Academic wiki-blogroll

Henry Farrell has spun off the Crooked Timber Academic Blogroll into a new wiki-driven blogroll called, sensibly enough, AcademicBlogs. Go take a look. I think it's a great venture that will begin to give a newer self-consciousness for what academic blogging can mean.

That said, I'm a little nonplussed at how film and media studies falls in the broad disciplinary categories. On one hand, you have "Culture, Theory and Literature," under Humanities. On the other, you have "Media and Communication" under Professional and Useful Arts. Yes, film and particularly media studies are not hallowed in their histories like History or Law. And, yes, each straddles humanities, arts/pre-professional training, and social science. Yet the logic that the blogroll uses to assign Category D to Media and Communication and, say, Chutry Experiment to Culture, Theory and Literature... well, I haven't figured out the logic. By all rights, there should be a Media and Film under Humanities; Film/Media Arts and Production under Professional Arts; and a Communication and Media under Social Science. I understand that AcademicBlogs is probably hesitant to proliferate subdisciplinary categories to match everyone's conception of where they belong, but these areas really are three different disciplinary clusters in the study of moving-image media.

Comments

Anonymous said…
They've transferred those categories from the original blogroll three years ago, but yeah, the categories are a little slippery to say the least. I think I'm in the "culture" category because when I was added to the blogroll, I was housed in an English department.

I like the idea of an academic wiki-blogroll quite a bit because many of the older academic blogrolls (such as the one at Rhetorica) have not been updated in a while.

Popular Posts