Wednesday, May 18, 2005

THE SBL CARG SESSION on biblioblogging, coming in November, is mentioned by Mark Goodacre, who posts the abstract of Rick Brannan's paper. I gave Kirk Lowery the abstract for mine, but Mark doesn't seem to have it. Here it is:
ENTER THE BIBLIOBLOGGERS

The rise of weblogs or "blogs" (basically just web pages produced with software that facilitates frequent updates and allows links to individual posts) as a media and political force has been an important cultural milestone in the last few years. Along with political pundits, hobbyists, diarists, etc., biblical scholars and those in related academic disciplines have also been establishing a niche for themselves in the "Blogosphere." By common consent, or at least in resignation, biblical scholars who blog refer to themselves as "bibliobloggers." As of this writing in the spring of 2005, for the last two years I have operated a blog called PaleoJudaica, which focuses on news and Internet content on ancient Judaism and its historical and linguistic context. Since PaleoJudaica began, there has been a gradual but ultimately geometric increase in the number of biblioblogs. At present I am aware of more than two dozen.

Given the rate at which web-based technology and its effects on our culture are developing, it is difficult to predict more than half a year in advance what aspects of blogging will be of greatest interest at the time of this CARG session. But I plan to share with you some of my experiences with PaleoJudaica and also to describe my work on Qumranica, a blog I have set up for the spring semester of 2005 for a course I am teaching on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I will also discuss some of the uses to which I and other bibliobloggers have put our blogs, such as commenting on and supplementing media stories in our areas of expertise; noting errors (which frequently are rife) in such stories; reporting on scholarly conferences we've attended; sharing our preliminary thoughts on our research; and sometimes providing advance summaries of scholarly work we are publishing.

UPDATE: Stephen Carlson collects and comments on recent posts pertaining to blogging. Me, I find blogging fun and restorative and should I stop feeling that way at some point, I'll probably stop blogging. I can't see that it has hurt my productivity and so far it's even led to a professional presentation (above) and a publication that I wouldn't have had otherwise. I may be an addict, but I'm a well-adjusted one.

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