Here is new format for digital scholarly publishing I an considering for my new “book” project : a “perpetual history” that would be released serially and then refined and expanded for an indefinite period, rather like a one author Wikipedia article. Is this good idea? How could such a work be made interesting and useful for both scholars and Internet users, and legitimate as a form of scholarly publication? What platform should be used to create it? Citations would be the big problem. They have to be there, and it would be so exciting to have readers be able to click through to actual sources, but how could that be accomplished?

Discussion of this idea could easily be grouped in with other people’s idea for new formats.

In my first post about a series of 10-minute tutorials, some people commented that they would like a separate workshop on starting & constructing your own website. This workshop will feature WordPress tools because they are some of the most simple, popular, and powerful to use today. Some steps might include:

• choosing WordPress.com (free service on WP’s server, with limited choices) vs. WordPress.org (freely downloadable software to run on your institution’s server or a for-hire external server, with more flexibility) — see how WordPress explains the difference
• understanding the WordPress dashboard and user roles (admins, editors, authors, contributors, subscribers)
• organizing the architecture of posts vs. pages, themes, menus, and widgets — see also WordPress Lessons
• seeking out and installing themes & plugins (for WordPress.org)
• making it up as you go along (that’s pretty much what I do. . .

Here are three different types of WordPress sites that I have created, each for a different purpose:

• a course website, with content by instructor and students
• a public history web-book, with long text and digital features
• a scholarly edited volume, w CommentPress plugin for open review

This workshop idea is more than what we can accomplish during the first 10-minute tutorial session, so that’s why I’m suggesting it here as a separate one, to see if there’s sufficient interest. If yes, I’m willing to start it up (have projector, will travel) and anyone is welcome to learn, share, and teach (since there are several people at THATCamp with more experience than me.)

I work for a local history museum that has only a rudimentary social media presence, and uses social media as an extension of traditional marketing methods. The staff is also interested in using social media and blogging to 1) engage our audience with behind-the-scenes stories and sneak peeks into artifacts, spaces, and other content that’s not featured in current exhibits and programs and 2) collect stories of the community’s history (the museum’s mission stretches from the community’s founding to the present day). Which strategies foster visitor engagement online in social media? What are the nuts-and-bolts issues of collecting oral histories and other user-generated content online?

As scholars, even digitally-minded scholars, even blogging scholars, we tend to ask ourselves how we can make our blogs more scholarly. We wonder how the blog can come to approximate the scholarly journal, or at least how it can reproduce its core values of evidence, citation, narrative argument, and peer-review. Even when acknowledging the inherent differences between blogs and journals, we still tend to argue for the former on the latter’s turf.

I’d like to take a session to step back from this discussion to look at public history blogs [full stop]. I’d like to take a step back from the prevailing discourse of “scholarly blogs” to talk about how the inherent affordances and values of blogging can benefit public historical work, absent any pressure to reproduce traditional forms and values. How can straight-up blogging–minus the baggage of “scholarly” aspirations–work for public history and its audiences? Is straight-up blogging enough? Or should we really be thinking about “scholarly blogging” after all?

It’s likely that this session will overlap with David’s session on the future of digital scholarly publishing.