down.]
The comments Assistant Prof. Holbo has left are also a rich source of insight into a certain kind of academic mind. He's fixed on the idea that, even though I put up a post that hit the high spots by citing, via links to specific url and blockquotes, some -- though by no means all -- of the posts that struck me as silly, elitist, luddite, conformist, or whatever during The Valve's first month, this isn't evidence. This is a sham of evidence, a fraud, notwithstanding that these things were actually posted on his site. Why? Because, apparently, I believed The Valve was a bunch of corrupt, uncritical, luddite conformists with bad, elitist motives, and whether I could find evidence to support my view or not was irrelevant. Well, yes, if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't post evidence to that effect -- but I did, after all, come to that conclusion after reading some number of posts that convinced me this was so. This is normally called empiricism.
This guy is in the Philosophy Department.
OK, let's consider this thing men call 'empiricism'.
The Bruce v. Valve kerfuffle started with this Bruce post [permalink OK]: Bruce concluded many dark things, I objected in comments that the quotes in support of these conclusions betrayed no tendency to support them, hence could hardly be counted as evidence. (Evidence is a functional concept. Quote is a formal concept, if you will.) As evidence of our really super-villainous badness, Bruce pointed out: that I quoted someone from the 40's; that Miriam J posted a quiz, asking whether people like pens and things like that; that Amardeep griped about corporate memos; that Daniel Green posted about how there there is a dust-up about allegedly rigged poetry prize competitions; that we Valvatistas 'tend to be employed by universities'; that we are a blog; that we are a group-blog.
The problem with proving we are "a bunch of corrupt, uncritical, luddite conformists with bad, elitist motives" on the basis of this evidence is that - even taking it all together - it seems consistent with our complete innocence on all counts. Quoting someone from the 40's, for example, is what you might call a 'dual-use technology'. You may do this thing because you wish to impose a 'backward-looking stance' and .. well, I'll just quote:
In his first post at The Valve, Editor John Holbo refers at length to a Lionel Trilling essay published in book form in 1950. Other web-based little magazines still appear to further a 1930s Stalinist fellow-traveling agenda, glorifying, of all things, life in Cuba.
But folks who do not wish to glorify life in Cuba, etc. and who are not even luddites, may quote folks from the 40's or even earlier. The same goes for the rest, unless you can show otherwise.
OK, philosopher hat on: basically Bruce is advancing an abductive argument, in the Peircean sense. This is a pattern for hypothesis formation: argument to the best explanation. Formally, Peirce lays it out like this:
The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence there is reason to suspect A is true.
For example, I might sidle up to John Bruce in false moustache and say: "Our mutual friend, Schmon Schmolbo, has quoted someone from the 40's." he might reply. "This is a very surprising fact, but if he were a luddite it would be easily explained. Hence there is a reason to suspect Schmolbo is a luddite and all-around Castro lickspittle." I might add: "And our mutual friend, Schmeriam Schmones, has joined a group blog." He might reply. "Another surprising fact, but readily explained if Schmones has elitist-authoritarian tendencies." Perhaps you begin to see the problem. Not only are the abductive arguments weak, the hypotheses they produce cannot be disconfirmed - which, Popper teaches, is not good empiricist practice. Why can't they be disconfirmed? Basically, Bruce is abducting on the principle that anything that is logically consistent with being a very bad person can be taken as evidence one is a very bad person. (What other principle can he be using?) But even Doctor Doom can pet a kitten, so we're basically Doomed. As wise Montaigne wrote of the hermeneuts of suspicion of his day:
What great subtlety! Give me the most excellent and purest action, and I will plausibly supply fifty vicious motives for it. Gods knows what a variety of interpretations may be placed on our inward will, for anyone who wants to elaborate them. In their calumny they play at ingenuity not so much maliciously as clumsily and crudely.
So I am forced to conclude that Bruce is no Popperian empiricist, though he may be, as it were, a Piperian empiricist. That is, his writings make perfect sense (only) on the assumption that he is like Roddy Piper's character in "They Live". He has a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see that those around him are very bad. I don't have any way of proving that Bruce lacks special insight of this sort, obviously. But I do wish he would stop hinting irrelevantly that somehow he has an advantage over us in the democracy department. Because Piperian empiricism - as opposed to its Popperian nemesis - has no obvious tendency to go together with science or with democracy. So it seems to me. I hope I am humbly amenable to correction.
Comments
Well… some thoughts.
I like the blog format, but am as susceptible to its failings as anyone: glibness, haste, etc. I think we all are. It seems to me that you’re on to something w/r/t the China Mieville thing at CT. Specifically, I know that poets love to be featured on Poetry Daily—why not a kind of Literature/Literary Theory daily in which The Valve posts one or two papers a day, invites authors of those papers as guest blogger, as well as, say, a nice intro that sets up the guest/their concerns by one of The Valve-ers? I think, for instance, that Jonathan Goodwin’s post on Plotinsky and Derrida would have gone much better had he posted, proleptically, the two papers by Plotinsky he posted when the entry had all but died down… and even better yet had he gotten Plotinsky to take part in a discussion that was framed better at the outset (and carried, with the author of the paper in question “in the room,” an air of greater seriousness).
I remember being thrilled as an undergrad when I got to participate in seminars by guests such as Donald Davidson and G.E.M. Anscombe--it would be a very cool service to literature/literary theory if these kinds of “visits” were shared by more than the small seminar/guest lecturer audiences that currently have access to them. I know that, as much as I love to visit at conferences/universities, there’s always a little let-down when I’m sitting at my hotel room afterward… a sense that there just wasn’t enough give-and-take/extended interaction to make the expense/travel worth it (and the honoraria I receive, even--or especially--when generous, sometimes seems cheapened by this experience). Which is to say: I suspect that a lot of academics would trade, if The Valve didn’t seem like a mere mugging by keyboard-wielding yahoos, a visit to university or conference X, a few hours during the day spent blogging their paper on The Valve--and, really, it may not even be necessary to trade: I know I have given lectures that I would love to have tried out in asynchronous mode before going live with them. I can’t imagine that I’m alone.
Doing a literary studies group blog is inevitably going to be hard.
Unlike current events-oriented blogs, the topics don’t always suggest themselves. Is something really big happening today in the field of reader-response criticism? Probably not.
The area that will be both current AND of common interest is going to be a little elusive. We can be sustained a bit by space-clearing polemics (i.e., about “theory"), but ultimately it’s our own smaller, everyday interests and passions that will sustain this enterprise.
I might prefer to see a Valve with one long post a day, which engages ideas, than several short ones, which engage news.
I also think it might not hurt if we simply ignored some of this massive raft of unwarranted criticism, and just went about our business. The early criticisms from Gzombie and Cultural Revolution raised salient objections. These do not.
Perhaps the ALSC sponsorship can be put to use in making available Project Muse refs (however temporarily) to us barbarians who lack formal affiliation with an institution (aka non-academics who give a damn)? Precedents include the Chron for Hire’s templinks via Arts & Letters Daily—yes, I know that’s but one publication, as compared to the herd of journals covered by PM; nonetheless, there’s that democratic impulse and all ...
"The early criticisms from Gzombie and Cultural Revolution raised salient objections.”
I never meant to be seen as objecting to the endeavor; I objected to the assumed exigence for the Valve.
The recent criticisms seem misguided and worth ignoring. You don’t have to respond to everything.
I think nnyhav has a great idea about convincing services like PM (or J-Stor) to provide temporary access to an article under discussion. If anything, such an arrangement is more likely to land these services additional subscribers than it is to deprive them of revenue.
The electronic OED does this: if you want to share a definition with others, it creates a free link to that definition for a few days.
The Chronicle has a relevant article today (subscription required), Humanities Scholars Continue Their Debate Over Whether Anyone Is Listening to Them:
In recent years, concerns raised by humanities scholars in the United States about the dire state of academic publishing have deepened into an even more basic re-examination of the mission of the disciplines themselves: Are the humanities—via publishing or pedagogy—attempting to reach a wider public? Is anyone listening when they do speak?
Such questions were raised again on Friday at the annual meeting here of the American Council of Learned Societies, in a panel on “The Humanities and Its Publics” organized by Pauline Yu, the organization’s president. Friday’s discussion enlarged the debate by bringing in the perspectives of scholars deeply embroiled in public debates elsewhere in the world and representatives of organizations that straddle academe and the public sphere.
Hm, you have enemies devoting their lives to you already. That’s success for you! At least all I did was send you a geoduck.
FYI Holbo, you’re a liar. And you’ve been challenged to a duel...a hit-counter duel. Don’t believe me? Check out the Bruce today:
Four hits so far from that post at The Valve. Huh? Assistant Prof. Holbo, put up a public hit tracker like Site Meter, the way many other bloggers do. You may have gotten a lot of lookie-loos—mention by one or another top blog of your debut may have spiked your early traffic—but your assertion that you’re getting lots of hits now just isn’t credible. You can easily make me look silly by making your statistics viewable by the public.
Apparently some people are incapable of recognizing the difference between the quality of a blog and the number of hits it generates. (I had this same strange mud flung in general direction a couple posts previous.) These same people are also incapable of realizing that it’s possible to read a post containing links without actually clicking on them. (Although I hope none of my readers believe that, as I expend great effort--many, many seconds--googling amusing images to attach to all those borings words I’m still, in 2005, forced to write with.)
That said, the vision of the Valve (Valvular Vision?) you’ve outlined here is superior to the one I defended on CO’s site last week. I think CO’s correct in stating that the Valve gives off “the air of acting above its station,” but I disagree with his assessment that that’s necessarily a bad thing. What you’ve outlined here--esp. now that you’ve referenced the China Mieville discussion at CT--would be a vast improvement over the content of the run-of-the-mill literary blog. Its appeal might not be universal; it might not challenge Instapundit for the Great Hit Count Crown; and its audience might be composed largely of academics, former academics, and aspiring academics. I don’t see any problem with that...but I’m sure John Bruce does. Just as I’m sure, if I click over there in about an hour, I’ll find out exactly why.
"The early criticisms from Gzombie and Cultural Revolution raised salient objections. These do not.”
So it’s salient to object (to take one prominet example) that the blog is funded by Bradley, and is therefore evil, yet not salient to point out that (again, to take one example of many) that the blog has an editor but no apparent editing? The second is a good deal more obvious, but the first is a good deal more questionable in terms of saliency. At least in my opinion.
John is too modest, and too considerate of his fellow-posters’ egos, to point out that he proofs every post here for spelling errors. Hence, “editor.” The fact that he never finds spelling errors is immaterial.
Amardeep--are you just using “reader response criticism” as a general example of the fact that trends move slowly in the field, or are you claiming that it’s no longer a viable field of inquiry? If both, or the latter, I’m going to object. At length. 5,000 words at least. Then you’ll be sorry.
If you only knew how many times I’ve heard, “Sorry, Davis. This just isn’t good enough for… THE VALVE.” Holbo’s such an editor that he’s tattooed “IS IT INTERESTING?” across his private parts. (I’m told.)
The nnyhav / gzombie idea sounds like a great thing to pursue, ALSC-legitimacy in hand. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with that, boss. In the meantime, Mel says that public libraries can sometimes help:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/the_spasmodic_gap_textual_notes/#359
so, i went over and read conscientous objector’s series on the valve, and i have to say, as a sympathetic occasional reader of the valve, that i think there is some merit to his criticisms (though perhaps you have some cause for not taking them as meant in good faith). i am yet to be convinced that a blog is the best way to achieve your stated goals, though it might seem the most expedient. you have to look at the “user interface” and blogs are really not the place to have long, structured conversations--they’re simply not easy to follow or even read. as conscientous objector and one of his recent commenters suggest, old-fashioned forums connected to a more static web-page (i assume typepad has moveable type’s cms functionality) would be a far better fit.
and i think amardeep is on to something with his “one long post a day” suggestion--i’d say even one long post a week. (this is the other generic constraint of the blog form: the pressure to post all the time.)
Jonathan,
I meant, it’s not a daily occurence, not that RRC is dead. Still, I would be intrigued to read your 5000 word refutation of someone’s dismissal of reader-response criticism!
And I would be really impressed if The Valve could Respond, every day, to pioneering articles and new books of reader-response criticism.
Responding is our Responsibility.
"Assistant Prof. Holbo, put up a public hit tracker like Site Meter, the way many other bloggers do.”
Furthermore, an investigative report by Inside Higher Ed suggests that not only does the safety valve not know “the worst truth about the engine,” there may not even be an engine!
Assistant Professor Holbo, put up a weather pixie the way other bloggers do. And one of those Audioscrobbler thingies so we can check up on what you’re listening to to see if it corresponds to what you say you’re listening to.
Assistant Professor Holbo, tear down this wall!
...I’m sorry, what was the question?
There’s one point I meant to add earlier but didn’t: there’s a sense in which Amardeep is right when he says “Doing a literary studies group blog is inevitably going to be hard.” But there’s another sense in which I think those sentiments dovetail with some of John Bruce’s assumptions; namely, that there’s a cultural logic of supply-and-demand to which the Valve (and all blogs) must adhere lest it face certain death-by-market-force. I don’t think that’s the case. The masses need not be catered to; often as not supply creates demand. Economists who’ve studied the decline in foreign-language box office receipts are quick to point out that the determinative factor in the collapse of demand for foreign films was the dearth of supply (i.e. the decrease in the number of distributors and venues for foreign films). It’s not that Americans demand Bruckheimer’s latest paean to tits and explosives; they have no choice in the matter. In the ‘60s and ‘70s they did, and a steady percentage of them rationally planted their agencies (along with the rest of them) in front of the latest Goddard. Market forces killed the American demand for any subtitled film that 1) didn’t feature Luc Besson out-Bruckheimering Bruckheimer or 2) star Audrey Tatou.
But...if more venues start showing foreign films, more people will see them; if more people see them, that increased demand will in turn increase supply. (And from what I understand, that’s what’s happened the past couple of years.) Of course, as with foreign films, there’s a limit to the amount of demand a venture like this can reasonably expect. But just as Amelie doesn’t need Armageddon‘s grosses to be considered successful, neither does the Valve need Instapundit’s hit-count.
Thanks for the useful suggestions. It’s nice to hear that folks think my publishing ideas are not crazy but actually might work. One point: Arnab is right 1) that Conscientious Objector’s objections to the Valve were not just snark but really a series of basically serious but heavily snark-laden points. I took him to task for the snark but do not deny an actual element of underlying conscientiousness. 2) the frontpage-centricness of the blog format is a problem to be contended with. (Amardeep says the same thing, above.) Blog format works great for diaries and politics, running in step with daily life and exercising on the newscycle. And the Ent-like pace of traditional scholarly publishing does need offsetting with something less glacial. But it’s clear blogs go too far in the opposite direction by encouraging a sort of snap judgmentalism and associated stupid pundit tricks. Anything that needs days of careful study is not going to get it’s due. One thing that would be nice would be if archived pages - which are mostly alms for oblivion at present - could be made more inviting to readers. So you post not just for today and possibly the morrow (if no one else posts and buries yours prematurely) but for some sort of posterity. One way to do this would be to have wiki-like group archives for a vast number of people working in a given area - e.g. philosophy, literary studies. Academic disciplines would be good approximate boundary markers and they could be constructed very porously. So a number of different blogs all archive their posts in the same place. 100 English prof bloggers building a communal archive of thoughts on subjects. You have some sensible overall category architecture, plus you allow whatever folksonomies to spring up in the cracks. Make them taggable. Thinkr. Once a critical mass was reached, people might actually go and search the archives for material on subjects that interest them, and expect maybe to find that material. At present I’m not going to go to someone’s blog and type in ‘Milton’ or ‘Shakespeare’ on the off chance they’ve written something on the subject. Individual archives are too small to make those longshot searches worthwhile.
by wiki-like I don’t mean others could edit your old posts. I just mean that you could give blog archives, which are presently not objects of enthusiasm, more interest. Because you would feel your posts were not disappearing down the newcycle hole but becoming part of an overall structure that was genuinely attractive to an audience and of real intellectual utility.
It is also true that really good blog posts get remembered and linked to months and years later. But that’s the exception.
Build your own wiki-like structure? When you first described the project, I assumed that you were going to let Google do all that. I don’t think that there’s any structure you can build that will do better than Google will at letting people find comment about an obscure work that they are interested in. wiki needs a structure because they have pages that describe common words and phrases, but with books, putting in the title and author should almost always work.
You would have to ensure that posts and comments were archived for longer than most blog text is, however. I doubt that most blogs archive material for longer than a couple of years before the blogger moves from one software package or host to another and mangles their database.
I agree that my proposal might just replicate google functionality, Rich. It’s not like I’ve thought it out. But maybe it could be of value. Let’s start by proposing that this is at least a para-disciplinary project. Philosophers banding together to contribute posts about philosophy, English professors about literary studies, so forth. Obviously you needn’t (and shouldn’t) be a snob about setting it up so only those in the academic club get to contribute. But let there be some minimal quality control. Not just any crackpot can add stuff to the archive. (Obviously I haven’t thought how to set up the psychoceramic force-field to do this.) Sometimes I go straight to wikipedia rather than starting with google if I suspect the former will get me better quality right off the bat. If I wanted to know something about some academic subject, I might reasonably start with a database built up of mostly academic writings, rather than google. Plus you might add some functionality above what google provides. Tagging. (I do see that the search engines are likely to catch right up and make what you do in this regard redundant.) But here’s a thing: most academic bloggers - most bloggers who do any sort of serious intellectual work of any sort with their writings - tend to mix it up with the catblogging. It might be nice if you could divide your posts between the serious and the catblogging, and if you could arrange for the serious and NOT the catblogging to be perma-archived somewhere as a sort of para-academic resource. Some kind institution might provide server space and promise perpetuity and non-manglehood.
Just idly metadata dreaming. Seems like there might be cool things to do with a massive multi-thinker online glass bead game
At present I’m not going to go to someone’s blog and type in ‘Milton’ or ‘Shakespeare’ on the off chance they’ve written something on the subject. Individual archives are too small to make those longshot searches worthwhile.
I don’t know. This past winter, I read a book I really liked and, as is my wont, did a search on Google after finishing it. When I happened to notice that a couple of blogs I read showed up on the search (including John and Belle), my first reaction really was to do targeted Google searches to find every mention of said book on said blogs. It worked - I didn’t find anything vastly interesting, but I did find a couple of mildly amusing things to read.
I don’t actually know what this proves - especially since I Am Not A Scholar. But I guess I want to say that I would be very happy with the sort of thing you’re proposing here - it fits into my own particular reading habits very well. If I knew there was this kind of archive available, and that the resources it offered were interesting, I am pretty confident that I would check it regularly each time I finished a book.
What you’re describing—the creation of a structure, the population of hand-created indexes, long-term archival—is work. Who is going to do it? It’s really library work, so ideally what you’d want is a librarian. Without one, or someone willing to take that role for the long term, my advice is to not even start building your own anything. Find a way to use existing projects—Google for indexing, wiki for structure if you really need it, one of the Web archival services for archives.
Even the differentiation of catblogging from serious intellectual writing can be work. As editor, perhaps you could suggest to your co-writers that they could do their catblogging on their own blogs. Unless it is all supposed to be community-building or something. If you want minimal quality control, you have to be willing to edit at least by suggestion.
As for “Not just any crackpot can add stuff to the archive”—that also is work. How are you going to judge crackpottery? Through academic affiliation? Unless you’re planning on writing a good deal about contentious religious issues or something, isn’t it simpler to hope that few crackpots will be really interested?
what platform does the valve run on? does it not have content management functionality or the ability to place blog posts in (multiple) categories at the time of posting?
wordpress 1.5 (the current stable version) allows the creation of both “pages"--which reside outside the temporal sequence of the blog--and “posts”, and allows the designation of “front pages” and so forth. it is open source and free. it can seamlessly import from almost every other blogging software.
platforms aside, here’s some more unsolicited advice: make this a little more like work for the valve team. instead of posting something every single day put it on a slower schedule: a new article comes up once every two weeks, say. you could rotate this among the crew and put each piece through a light internal peer review before it goes out. then leaving it up for 2 weeks allows for a deeper engagement with it. if you were to use the “pages” and “posts” functionality on wordpress (perhaps moveable type also has something like this) you could give this more visible importance on the site *and* have a lighter blog with snippets etc. running in parallel. the pages get automatically categorized and archived as such.
p.s.: make it more readable by switching to a two-column layout and giving more space to the text of posts. instead of posting the giant blog-roll just put a link to it in the left menu.
Sorry, I should make clear to Rich that my little dream isn’t for the Valve. It would be for some ring of blogs. Plus something new to be the aggregator-hub, as it were. Clearly it would be something quite new. And it would be a lot of work and headache and might not work. (Just a dream.)
Arnab, I’ve toyed with these thoughts myself. I’m sort of tentatively running with the following strategy, since you asked: almost totally fluid, then solidify the thing up for occasional ‘events’ - like round-table book reviews. Some other things. I’m a little concerned that trying to go for something between the liquid of blogging and the solid of conventional academic journalism would leave me stuck in the mud: something not as lively as a blog, and not as rigorous as a journal. (Not that it’s obviously a bad plan, mind you.)
The platform is Expression Engine, from pMachine. But the issue isn’t putting posts in categories, or multiple categories. That we’ve got. It’s designing some sort of novel aggregator for a whole community of blogs. That’s not a serious technical obstacle, I should imagine (though I’m not the one to do it), but it is a serious exercise in community design and building. Lots of thoughts about metadata if you don’t want to just reinvent a puny version of the google wheel.
I reallyreally haven’t worked these ideas out. Can you tell?
John Bruce, incidentally, has a whole new set of Valve rants up. He’s still upset that more people here aren’t posting on or linking to his site. He does seem a bit like that sullen kid at the back of the class, who desperately wants the teacher’s attention and approbation but can’t think of any way to get it other than making rude little noises with his hands.
Looking at the posting and comment level, and the fact that this has the good sense to allow notifications of follow-up comments, the number of hits suddenly seems a lot more likely.
Any chance of a public hit meter? That would end the criticism.
Actually, Stephen M (Ethesis), I have access to the raw analog files, and we’ve only had about 700 hits since the site started. John and I were discussing what would be a good figure to confound Bruce with. He decided on 100,000 after concluding that my suggestion of three billion was implausible.
The irony of it is that the analog files Jonathan has were cunningly falsified by me. We really have had three billion hits, but I figured folks wouldn’t believe me, so I settled on 100,000 hits. The 700 figure was only to make my authors work harder to do better. An editor’s work is never done.
Behavior like Bruce’s needn’t be rewarded with even a minor site redesign. I’m happy for it to be my word against his. I’ve emailed to ask our webmaster Chris how many individual visitors - as opposed to hits & reloads - we’ve had. Because that’s interesting data and I haven’t seen it. As of this second, we have had 128,177 ‘total combined pagehits’ since March 31. So sayeth my control panel.
john, is that “128,177” figure for old-style page-views only or does it include all requests made to the database*? one page-view can correspond to many, many more requests (depending on what’s on the page). either way, a very respectable number for an academic blog such as this one.
(*i ask out of geeky interest, and with no agenda)
to respond to your earlier response to my earlier response: this is your baby, of course, but i don’t think you should worry too much about becoming quasi-journal’ish. i think that would actually fit your stated goals better. what is bad about the existing refereed journal racket is that it tends to professionalize what should ideally be a spirit of academic inquiry; plus, print anything has no response/continuing conversation mechanism worth talking about. you should theoretically be able to jettison the former; certainly the web enables the latter.
i took a look at the pmachine site--they say that expression engine is a full-featured content management suite. if so, you should be able to do a lot more than the simple blog form allows.
and if i can make another unsolicited design suggestion: given how little space the “archives” menus take up, why not move them higher up in the left pane? would make it a little easier for people desirous of finding older posts to find them.
I don’t know. I assume it is page views. Chris will tell me how many visitors we’ve had, which is probably the more interesting figure.
Chris is the pMachine guy and has assured me that it is, indeed, a very full-featured platform. I am hoping to take advantage of that in ways I haven’t thought of yet. Archives further up? Hmmm. Have to think about it.
Let’s thread the hell out of these here comments, first of all. Impossible to have lengthy discussions otherwise.
That’s a good point, Jonathan.
One consequence of threaded discussion is that it encourages topic drift and isolation. Though when the initial post contains many possible directions of development, that’s probably a good thing.