Peer Reviewing Blog Entries - The Good and The Bad
Via Blog vs. Peer Review Update: Interactivity Brings Some Surprises by Jeffrey R. Young.
A great little piece on the use of blogs to journalise research progress. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor at the University of California, has been posting a draft section from his forthcoming book, about analyzing video games, every one on a popular blog (Grand Text Auto). Eventually the whole book will have been posted.
He then encourages readers to “to praise it or tear it to shreds”. As to be expected they’ve done both.
For example some of the designers, mentioned in the book, have commented sharing their thoughts and “and (sometimes) set the record straight”. Wardrip-Fruin says that this will definitely improve the final book.
“Also, doing the review in a format that allows discussion turned out to be very valuable,” he said. “Comments I might have brushed aside, not fully understanding their import, instead became the starting points for exchanges that revealed significant issues I must address in my revisions.”
Interestingly, and I’m glad this happened as it validates the experience, not all comments were entirely positive. For example Ian Bogost experience difficulty reading the book because it was broken up into many pieces. In his blog (view post) he states “A book, unlike a blog, is a lengthy, sustained argument with examples and supporting materials. A book is textual, of course, and it can thus be serialized easily into a set of blog posts. But that doesn’t make the blog posts legible as a book.”
Wardrip-Fruin is going to compare the peer reviews with those given by the MIT Press selected blind reviewers. He reckons that “they will be completely different — focusing on the broad-strokes argument, while the blog-based review has focused on the specifics of my examples and local arguments. But it could be that, say, the two reviews will say contradictory things. I’m looking forward to finding out.”
This is a great use of blogging. It emphasises as to how, although the blog essentially belongs to one person, it can still be used for collaboration, in this case peer reviewed content. In a class room context this could be used for peer-reviewed student developed content. It might be that, as pointed out, blogging is not the best format for serial chapter publishing but as a facilitator for dialogue on the subject it clearly excels. After all its about conversation.
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