Blogging Deep Dives

Pocket shut down just last month. One of my favorite internet finds, the web service let you bookmark pages for reading and, most important to me, save the content to read offline at a later date. As a tribute to the quirky little service that once was, I thought I’d share one of my favorite Pocket memories and the different kinds of reading habits it helped me cultivate.

“Save now, read later” might sound relaxed and methodical, but my use of Pocket was usually panicked. I typically dove into the app in a rush during pre-boarding at airports when I suddenly remembered, once again, that I had nothing to do during a flight. I never learned. One time, on the way to teach at HILT, I had digital humanities on my mind. I went to the blogs of some DH scholars who I admired and started saving as many blog posts as I could to read later. Because I was on a time crunch I went for depth over breadth. Instead of looking topically for particular things of interest, I grabbed all the blog posts from a few different people on their sites. I dove in on the flight and read each person’s blog chronologically from their first entry to the latest. As a part of my current book project, I find myself doing the same thing with the HumetricsHSS blog, reading all the posts in chronological order from the beginning.

Blogs work especially well for this immersive practice because the pieces tend to be shorter. It’s difficult to imagine reading a whole series of articles in one sitting, but you can often do that with a single person’s blog. Most of us, I would wager, tend towards a research process driven by specific questions and topics. Reading through a single scholar’s output chronologically feels like something else entirely. You get a sense of how a person’s thinking develops over time, how their projects and research questions in the past lead directly to the present. Given the nature of how people use blogs, you also see the arc of their personal as well as their professional lives. Success and loss. Pets and children. Illness and grief. I think about those reading sessions a lot.

I don’t fly very much these days, and Pocket is no more. But I want to hold onto the blogging deep dive as a reading practice. Folks often speak of the early 2010s as the moment of DH blogs. The next time I put together a syllabus, I plan to assign a few blogs in their entirety to introduce conversations about scholarly publishing, open access, and research processes. Rather than discuss the moment as something of the (not so) distant past, I want to make space for those conversations to live, for the thinkers to breath in their totality rather than as sound bites.