DeepThought

Blogging and the Academy

A conference was held at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society (sponsored by Microsoft!). Twelve papers are available for download and a webcast of the event is also available.

“Web logs ("blogs") are transforming much of American society, including government, politics, journalism, and business. In the past few years, blogs have begun to affect the delivery of legal education, the production and dissemination of legal scholarship, and the practice of law. We are delighted that over twenty of the nation’s leading law professor bloggers have agreed to join with us for the first scholarly conference on the impact of blogs on the legal academy.”

Papers discuss what is meant by ‘legal scholarship’and the value/use of blogs as an arena for ‘an informal and yet sophisticated discussion’ and ‘how blogging can advance our scholarship?’

I haven’t yet downloaded and read all of the papers but they certainly add to the debate around blogging. There was also a blog workshop at the WWW2006 conference with all papers online at Weblogging Ecosystem

These are mainly quantitative approaches to blog analysis but there are some interesting ones - Iranian and Chinese bloggers are both covered, and some papers show clear trends, for example about the relationship between social ties and continued blogging. In addition to a regular track of research presentations, this year's workshop also featured the first ever weblog research data release. This data release gave researchers access to 10 million weblog posts from July 2005. Many of the workshop papers used this data set in the presentation of their research results at the workshop. The plan is to compile the papers that focus on this data set into a book which will present an ‘exciting view of a specific period of blogosphere history’.

[The data release comprises a complete set of weblog posts for three weeks in July 2005 (on the order of 10M posts from 1M weblogs). This data set has been selected as it spans a period of time during which an event of global significance occurred, namely the London bombings.]

posted by Denise Carter @ 3:04 AM