There are a lot of good science bloggers out there, but overall we are way behind other areas of academia in the realm of scholarly blogging. Social scientists and law professors, in particular — that is, disciplines that regularly interact strongly with the larger social context — seem to have taken to blogging more readily, including at least one Nobel laureate (economist Gary Becker).
Here’s what looks like a major step: a new blog by the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School.
The University of Chicago School of Law has always been a place about ideas. We love talking about them, writing about them, and refining them through open, often lively conversation. This blog is just a natural extension of that tradition. Our hope is to use the blog as a forum in which to exchange nascent ideas with each other and also a wider audience, and to hear feedback about which ideas are compelling and which could use some re-tooling.
The entire faculty! Taking turns blogging, discussing recondite legal issues within an informal format that is readily accessible to interested nonexperts. Jack Balkin has a good take on the project; it will be interesting to see how it develops.
Perhaps, after cautiously observing the experience of their colleagues across campus, more scientists will come to appreciate the fact that they are paid not only to discover new things about the world, but to communicate to others what it is that they’ve discovered.
September 30th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
Language Log is the oldest faculty blog I know of. Started by Mark Liberman (a colleague of mine at Penn), it is writen by Mark and linguists from several other universities. It has a much serious linguistics, psychology, and other social sciences, but also great humor.
September 30th, 2005 at 5:33 pm
Law professor bloggers are the worst. Instahack, Volokh, Assrocket…
September 30th, 2005 at 8:33 pm
With respect to physics, I think the lack of a standard and easy way to blog with LaTeX mathematical typesetting is limiting the kinds of ideas that can be expressed over blogs to those of a relatively non-technical nature. This isn’t to say that this is necessarily a poor thing (for one, I imagine such blogs do wonders for the image of physicists in the public eye), but if one is considering a faculty blog similar to U of C’s school of law, I think we still have a few steps to go in widely implementing the prerequisite technology.
October 1st, 2005 at 12:34 am
Some people think that’s a good thing.
We’re working on it. But, yeah, there’s still quite a way to go …
October 4th, 2005 at 3:48 am
[...] UPDATE: Cosmic Variance also posted recently on blogging within academia – with a slight emphasis on physics. [...]