[Cross-posted to the Ancient World Bloggers Group.]
If you’re not familiar with the term a Blog Carnival is a series of blog posts which are collections of links to other blog posts. An example would be the History Carnival or Four Stone Hearth. The carnival aspect comes from the fact that each post is compiled by a different editor and held at a different weblog. The original aim was to try and put posts from various bloggers which may have been missed in front of a wider audience. What I’ve been thinking about for several months is that it may be worthwhile re-thinking the concept of a blog carnival.
The thing that’s pushed me into posting is the exciting potential of Sebastian Heath and Billur Tekkök’s project Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia) which inspired Shawn Graham to compile some of his posts into a free e-book Electric Archaeology. The exciting thing about these books is that they provide material in a form that’s citable in front of a technophobic audience. You can simply cite Author, date, Title, and Lulu.com as the publisher. This may get sniffs from people who would call this vanity publishing, but would be happy supplying camera-ready copy and their own referees to a ‘respectable’ publisher. You can’t have everything and for everyone else it provides a canonical reference to cite. Importantly to the reader this e-book can be provided at zero-cost, and for the publisher it is lo-cost or no-cost. If this approach were applied to blog carnivals, it would be possible to create a periodical available as a CC licenced e-book and a hardcopy with ISSNs. This would provide canonical citations for blog posts which for various reasons haven’t been re-written for academic journals. Could this be used to create a bridge between weblogs and the unwebbed?
There are good reasons for creating a more permanent blog carnival. Weblogs come and go, even the carnival posts themselves come and go. The impermanence of a weblog makes citation of a weblog post a bit of a gamble. I suspect that HTML will be readable by computers in 20 years time, but I wouldn’t like to say how many of today’s weblogs will still be accessible. A permanent blog-carnival would give a better chance of some ideas being archived. Archiving may prove important in the future. While a warning over weblogging is that ideas can be lifted, so too a permanent record could be used to demonstrate precedence. You can insert your own PhD thesis referee horror-story here.
Light-review may help authors re-think posts and help clarify ideas which the author might not have realised were ambiguous. Additionally my case some of my entries would benefit from porof-reading for mispellings and bad grammar. The alternative would be to include an obviously deliberate spelling mistake and claim that all other mistakes are deliberate, but that would lose credibility after a while.
At the same time there are also advantages for authors in pooling posts into a carnival. Some posts are very much products of their time and may lack the impact that they could have had, had they been read sooner. Juxtaposition of posts on similar topics can also create new discussion around a subject. There are practical reasons why an academic journal wouldn’t have three reviews of a film like ‘300’. For an electric journal would not be an issue. A journal based on weblogs could, if permissions could be gained, also use comments on posts used, as well as entries responding to other posts. It wouldn’t necessarily be Current Anthropology, but it could be similar in intent.
Finally there is no choice between publishing a weblog post in a blog carnival or in a personal e-book. The open nature of weblogs would render the idea that a carnival/journal had exclusive reproduction rights for an article ridiculous. It would be message rather the medium it was transmitted in which would affect its acceptance.
To some extent this idea has already been tested. The Open Laboratory recently published its second edition. Around fifty entries were selected from 500 to produce a commercial book intended to be read as a hard-copy. A regular and smaller journal in a similar vein, intended to exist primarily as an e-book should be feasible. If it’s not obvious then I haven’t seriously edited anything, so I could be talking rot. On the other hand a blog carnival can be created in a few hours. A month from submission deadline from willing participants to getting the downloadable e-book would seem to be feasible.
So what would it look like?
My guess is that in hard copy it would be an A4 saddle-stitch book on Lulu. This would work for up to 88 pages. The reason for this size is that it would be the same size in the e-book file, and the printers I’m familiar with take A4 paper. If A4 is really bad news for North American computer printers then it would have to be another size. I know an e-book can be read and searched on a screen, but if you want to spend a lot of time reading something paper is better. If you want to hand a copy with comments on to a colleague then you’ll find they respond better to sheets of paper than they would to a monitor with annotations scrawled in permanent marker on it. Paper isn’t going to be obsolete for a long while.
On the inside there’d be contents and possibly a foreword from the editor(s). The entries would be more eclectic than you’d find in academic journals. There could be articles on work in progress, or comments on other articles or book chapters similar to the BPR3 project. Bloggers would probably be a good source of reviews. In short the usual range of opinion and commentary on the discipline which you find in blogs. There wouldn’t be a need to show that what you’re submitting is an original and outstanding piece of research, merely that it’s interesting and worth making a note of. Additionally there could be CC-licenced photography, which would work better in the e-book than the hardcopy. Knowing what material is being made available would be helpful. This might not make it a proper academic journal, but that wouldn’t be the aim. Personally I see weblogs as closer to an ongoing conference than a journal.
The articles would have a title, author name and affiliation – if applicable. A common complaint against the internet is that anyone can put up a website. Counter to this I would argue that one of the good things about the internet is that anyone can put up a website. It reduces barriers to publication, and just because something is on the web there’s not compulsion to take it seriously. At the end of each article would be the URL of the original post. Again, this would be a bridge between weblogs and non-blogging academics, not a replacement of either.
The big problem I see is how light review should be. Proof reading from another person is always a help, but more is required. If you want to demonstrate how weblogs can be used for intelligent discussion it would be helpful not to be including gibberish. I have no reason to think that Duane Smith writes nonsense, but I lack the linguistic skills to be sure. For what is intended as a permanent compilation of posts how far should I go checking his work? I’ve picked on Duane Smith, not only because of my own ignorance, but also because he has a basic logical thread to his posts. It means that even though I don’t have the skills to check his translations I can assume his blog posts are reasoned, even if not everyone would agree with him. For this reason I would say that I’d be justified in including his entry Semi-Literates in the Hinterlands of Ugarit? Nonetheless a team of editors, preferably including one who could point to Ugarit on a map, would be desirable.
The whole thing would be released under a BY-NC-ND licence, which would make it duplicable for electronic archives without exposing the authors to commercial exploitation. As for frequency, an edition on a quarterly basis would be feasible. The History Carnival runs on a monthly cycle and Four Stone Hearth is fortnightly. This may well result in short editions, but would mean that the immediacy of the web was being used.
Good idea? Bad idea?
