Panel Podcast

You've all been on the edge of your seat since last week—especially those of you whose are my mother—so without further ado, I present talking pictures of the panel I shared with Eric Rauchway, Brad DeLong, Tedra Osell, and Ari Kelman.  Enjoy!  (I know I won't.  Little on earth is more harrowing than watching yourself on video.)

UPDATE: Did I say "harrowing"?  Doesn't quite capture the feeling.  "Lacerating"?  "Eviscerating"?  I make myself extremely uncomfortable with my words and what I say.  (Not to mention how I sound saying them.)  (By which I mean, "like Kermit the Frog.")

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

As far as I know, people still aren't supposed to know who Tedra is officially, therefore your link above shouldn't be linked -- right?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

They'll know as soon as they watch the video; but still, better safe then upset Tedra.

[Rich Puchalsky]

It seems to be linked at the page holding the podcast in any case.

[bitchphd]

I hear that if you upset that person she'll kick your ass.

Strangely enough, she's vain enough that she thinks she looks and sounds good on video, too.

[Brad DeLong]

"Flensing." I think the word you are looking for is "flensing." At any event, it's the word I've found.

[Alex]

Really good stuff Scott, but are you wearing a Dog Collar? My opinion on academic blogging in theory might be changing, but in practice I still don't think it work, but lets hope it does. I love love love the ideas here, but I haven't seen it enacted in practice.

Where discussions do take place, they tend towards argument, not towards collaboration. Also I for one get enough trouble from myself with the constant "is this good, is this bad, is this worthwhile, is this just too, you know, trendy-bendy (is this a re-hash of sub-Derrida)", and I fear that this will only increase academic anxiety of this sort. I am not worried about having my ideas discusses, but if thousands of people took every point, I would just have to cry. It ups my confidence yeh, but it could absolutely devestate it as well.

I do like the way that the guy at the end talks about the speed of it all. His joke by saying classicists twice goes down like a lead balloon mind you.

Information overload that he talks about is good. I subscribe to 120 blogs, mostly academic and my God, this drives me mad and is a time BLACK HOLE. It drives me nuts and I waste so much time, so much time going through them all. It can become addictive - what if something out there would really help me out - a bit like my obsessive checking and rechecking of journal sites when I am writing something - "maybe there is that one paper which fills a gap in my knowledge or makes it clearer or fires me off to think this better" when really I should just be cranking it out.

I think it is fun and makes you think a great deal, but I am still sceptical if serious work and really serious work can be done. For example, has anyone actually picked up a book to respond to a post and I don't mean to just grab a citation, but to read again and think about it again and then post in detail about it all.

If you really, really want to go all out on this. I suggest that you post a chapter to http://writewith.com/ and allow people to edit it, add notes etc etc, that you can then use or not. Just to see what happens and if real collaborative work can be done. This is web 2.0 future and the real future of blogging.

"not all from the three same people, though it sometimes seems that way"

L-O-L.

"66 people wanted to read it. Crowd: Jesus."

HA!

I haven't been to an academic meetup in quite a few weeks so it was like a lovely virtual one!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'll respond tomorrow, after I turn my chapter in, but for the record, I'm not wearing a dog collar. (I couldn't barely see my head, to be honest. And I only watched the first couple of minutes -- long enough to note that Eric Rauchway really reminds me of Eric Stoltz and to be totally put off by my own performance.) Truth be told, I think the dog collar is an artifact of me wearing a black dress shirt under a black sweater ...

... which reminds me, I need to find out whether I smoothly took off my jacket, as I intended, or clumsily proved that I can barely dress myself, as I think it went down. Damn it, I'm going to have to watch it, aren't I?

[Rich Puchalsky]

All of this stuff about how academic blogging lets various people read your diss and so on is overblown, I think. You don't really need anyone to advise you on your diss. The important part of one is whether it's completed or not; no one is really expected to read it.

No, the important part of academic blogging is Mudslide Theory, a term which I just made up that states that comments on a blog must necessarily be less substantive than the posts themselves. Thus if someone starts out by posting about their cat, the comments can be no more than inarticulate near-preverbal noises indicating cuteness. If someone starts by posting about their dissertation, the comments can possibly be comic poetry, witty in-jokes, and discursive whimsy.

Someday, some blogger will put into words the highest ideals and deepest feelings of the human spirit, so that their commenters may once and for all determine which season of Buffy was the one that marks the point at which it is no longer for the ages.

[Brad DeLong]

Don't be really put off by your own performance. Your own performance is fine. The flensing effect is personal, and is a misperception...

[Brad DeLong]

Now which one is Ogged, again?

[ben wolfson]

Scott, are you really one of the cofounders of the valve? I thought you were brought on as a later addition.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Quickly, as I'm having Fun With Sleeping, no, ben, I meant to correct Eric on that, and would've, were it not for the other 18,000 things roiling around my head.

[Eric Rauchway]

My mistake, and my apologies to Nobelist John Holbo and the other co-founders.

[eb]

I just finished listening to the podcast (am I being greedy in wondering what happened during the Q&A?) and, responding in blog fashion to the most recent thing I heard, I thought Kelman's reporting of Josh Marshall's frustrations with the immediacy of the 24-hour news style of some blogs interesting because that's the main difficulty I have in following the TPM and TPM Muckraker blogs. On the one hand, the individual posts don't take that much time to read; on the other, if you look at those blogs as collections of primary sources (of a type - a lot of posts are really the reporting of other, in some ways more primary, material) and want to get a sense of the larger picture of each story, you really have to read a lot of posts over a long period of time and start sifting through the information yourself. Occasionally there are attempts to synthesize what is currently known about a story, but those can't be too frequent, or they risk being too repetitive, as information doesn't actually change that quickly by blog post frequency standards, and longer length write-ups are more likely to appear as accounts published in newspapers and magazines: things to be linked in posts but not posts themselves. There's probably an analogy to be drawn here to the difficulties historians in particular face in trying to blog ongoing research.

[Mike S]

Scott --

For what it's worth, I think you met your presumable objective in joining this panel. You sat before a group of "blank-faced" professors, students, and innocent bystanders and made a compelling case (as compelling as possible in 10 minutes) for legitimating academic blogging as a productive and efficient scholarly activity. Not only legitimating it, but actually using it is part of our teaching, research, and professional collaboration.

Also, you're right to acknowledge that all of this is already underway. Blogs may not capture the fancy or endorsement of middle level and senior faculty whose Internet use consists mainly of checking e-mail. But current grad students and assistant professors generally recognize the potential and value of blogging -- this is the case, at least, at my institution.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Thanks, Mike. You should've seen my in the Q&A. Much, much better than my talk. (Which is typical, I think, of people whose run their classrooms Socratically.) Like eb, I'm saddened they didn't include it ... however, I made one remark during it I'm rather glad won't be in public circulation, so I suppose you take the good with the bad.

eb, the other problem with the TPM comparison is that while Marshall may himself be a former doctoral candidate, his blog isn't academic by any stretch of the definition. There is a rushed thoughtlessness, born of necessity, to that sort of blog, one which doesn't really correspond to what happens in the academic blogosphere.