A couple weeks back I noted that in his Comics vs. Art book, Bart Beaty hadn’t cited a number of essays of mine that were relevant to his arguments. I suggested that such was often the fate of bloggers. Beaty responded in comments by confirming that he did not in fact read blogs. (The exchange was somewhat more heated than that, so click through to the links if you find that sort of thing entertaining.)
Anyway, I was poking around the internets, and much to my surprise discovered that this essay of mine, which Beaty does not mention, though it parallels a number of his thoughts on Charles Schulz and Charlie Brown — is actually cited in the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature by Charles Hatfield in his essay about Peanuts. (The book was published in 2011.)
My essay was originally published in 2005 in TCJ, so it’s maybe a bit tangential to my point about blogging often not being on the radar for academics. And, of course, the fact that someone else read my piece and Beaty didn’t doesn’t mean that Beaty committed some sort of sin against scholarship — no one can read and cite everything. Still, it was funny to find the mention so soon after I’d talked about the essay not being mentioned.
On the other end; Corey Creekmur, my editor on the Wonder Woman book I’m working on, recently read my ms and mentioned a couple of books that I should probably read and cite as relevant to portions of my discussion. One of the books he said I needed to look at? Bart Beaty’s volume Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. (Which I’ve just started, and which, in its initial pages, discusses the significance of the fact that academics in mass culture studies often don’t cite Fredric Wertham.)
You’ve discovered the intertext! And you were the first one ever!
Can I quote you on that?
Noah, what’s fascinating to me, as I read through this continuing kerfuffle, is how much academic disciplines seem to vary in regards to blogging and internet scholarship.
In the journal I’m editing, I’ve had to figure out citation rules for defunct list-serv conversations, online databases, all sorts of weird net stuff. It’s folklore, which is small, but usually tech-unsavvy.
I know that some other pretty large figures in some disciplines are bloggers. Crooked Timber is the big one I’m thinking of (Berube is the pres of the MLA) and Philosophy seems to have a decent number of bloggers.
If you want to look into citation patterns, library science calls this stuff ‘bibliometrics’. It can be pretty interesting.
Huh…I hadn’t really thought about disciplinary differences….
If you’re going to read Beaty’s Wertham book, you should probably read the essay Fiore wrote about it in tcj.
Maybe…I kind of bet Fiore on this subject would just irritate me, though….
There are lots of blogging academic statisticians and (especially) economists. Or maybe I just know about them because I looked them up when I was thinking about whether I wanted to go into stats.
The blogs-by-academics I read are marginalrevolution.com, theincidentaleconomist.com, and Andrew Gelman’s blog. But there are lots of others.
Yeah…economics is kind of weird, though, because economists are basically the rulers of the world. It’s just easy to translate an economics expertise into a mainstream platform, I think….
Yeah, that does seem to be the case – except for the posts that go too much into the math. Although, on the other hand, there are lots of engaging mathematician blogs. Those guys are just so happy to share the details of how they have solved this or that puzzle, that they’re fun to read even if you don’t precisely follow all of the arguments.
Just finished the Beaty book. Skipped around in the beginning since Wertham’s pre-comics scholarship doesn’t interest me a ton — but the end of the book is really great.