Friday, February 26, 2010

Does American Anthropologist respect blogging?

I just posted an entry on Ancient World Bloggers Group called "Blogs Don't Get No Respect." It makes three points:
  1. A new paper on blogging in American Anthropologist, while purportedly giving respect to blogs, in fact suggests a lack of respect for blogging on the part of the journal and the article author. (Price, David H. (2010) Blogging Anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and AAA Blogs. American Anthropologist 112:140-142).
  2. Savage Minds is a fantastic blog, with a lot of vibrant and exciting intellectual exchange.
  3. Archaeology, unfortunately, lacks anything like this.
Oh well.

1 comment:

Ryan Anderson said...

Well, it's interesting that they wrote about blogs. It's always fascinating when the "informal" content starts to get subsumed by the formal content. Blogging is kind of like the Google model for anthropology--and sometimes I wonder how long the old publishing method will last. At least, I wonder how it will change.

Savage Minds is certainly a start, but there is a lot out there, and more sites are showing up. And there are several good archaeologically oriented blogs...one that I like a lot is Middle Savagery, by Colleen Morgan. She has some pretty interesting posts up there.

I like the informality of it all, especially since I spend more than my share of time being exposed to the formal styles of journal articles, texts, etc. There is something a little looser and more open about the ideas/posts that people put on line--and the discussions that follow. Savage Minds and Zero Anthropology are some good examples.

It'll be interesting to see what others end up doing with this format.