Let me start out by saying I have mixed feelings about this post. On the one hand, it’s pretty banal: link and cite more! Duh. On the other hand, sometimes the obvious needs articulation. Additionally, we’ll need to justify to our deans, bursars, and chain-yankers why we are sitting around all day and blogging. So it seems that I had some deep-down visceral dis-ease that apparently needed expression. (“Tell me about your desiring-machines, Amy.”) There are reasons enumerated in the post for its genesis. Yet there is perhaps another reason beyond those, a reason which compels me to repost here. In one of our earlier meetings, Branden mentioned that somebody should be writing, in meta fashion, about what’s happening here in Nomad Scholarship: namely the appearance of collaborative discourse across institutional boundaries and geography, the transverse blending of two individual traditional face-to-face seminars into some new discourse all it’s own. I’d like to think that this post is somewhat of a tangential start to that reflective process.

the Urban Archivist

Plate 76. A well-crafted blog post. Note lines of flight
into and out of the vaguely-circumscribed post.

I was having some “meta” thoughts about writing this evening. Specifically, I was thinking why academics need to blog (or otherwise publicly write) and why it is as important, as a parallel project, as traditional publishing. These thoughts were prompted by a whole host of reasons and one blog post.

Something the comes up frequently in Becoming Poor meetings, especially when we read from The Europeans (which *cough* is most of the damned time), is how they all seem to be referencing one another without bothering to tell us that. As they are so thoroughly well-versed of each other, it’s almost like an in-joke among them. Still, it would be nice to know sometimes where all that is coming from. Relatedly, we’ve talked on occasion of various citation styles which make it easier…

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