This blog has evolved a great deal over time. I started it primarily as a way of keeping up with friends and family during my time abroad. It pretty quickly evolved into observations about Chinese society based on my personal experience there. During my year teaching in China, the college campus where I worked ended up breaking into riots, and then a week or so of student protests. Highlights from this period include Waiting, Building Madness, Students and Teachers (part 2), and several posts covering the riots on campus. I came back to revisit this recently, just under 5 years after the first events. This period also produced one of my favorite posts - an attempt to rehabilitate the other six deadly sins (the premise being that others had already argued that "greed is good")
Following a several-month hiatus, I decided to post more. Much of this was centered on my rather naive interpretation of contemporary politics, the environmental movement. While I did have some rather interesting thoughts on sport, margins and new years resolutions, I am ultimately rather embarrassed by most of what I produced during this period - trying too hard to be theoretical without actually knowing much of anything about social theory.
With several years of graduate school under my belt, I came back to the blog intent on making it a platform for my non-academic musings. This produced some interesting posts on drugs, diseases and memes, energy as an analytical category , evolutionary arguments about diet, games and learning, and musing on what a nomadic academic would look like.
It was around this time that I realize that my posts were leaning closer and closer toward my academic work - I was writing about things I wanted to write academic papers about, but didn't have the time. I was annoyed that I didn't have time to write better posts, or more posts. I was arguing for the need to share incomplete academic work and open sources for other scholars to use - but I was doing most of the arguing in RL. Through a series of conversations with Javier and Rachel, I came to realize that I should put my money (more precisely, my time) where my mouth was.
So, at this point, I have decided to transform this blog into a forum for sharing my academic production. I will start to post conference papers, drafts, book reviews and visualizations that I am working on. This is intended as a way to help me keep track of my work and keep me honest about my writing. More importantly, it is an experiment in what we might call open source research. There have already been some moves in this direction, and I am clearly a bit late to the bandwagon.
Ultimately I am hoping that current scholars can actively promote sharing of research while it is in progress. There is now open source software and open source hardware, and all manner of other crowd-sourced work being done. It has become abundantly apparent that there are major benefits to opening up projects to criticism and assistance from a broad base. It is ridiculous in this day and age for humanities researchers to guard their sources and maintain the illusion of published books and articles being somehow "finished."
There are clear drawback to fully-democratized approaches to knowledge generation. They make it much harder to maintain standards of academic proof, as well as being undirected. It is necessary to make clear that this is not able to be, nor is it intended to be, a fully crowd-sourced project. I am ultimately responsible for the posts that appear on this blog, and I intend to hold myself responsible for crediting (by hyperlink whenever possible) work that is not my own. For now, this will be a gradualist experiment in sharing as much of my in-progress work as possible, including sources and methods as well as analysis. I have yet to establish exactly how all of this will be done. If you have questions or advice, post them in the comments.
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