Sunday, June 27, 2010

Indological blog or forum?

An interesting discussion raised by a recent post made me consider the following points.
  1. I assume as self-evident that it would be positive for whomsoever deals with Indian textsto have a (virtual) place to meet and share ideas.
  2. Previous essays did not lead to satisfying results, often due to the "laziness" of scholars of South Asia, who are not enough keen to dedicate time and energy to a collective enterprise.
  3. Hence, I proposed the idea of a multi-authored blog, in order to avoid the zombie-look of a forum with no participation.
But which kind of blog?
As far as the topics involved, I must admit that I often cannot follow the very interesting posts several of us dedicate to IT issues. I imagine that, in a similar way, several of my posts may seem very boring to many readers. Hence, either one finds a common topic (say: inquiries based on an ancient Indian text), or one distinguishes, within the blog, several headers. I have seen it other blogs and I thing it works quite smoothly. In this way, one could have, for instance, "Indian philosophy", "kāvya", "Veda", "IT tools", etc.
Even more complicated is the identification of the authors. As already hinted at, I would be happy to welcome all readers/authors, maybe asking them to write a motivation letter first.
Does this mean that one could start with a small group and then wait for others to join? Or should one invite all bloggers already writing about classical South Asia? If the latter, I assume that they would all be glad to keep on blogging on their home pages. Even if it were the case, I still think that the multi-authored blog would improve on the present situation, since:
  • being "forced" to post on the multi-authored blogs, many of us would be tempted to comment on others' posts, too.
  • for readers it would be easier to check at once all news on the field.
What do you think? And, in case you would prefer the single-topic option, which posts of mine would you like to avoid?

4 comments:

AC said...

I think I just sent you a link to a zombie forum. This is absolute zombie!
:-)))

elisa freschi said...

No longer…
http://orientalia.freeforums.org/

VS said...

I think the idea of the multi-authored blog is good, but the experts dont ever seem to agree on a single topic, thus you might have to give them different sections.

elisa freschi said...

Well, if everyone has her own page, part of the purpose of joining people together would be lost. What about the idea of a multi-authored blog where, say, XY writes about the topic Z and then WQ answers strongly disagreeing and so on? WQ would then also be able to write her own posts...

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