Blogging
- Verifiability. Links to your sources allow me to verify whether or not your story is true. For this to work, though, they should point to hard news sources, not just another blog. Bobbie Sullivan does this on Aircrew Buzz and her other aviation blogs.
- Acknowledgment. Sources permit you to acknowledge where you got your ideas and information from in the first place. These can include not only hard news sources, but also any blog or other source that sparked you to think about the topic. If the information is not generally known, though, include additional sources to satisfy the verifiability requirement. I sometimes handle acknowledgments with a hat tip. You can see one Gavin Robinson gave me in the first paragraph of the 14th Military History Carnival.
- Examples. Sources can help provide you with the kinds of examples you need to support your arguments. Since the internet is a hypertext environment, sources can also help you to pack more information into a post without providing loads of background details. I used links in this manner in the second paragraph of a post about generational differences between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. I’m also linking examples in this post about sources.
- Context. Sources help locate your ideas within their broader context. By providing links to that context, you help your reader to understand how your ideas relate to other opinions and discussions on the internet, and on your own blog. In the process you provide additional value to your reader, giving her one more reason to return. One blogger who often provides good context through linked sources is Rich Becker of Copywrite. Ink.
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Clio and Me was my history-focused blog. I later closed it and migrated posts to this domain. ↩︎
Blogging and Myth-Busting
Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory has posted good material to his academic blog under the category, myth of black Confederates. Several recent posts include criticism of efforts by modern-day Confederate patriots and would-be historians who want to appropriate Weary Clyburn, a slave, as a defender of Southern liberty. In one he points out that writing good books to debunk myths is all well and good, but on the subject of black Confederates "the real fight must take place on the web."
In the same post he points to an earlier one he made in late March: "Should Civil War Historians Blog (academic that is)?" In it he observes how vast the public discourse about the American Civil War is, while the discourse in which professional historians participate is relatively narrow. Historians need to continue their current research and publishing mission, but they also have "a responsibility to engage a wider audience and contribute to the public discourse." Since much of the public turns to the internet for ready answers, historians need to offer these answers in an accessible format, especially for highly sensitive questions that shape American identity.
I agree with Kevin about the need for Civil War historians to blog. I have also observed a similar need with respect to Holocaust denial, since I have found that Google can get it wrong. Until now I have used this blog mainly to reflect on what I do and to communicate with other historians, but as Kevin points out, Google brings him search engine traffic for important topics such as black Confederates, so his blog posts reach a wider audience. I have written a few of my posts with that awareness, but his arguments make me think I could do much more. So could other historians.
Do You Link to Your Sources?
This following piece appeared on this day on the blog of the now defunct Blog Catalog. At the time the site was a hybrid blog portal–social networking site with an active community. I pulled it from the Wayback Machine.
Too often I come across an interesting piece of information on a blog that does not contain links to the author’s sources. That’s too bad. All I can do at that point is shrug my shoulders and wonder if the story is true. Then I’ll probably close that browser tab and go somewhere else, because I won’t risk experiencing similar frustration with a second story on the same blog. Of course, if the story is really important to me, I can do further research on Google, which is fair enough. At the same time, though, what reason have you given me to go back to your blog? None. Offer me a good, well sourced post, though, and I will be back. Links to your sources are important for at least four reasons:
Of course, not all blog posts need sources. If you are writing about your own life, you are the acknowledged expert on it. Enough said. And no one who has heard Tony Hogan’s music is going to ask him to provide sources for the advice he offers on learning the guitar. It helps, though, that he has a good about page on his blog, which tells us a bit more about him. And what about me? Why do I think I can offer this advice without providing sources on the art of sourcing? My field is history, and getting students to understand the value of sources is one of my everyday teaching concerns. Yes, I could be making this up, but you can find out more about me at Clio and Me.1
The Responsibility to Protect
This is a post related to a bloggers human rights campaign. I'm merely leaving the Internet Archive link here because the link-heavy post makes more sense with that context. – MRS, 10/27/2024
The Ups and Downs of Tumblelogs
I began blogging in May 2007 with a tumblelog on Tumblr. A tumblelog is a loose collection of images, quotes, videos, sounds, and short chunks of text. I’ve seen the genre compared to a stream of consciousness, although we’re not talking The Sound and the Fury here. In fact, there is no stream but rather bursts of varying length at random intervals. Hence one journalist has called the tumblelog the punk rock of blogging, an apt comparison insofar as tumblelogs are also lean and often undisciplined. But punk offers more coherent narratives than most tumblelogs I’ve seen.
I used my tumblelog for fun and random thoughts, but soon I began blogging for real on Blogger about history and the Mac. The point was to teach and help out. The focus was narrow. My “real” blog was still my tumblelog, where I put the most interesting tidbits from past and present.
After some six months of blogging, however, I have found that there is much more interest in my blogs than my tumblelog. Part of the reason is that my blogs offer hard information, but my previous post suggests another compelling reason for the lukewarm response to my tumblelog. People with a natural appetite for narrative and an authentic voice leave my tumblelog amused, perhaps, but still hungry.