The Open Web
2. Access and use content / code / web-apps / implementations 3 Publish content and applications on the web in open standards
These practices are afforded by three infrastructural dynamics: open standards,
open access, and open publishing. Open Standards
Open standards are the sociotechnical underpinnings of the web. The most
important standards of the Open Web are HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript (JS). While there are many
standards involved in the web for a discussion about blogs the other important standard is Really Simple Syndication (RSS). These standards collectively make it possible to read, browse, comment upon, stay-up-to-date-with, and find blogs using different browsers, applications, and devices.
Interestingly, blogs are not a web standard but more of a convention of
expectation, structure and design (Rettberg 2013). By convention, blogs are
composed of individual posts written in reverse chronological order. The RSS standard defines a way of representing new content, like blog posts, as a
machine-readable feed. RSS allow tools, namely feed readers, to “subscribe” to a blog allowing an individual to efficiently follow and read many blogs. RSS became the de facto standard for blogs because it defined a standard means of
syndicating blog content across the web. Open Access
Open access is a fundamental principle of the web’s network architecture. The idea of open access specifies, at its simplest, that resources (web pages) located at a particular Universal Resource Locator (URL) should be freely and openly
accessible to any computer requesting that resource. From an infrastructural perspective, open access means that any endpoint can communicate with any
other endpoint on the network without interference. This property is related to the hotly debated topic of network neutrality (Wu 2003).
Open access has another, more important, meaning with respect to scholarly publishing. In this context, open access is more than simply unfettered access to a resource located at a URL, it invokes complex social dynamics related to
economics, policy, and intellectual property. According to Peter Suber, who literally wrote the book on open access, “Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” (Suber 2012, 4). For Suber, open access is not merely the technical retrieval of content, but the legal freedom to use and share that content without the encumbrance of permissions from its owner.
Open access with respect to the Open Web does not have to be “free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” In the purely technical conceptualization of open access, content need only be “digital, and online, [and] free of charge.”. While bracketing the copyright and intellectual property issues ignores some of the most contentious and important aspects of open access, the freedom and openness implicated in “free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” is not a technical requirement of the Open Web, nor is it a social expectation of content published on the web.22
Open Publishing
Where the premise of open access posits the ability to freely and
programmatically request information from anywhere on the Open Web, open publishing posits the reciprocal. Open publishing means anyone, anywhere, can publish information on the web. However, unlike open access, open publishing doesn’t mean anyone can put anything anywhere, rather it means anyone can claim their own piece of web real estate and publish whatever they want. Open publishing is also distributed publishing. It is a lot faster and cheaper to register a
22 Most of the blogs I have scraped do not have free and open copyright licenses. Because my data
are textual this makes sharing much more complicated than purely numeric data. For these reasons, I am not planning on posting my data publicly online.
domain and host website than it is to publish an op-ed in the New York Times online. Gatekeeping and editorial control, which do regulate what gets posted to certain portions of the web, are domain specific organizational functions, not structural features of the system itself.
This means the word publish has lost some of its semantic weight. Web publishing, in contrast to scholarly publishing, means making information accessible on the web and does not imply editing, peer review, preservation, and all the other functions of print-centric publishing. This is an important
distinction because it delineates formal from informal scholarly communication. The Open Web provides the infrastructural milieu in and through which the digital humanities, blogs, and informal scholarly communication can be
understood. The technical properties of the Open Web specified the conditions of possibility for, but do not determine, how the web is used. Blogs are one
realization of these possibilities.
Blogs
The term “blog” is a portmanteau of “web” and “logs” and those two words do a reasonable job describing the gist of blogs. Blogs are logs of a variety of stuff published on the web. Blogs are not formally defined, but are rather a collection of conventions that emerge out open publishing and open access’s lack of control, and web designers composing documents with open standards. There is no W3C standard for blogs, there is only the ongoing practice of blogging and the
platforms and products built to support that practice. Blogs have their origin in online, web diaries (Serfaty 2004; Rettberg 2013) and some of their best histories have been written not by academics, but by early bloggers themselves (Rodzvilla 2002; Rosenberg 2010).
In Blogging, Rettberg (2013) dedicates 30 pages to answer the question “What is a blog?” (2013). The answer, as is any academic treatment of a subject, is
complicated. Blogs can be defined by their platform, i.e., websites published on Wordpress.com or Blogger.com. Blogs can be defined by conventions of design
and format, i.e., the basic unit of content is a “post,” which are listed in in reverse chronological order, may or may not have comments, can have tags and
categories, and are distributed by RSS feeds. Furthermore blogs can be defined by their content. According to Rettberg blog have three styles of content, personal blogs that provide narratives of an individual’s lived experience; filter blogs, which aggregate and curate links from across the web; or topic-driven blogs, which focus on sharing information, via links or narrative, about a particular topic of interest.
The question “what is a blog” was the subject of recent debate because 2014 is seen by many as the 20th anniversary of blogs. Justin Hall started the first blog in 1994 (Rosenberg 2010), so naturally the Guardian thought it appropriate to do an article interviewing early bloggers on the 20th anniversary.23 On Twitter Ian
Bogost raised the question, can we really be celebrating the birth of blogs? The blog, in his view, is deeply intertwined with the technical platforms like Blogger and WordPress and those infrastructures did not exist in 1994.24 The definition,
in Bogost view, is sociotechnical. However, as early blogger Anil Dash pointed out, the early design of blogging platforms accommodated the existing practices of early bloggers who had built blog-like structures by hand.25 Peter Merholz, the
web developer who coined the word blog, argued the Mosaic Communication Corporation’s “What’s New” page26 from June of 1993, should be considered a
blog, to which Bogost responded “no.”27
23Rogers, Katie & Spencer, Ruth. “The blog turns 20: a conversation with three internet pioneers”
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/29/blog-turns-twenty-conversation-internet- pioneers
24Bogost, Ian. “In'In what way is it accurate to claim that ‘blogging turns 20 this year?’”?"
https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/428597798057959424 and “(@ibogost)" (@anildash) earlier I suggested that blogging names the specific kind of accessible CMS systems that made the form widely adoptable.” https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/428709391236214784
25Dash, Anil. “@anildash" (@ibogost) except I remember building the CMSes to match the format
I was doing by hand in Notepad.” https://twitter.com/anildash/status/428709625689817088
26http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/388/2129 27https://twitter.com/peterme/status/428716148553568257
Figure (4) Ian Bogost laying down the definitional law on blogs. I leave the reader to conclude who is right.
The Mosaic Communication Corporation’s “What's New” page had the technical features we often associate with blogs, links, short entries, and posts listed in reverse chronological order. However, the site was not built on top of any of the infrastructure of modern blogs (Wordpress, blogger), it also existed long before the term Blog or Weblog came into being (but that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t a blog). The MMC What’s New page doesn’t have an author. The person behind the blog is a nameless faceless employee of a corporation. This is radically different from other early blogs like Justin Hall’s, which were focused around an individual’s lived experience.
Communications scholar Ignacio Siles has studied the stabilization and
normalization of blogs from functionalist “filters” to “formats” with styles and structure. The early perceptions of blogs, as articulated by early and influential blogger, Rebecca Blood, stated the purpose of blogs is to filter and assemble links from across the web. Yet today blogs have come to be much more than so-called “linked lists.” Siles explores the question, “How did blogs develop from filters into a flexible Web ‘format’?” (Siles 2011).
Drawing on Pinch and Bijker’s notion of closure, Siles, shows how blogs as a format have stabilized through “the mutual shaping of artifact and content” (Siles 2011, 739). The emergence of Blogger.com as a platform for blogging is given important significance in Siles’s analysis. Early web publishers and online diarists wrote their posts directly in HTML, a high learning curve for online publishing. Software like Dave Winer’s Frontier automated the publishing process, but also stabilized structure and format conventions like top posting, by putting new content at the top of the page where readers were more likely to see it.
With the stabilization of technical structure, genre expectations changed as well. The previous shape of blog’s forms, as a curated collection of links from across the web, expanded to focus on forms writing like essays and journalist notebooks. Further stabilization occurred with the emergence of the Blogger software
platform, which made publishing easier and semi-automated. Blogger’s interface emphasizes text, a “blank box” where bloggers incorporated content above and beyond an annotated list of links.
The expansion of the content of blogs was tied to their material stabilization, particularly by informing the emergence of blogging software. The creation of software crystallized the efforts of communities of Web users (such as online diarists, personal publishers, early and new weblog users) to communicate with others in the public sphere, expressed through the re-articulation of the blog’s artifact and content (Siles 2011, 747).
Stabilization occurs through a mutually constitutive relation between content producers and software developers, between sociality and materiality. This is not an exclusively a technical or cultural explanation, it is both. Blogger’s identities infused code and that code in turn shaped their conceptions of self (Siles 2012). Bowker and Star, in Sorting Things Out discuss the process of normalization as one in which expectations, assumptions, and decisions are sunk into the design of infrastructure (Bowker and Star 2000). As Siles demonstrated, blogging practice, and more importantly bloggers as a community of practice, stabilized blogging as a format, as a genre, through a sociotechnical shaping of publishing
neither technologically deterministic, nor was it purely cultural, but a negotiation between the two.
Blogs, as a complex sociotechnical apparatus, afford distinct forms of discursive practice. These forms are, in turn, unique to the specific communities of practice that inhabit and shape them. Academic communities have also turned to blogs as a format for scholarly communication. This raises questions about the complex relationship between scholars and their blogs.
Scholarly Blogs
In the book Uses of Blogs, Alexander Halavais argues academic blogs constitute a “third place” supporting, but not replacing, traditional modes of scholarly
communication (Halavais 2006). Blogs are a kind of electronic “coffee house“ or conference that enable near strangers in a community of interest to engage in debate and discussion. The structure of blogs satisfies, in Halavais’s mind, a kind of discursive ideal, a “virtual place for continual discussion with little cost or commitment from participants” (124).
Halavais’s idealized notions aside, he notes that blogs are by their very definition visible and make available the latent “social circles” implicit in Crane’s
development of the Invisible College. Cronin et al. have called the web a “nutrient-rich space for scholars” (Cronin et al. 1998), and found it to be simultaneously a space for publishing and conversation. The web, they argue, invokes new forms of communication that are not fully understood and while they put forth a typology of web-based “genres of invocation,” blogs were not included.
In her dissertation work, Carolyn Hank surveyed communities of scholars across the humanities, social, and natural sciences in an effort to better understand the characteristics, preferences, and perceptions of scholarly blogs (Hank 2011; Hank 2013). Her work focused specifically upon the archival implications of blogs as an important part of the scholarly record. Blogs leave a trace, but Hank asks the crucial question, “for how long?”
In her survey of 153 academic bloggers and analysis of 93 blogs, Hank found that 66 percent of her respondents considered their blogs to be part of the scholarly record and subject to critical review, although they did not significantly respond that their blogs improved their chances of promotion and tenure. In terms of preservation, 80 percent felt preservation and access to their blogs was
important, but only 46 percent save their blogs. What this means is that while scholars are deriving personal benefit from their blogging practice, the social and technical infrastructures of promotion and preservation are lagging far behind the practice.
The scale and pace by which digital humanities scholars use blogs is a massive preservation problem, if we want to save these scholarly records. Even more generally, scholarly communication research has always lacked large-scale investigation in part because of a lack of citation data (Linmans 2009; Sula and Miller 2014). Yet, it is important to not take a technologically deterministic view that new technology shapes communicative possibilities and practice (Cronin 2003; Kling and Callahan 2003). The adoption and use of a particular
technology, like blogs, intertwines social dynamics, like the digital humanities delight in new technologies, with the Open Web’s technical affordances of open standards, open access, open publishing.