Legitimizing The Blog: On Reading, Citing & Archiving Blogposts

Over at the Forbes blog this week, I wrote about an issue within academic blogging that has been bugging me for a long time: Why aren’t more academic blogs cited in the footnotes of journal articles and within academic books? While there are certainly still specious blogs that abound on the web, the number of trusted, well-sourced, and highly researched academic blogs is on the increase. This post was meant to point out some blogs that are dependable and quite rigorously reviewed, to demonstrate how they might be cited, and then to show readers how to archive a blogpost. I will briefly go through these steps below.

1. The Blogs: There are myriad blogs (Fun fact: In the plural, a Greek myriad=10,000) focused on classical antiquity. Tom Elliott (NYU-ISAW) runs a comprehensive feed aggregator called Maia Atlantis that will allow you to explore almost everything posted on the web having to do with the ancient world. In terms of my morning blog habits? While sipping coffee, I tend first to turn to the Rogue Classicist and then to move onto the medieval world by skimming any new posts from Littera Visigothica or Medieval Books.Trust and familiarity are big parts of reading and then citing academic blogs, but you will quickly come to learn the notable professors, librarians, scientists, and researchers in each field who post reliable content; however, just like anything else, you are still responsible for evaluating each post. Reading academic blogs may require a bit more source criticism and critique, but they are a great way to hear new ideas, to find out about recently discovered archaeological remains, or to find out about news fast. For instance, the AAIHS’ Black Perspectives blog is rigorously peer reviewed and contributed to by numerous scholars that provide citations and copious bibliography, all while reacting to current issues in real time.
2. The Citation Format: Once we have a blog post we wish to cite in our own book manuscript or journal article, it is time to properly cite according to the accepted style manuals. There are standard formats for citing a blog post in MLA and Chicago Style, which can then easily be integrated into your footnotes and bibliography.First name Last Name, “Title of Blog Post,” Blog Title (blog), Publisher/Sponsor of Blog (if applicable), Month Date, Year of post, URL.Here is the Chicago Style format for a blogpost from Kristina Killgrove on crucifixion:Kristina Killgrove, “Line on the left, one cross each: Bioarchaeology of Crucifixion,” Powered by Osteons (blog), November 4, 2011, http://www.poweredbyosteons.org/2011/11/line-on-left-one-cross-each.html.

   I find that using the Zotero extension for your browser helps you keep track of online reading. This open source citation tool (originally created at George Mason University) will allow you either to find the proper citation through a Worldcat search or you can take a snapshot of the webpage and then cite that.

   

   3. The Archive: On my own blogs, I tend to cite primary sources by giving the classical citation  (as stipulated by the Oxford Classical Dictionary [PDF]) or by hyperlinking back to the texts themselves. Usually this means a link to the Perseus Project or to LacusCurtius. I trust both Tufts University and LC’s Bill Thayer, who respectively run these sites, and also have confidence in their stable URIs. However, there are still a lot of dead or broken links when you only hyperlink back to either a primary or secondary source, and certainly this won’t work well for an ebook or journal article. The fear of corpse-links is not only founded, it keeps people from citing blogposts or webpages.

   Taking the attitude that webpages are ephemeral and thus unworthy of proper citation is something we have got to abandon. My institutional repository scrapes my blogs and then archives my posts in my individual IRO account. However, you don’t have to have an institutional repository in order to create an archive of your own blogposts or of the ones you wish to cite. We have at our disposal a number of citation tools (e.g. the aforementioned Zotero snapshot) and archiving sites that can allow us to archive a post in order to verify the words we quote for future audiences or to provide a later reference. Over at the Internet Archive, there is the so-called WayBack Machine. This service has permitted thousands of datasets from the federal government to be recorded, saved, and archived prior to their deletion under the Trump administration. It can also allow you to save a webpage and then site a stable, archived version via a link provided by the site.

Academic blogging is a rather thankless task at times, but take heart: the visibility and recognition of blogs as valid publications is increasing. As authors, bloggers are still responsible for what they publish and should be held accountable for the things they say. But that means that readers must, in turn, cite the blogposts they are using in their own work. Over the years, I have seen a number of the ideas, images, and translations that I have posted reused without attribution. I am not here to point fingers, I am simply going to state the obvious: We live in a digital world, but plagiarism is still plagiarism, whether you copy and paste from a book or a blogpost. Our citation habits must expand to include the academic blog if we are to further legitimize them as publications. There really are no more excuses.