ABSTRACT
Digital history has been understood as writing the history of computing, relying on digitally available source material, using digital tools for analysis or presentation of data, or disseminating research through digital media. At first glance, blogging, or more properly ‘web-logging’, the practice of writing discrete entries called ‘posts’ on a website which are then displayed in reverse chronological order, would seem to be just another digital mode of research dissemination. Within the academic sphere, research blogs are primarily assumed to be dissemination vehicles for either one’s own research or discussion of others’ more traditionally published research (e.g. Powell et al. 2012; Schema et al. 2012). But over the course of three years of blogging about my research project ‘The Return of Native Nordic Fauna,’ I have found that committing to a research blog fundamentally altered my research process and my scholarly publications. My project is a cultural history of animal reintroduction focused on the
Scandinavian case studies of European beaver and muskox, but as I have worked on the project it has expanded to encompass re-wilding and de-extinction as contemporary ideas for bringing back nature. My work is situated as an environmental history in that it seeks to better understand the complex relationship between humans and the non-human natural world. Because I started this project while working in an ecology and environmental science department, the scholarly publications that have resulted from my research reach across disciplinary boundaries with some appearing in natural sciences journals and others in humanities/social science venues. There is nothing inherent in ‘The Return of Native Nordic Fauna’ that would
predispose it toward digital media. Unlike the earliest scholarly analysts of blogging, Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker (2002), who worked on online gaming, my project is not about online material, Internet communities, or digital data. The project is an environmental history, not in any way a digital humanities endeavor. The decision to use a blog was based on the idea that it would be a knowledge dissemination tool. I had never thought of my blog as a communitybuilding tool or history discussion forum, which has been touted as a major reason for blogging research (such as Bonetta 2007 and Wilkins 2008). Indeed, my blog does not generate a large amount of discussion through the comment feature, although there has been some discussion on other social media networks
such as Twitter and Facebook. I was not anticipating that it would modify my research process and certainly would have agreed with Mortensen and Walker (2002, p. 254) who claim that “we are not positing that writing a weblog will change the articles we publish in scholarly journals,” even while recognizing blogs as potential influences on research. Now I think differently. In this chapter I present an experiment: five pseudo-posts about blogging. I
call them pseudo-posts because, unlike the true online format of a blog, clickable links and embedded visuals are not possible. Yet I’ve tried to simulate the reading of a blog through indicated links (they are underlined and you can find the web addresses in the footnotes) and writing style. Each pseudo-post uses the title of one of my 2013 posts as a launching point and explores how blogging changed the process of my environmental history research.
