One of the highlights of the April 2005 edition of the AHA Perspectives is Roy Rosenzweig’s “Should Historical Scholarship Be Free?”. Roy argues that because most historical scholarship at the university level is conducted using public money (in some form or another), that scholarship should be made free to the public, thus decreasing what John Willinsky calls the “secondary digital divide” between scholars and the public. Roy correctly identifies a hypocritical tendency among historians who dismiss much of the internet as trash yet do little to create free, accessible, quality history content on the Internet. Moreover, Roy explains that gating information actually costs more than making information free.
I’ve mentioned in a few posts that blogs could be useful as a form of scholarly communication. Bloggers frequently have conversations on their respective blogs, and can extend their conversations through the comments. Services similar to Technorati can help us determine how many times a blog entry or author gets linked, thus helping to measure the impact a particular author and his/her work has had. Free, open access combined with sophisticated searching and tagging can help “authors gain greater visibility, a bigger audience, and more impact.”. Incoming links, authority, and relevance can all be measured (though not without some caveats), but only if the information is free and easily disseminated.
Blogging can serve as a kind of “self-archiving,” a strategy that Roy discusses in his article. It can also take the form of public book writing, as Josh Greenburg has discussed. The point of both of these strategies (and any other that might be used with blogging) is that, as I’ve offered before, blogging can easily serve as a medium for serious scholarship if we choose to use it that way. While I agree with the points of Unfogged and Miriam Elizabeth Bernstein, the counterargument I would make is that it’s not the blogging medium itself that lacks scholarly qualities but the way we, as authors, choose to use the blog medium. Even in this post I’ve chosen to write a rather quick, reactionary post. But the great thing about blogging is that we can choose to do both reactionary posts and longer, more thoughtful essays.