Academic blogging down under

by Cliopatria

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Via Deltoid: the higher education supplement of The Australian newspaper this week has a couple of articles on academic blogging in Australia. (Choice quote from the first link: 'A spate of studies has shown that making articles available online boosts citations by 50 to 250 percent.')

Hopefully this will encourage more Australian academics and students to take up this noble pursuit -- there are disappointingly few of us, even though the term"weblog" was (apparently) coined by two Australian academics in 1995! As far as I know, I'm the only history blogger in the Australian academy (and as a lowly PhD student, I'm only just in the academy :) I'd love to be proven wrong on this, though! If there are any others out there, give us a cooee in the comments.

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Brett Holman - 6/30/2006

Thanks! It does look like a fun read.

By chance, I did stumble across an Australian academic historian's blog, Geoff Robinson's thesouthcoast. He mostly discusses recent (Australian and US) politics rather than straight history, but that hardly places him beyond the pale as far as history blogs are concerned!

Ralph E. Luker - 6/24/2006

Although he isn't an academic or even a professional historian, an Aussie history blogger who I like a lot is David Tiley, who does Barista.

Brett Holman - 6/22/2006

Possibly! He is outside the academy though, though maybe I am defining that too narrowly though. Also, to my mind his site isn't really a blog: his posts are just the texts of articles and talks presented elsewhere, and there are no comments. So there is no sense of novelty, interactivity or topicality.

On the other hand, it's an excellent example of using the web to increase the reach of his writing, which is something other Australian historians could learn a lot from (not excepting his opponents in the "history wars"). So he should probably get an honourable mention at least.

Ralph E. Luker - 6/22/2006

Does Keith Windschuttle's The Sydneyline qualify as a nominee?