Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’
Blog-to-Book Tools: TnP? Preservation? Portability?
So is that all there is to say about it? Nope. There are three reasons I’m paying attention to this tool. I’m a blogger. I’m a humanities scholar. I care about the future of the book.
As a blogger, this is a great tool. The more tools we have at our disposal, the better. I can’t wait for people to start using Anthologize for all sorts of things it wasn’t intended for. I’ve already fielded questions about this “sort” of technology at the Louisville Conference on Lit this past February. I was giving a paper on Barthes, Blogging, and Authorship. The most interesting question: Am I going to turn [my] blog into a book eventually? (I don’t want to mis-represent the context of the question. He was asking because he wanted to turn his own blog into a book, not because he wanted to read mine as a book.) I told him that I thought that would be a nice tool, but I didn’t really see the use or necessity. But that was because I hadn’t really thought about it. But I have since. Why would I want to make a book out of my blog? Read the rest of this entry »
The Self-Construction of Public Identity (Blogging, Authorship, and Roland Barthes’s Autobiography, Part IV of IV)
This is a difficult point. To begin with, let’s return, again, to a brief description of how blogs work. So far we’ve covered the prose entries themselves and the metadata structuring the definitions and operations of those entries. There are two additional elements, mostly non-manipulable by a blogs’ readers. Those two elements are the "blog theme" which is also referred to as the visual design, and the author’s "dashboard." A blog’s author can define, change, and experiment with all sorts interface elements. She can design different combinations of colors, graphics, and layouts to create a certain atmosphere framing the experience of the blog. But she also has access to her own "dashboard," an author-only interface where she configures certain navigational elements and small applets called "widgets." It’s here at the dashboard where she structures the ways which her visitors can search for specific terms, organize entries according to categories and keyword tags she defines. At no other point in the blogging experience is it more clear to the author just how much control she does and doesn’t have over the way her readers encounter her and her work.
Barthes has always been interested in self-representation. Even from his earliest writings, Barthes was constantly working toward a theoretical and practical understanding of his own work and identity as a writer.
The Reader’s Role in the Construction of Meaning (Blogging, Authorship, and Roland Barthes’s Authobiography, Part III of IV)
A blog, though built and maintained by a writer, is an unweildy and restless semiotic object. Once configured, named, and populated with a handful of texts, a blog’s complexity begins to facilitate all sorts of emergences. Writers have habits and preoccupations, blind spots and projects. And as a writer takes on the practice of blogging, he becomes a blogger. And as his entries proliferate, Barthes would suggest that the illusion of an Author emerges. But we will get to that later in the presentation. Now I want to focus for a minute on one organizational element of blogs that constructs a blog’s readers as the arbiter of meaning. And that element is the database.
Though a blog’s interface may look a lot like a traditional webpage, a blog’s front page is really just a way of interacting with the underlying database. Without getting overly technical, suffice it to say that there are essentially two levels of meaning for every entry on a blog.
