Blogging Archaeology 4: What next? Part One

Mar 29, 2011 Alun Digital Academia 1 Comment Blogging, Publication, Social media

For our last ques­tion, I would like to ask you to con­sider the act of pub­lic­a­tion for this blog car­ni­val. How could we best cap­ture the inter­play, the mul­ti­me­dia exper­i­ence of blog­ging as a more form­al­ized pub­lic­a­tion? What would be the best out­come for this col­lec­tion of insights from archae­olo­gical bloggers?

This week’s ques­tion is two ques­tions which makes it harder to answer. I’m not sure a form­al­ised pub­lic­a­tion is the best out­come. It’s not a bad idea though, so I’ll tackle that in this post.

My first reac­tion was like Shawn Gra­ham, a Kindle Single — but that’s because a Kindle is my new toy. A Kindle single could work, I liked this art­icle on hydro­frack­ing, which was free to down­load when I got it. It has some per­man­ence and it would col­late the vari­ous entries. The reason it might not be the best solu­tion is that first it helps to know why you’re col­lat­ing the entries.

If you want to give blog­ging a degree of cred­ib­il­ity among people who don’t value elec­tronic media then an elec­tronic out­put is a per­fect way to be ignored. You could try and self-publish via some­thing like Lulu. I’d be against try­ing to cover up the self-published nature of the book by adding a spuri­ous imprint — unless the pub­lic­a­tion were part of a long-term pro­ject involving sev­eral books. Still, I’m not sure to what extent this is a good idea. I can’t see a tech­no­phobe buy a book about archae­olo­gical blog­ging. This is why I think Colleen Morgan’s approach is clever. She’s put­ting the ses­sion into a main­stream con­fer­ence. Both John and Mat­thew Law raise the pos­sib­il­ity of pub­lic­a­tion via an SAA related pub­lic­a­tion. If that’s pos­sible then this is a sens­ible out­reach com­pon­ent of pub­lic­a­tion. Addi­tion­ally then, a Kindle Single would be the elec­tron­ic­ally per­man­ent ver­sion — the advant­age of the Kindle Single being that you can embed links in them. Add a CC licence and drop a big hint to Amazon that you’re mak­ing avail­able free on the web and Amazon could make it avail­able free on their site, like Hydro­fracked was.

In terms of how the con­tent of the book could look, a good model that comes to mind is Philo­sophy and Archae­olo­gical Prac­tice. Per­spect­ives for the 21st Cen­tury by Cor­nelius Holtorf and Håkan Karls­son. Each paper in the book comes with at least one response by another author. A com­mon obser­va­tion is that the com­ments have added value to the car­ni­val. I think Kand­in­sky adds some­thing to my post here, and I’m hop­ing this adds value to the pre­vi­ous posts I’ve linked back to. Jonathan Jar­rett is leav­ing some excel­lent com­ments in vari­ous places. I think adding these to the pub­lic­a­tion demon­strates that blog­ging can be part of a reflect­ive pro­cess and need not be a static out­put, even if by pin­ning it into a pub­lic­a­tion the posts become static on paper.

I think col­lat­ing the blog posts in some way is bet­ter than not col­lat­ing them, so I don’t want to run down the idea. I do won­der if it’s going to be ter­minal. Freez­ing the posts marks an end. It could be pos­sible to start a new pro­ject in a few months, but it would be start­ing from scratch again. Colleen has put in a huge amount of work get­ting the SAA ses­sion to work. She’s been e-mailing people for sev­eral months organ­ising this, and the vis­ible part is really just a frac­tion of the effort. It would be a shame if someone else look­ing to start a group pro­ject had to rep­lic­ate all that work again. Terry Brock has raised the pos­sib­il­ity of using this as a spur to some­thing more ongo­ing, like a group blog. Mick Mor­ris­son has also been ask­ing what people think about the future of Four Stone Hearth, an anthro­po­lo­gical car­ni­val with a large archae­olo­gical com­pon­ent — with little suc­cess by the looks of it.

An ongo­ing event is not exclus­ive to also form­al­ising this cur­rent car­ni­val, but it is a dif­fer­ent prob­lem, so I’ll tackle that in another post. For now my response for Colleen is “form­al­ise the car­ni­val how­ever you like”, but in a cheery and enthu­si­astic tone of voice.