[On August 6, 1991, World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee publicly announced his WWW software for the first time. So for the 30th anniversary of the occasion that brought us all here, this week I’ll highlight just a handful of the many wonderful AmericanStudies websites. Share your favs for a crowd-sourced post, please!]
On the vital
role of community and solidarity in navigating the scholarly web.
I’ve written
many times in this space about the public scholarly bloggers who served as both
models and encouragement for me as I began
my own daily blogging, nearly 11 years ago now (well, 10 2/3rds years,
anyway). The three who most come to mind (in descending order of how much I’ve
had the chance to meet and get to know them) are: Rob
Velella and his American
Literary Blog; Kevin
Levin and his Civil War Memory blog and website;
and Ta-Nehisi
Coates and his blog for The Atlantic. What I’ve gradually
come to realize that I learned from these folks, both directly through
connections and indirectly through their work, is much more than just what or
how they wrote on and used their sites—it was how they highlighted and shared
the work of others, through hyperlinks, through quotations, through guest posts
(including, in Rob’s case, ones
by me), and in other ways too. Finding scholarly voices has always been
something of a crapshoot, but at least in a library you could go to a certain call
number and see (for example) all the books they have on that similar subject; online
scholarship has no such natural locations, and so if we’re going to find
authors and works we need some help, some guidance, some collection and
curation.
Individuals’
sites like those I listed above (and this one of course) can do that to a
degree, but there’s a vital need for complementary, more collective sites,
spaces that exist mostly to provide such community and solidarity for
individual online scholars. In our current moment, my favorite such collective
site is The Octo. Hosted by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History
& Culture (out of William & Mary University), the Octo features a rotating
collection of eight (duh) American Studies blogs, selected by Katy Telling and Joe Adelman. Obviously that’s only a
tiny fraction of all the blogs and sites out there, but through its rotation
style, the Octo certainly has eventually highlighted many of them (including,
at some point, this one, for which I will be eternally grateful) and will keep
getting to more still. And in any case, at any given moment I know I can
navigate over there and find eight public scholarly blogs and sites, eight (or
more if they’re multi-authored blogs) voices with whom I’m in solidarity in
this amorphous and awesome community. Not sure there’s a better note to end
this series on—and ask once more for your input for tomorrow’s crowd-sourced
post—than that.
Crowd-sourced
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: What do you think? Favorite websites, past or present, you’d share for
the crowd-sourced post?
No comments:
Post a Comment