By Stuart Towner Noble, Center for American Studies University of Southern Denmark
In November 2006, I launched the Atlantic Community, my third blog since joining the blogosphere in 2002 when it was still in its infancy. My initial goal was to create a space where I and other students and academics living in Europe, and principally Denmark, could share our reflections on America from afar. The subtitle says it all, “Transatlantic perspectives on America.” Before enrolling in the graduate program in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, I had spent the last 15 years living a transatlantic existence, splitting my time between various European countries and the United States. I set out to apply a transatlantic perspective to both my graduate studies and the Atlantic Community. After reading David Nye’s article, "American Studies in Stereo: Nordic Perspectives," the idea of a conscious creolilzation of academic identity and inquiry further added to the Atlantic Community’s conceptualization. If America and Europe represented left and right speakers, then the Atlantic Community would provide amplification.
So I set up the blog, which was the easy part, and thus began my new online project in progress. I felt like Henry David Thoreau embarking upon Walden, “I went to the web because I wished to write digitally.” It began as not much more than random postings and short commentaries for literally a handful of readers (mostly personal friends) in the States. Over the course of a few semesters, the site would reflect course work, research and often continue class discussions into the digital ether.
While we don’t yet compete with The New Republic for readership, the site is growing, averaging 200 visitors a month with approximately 50% of the traffic from Denmark. The most trafficked blog post to date has been, “How to Caucus in Iowa.” I suspect most of the traffic to that article had far less to do with my ideas about John Edward’s disintermediating strategies” and more to do with people simply looking for information on how to Caucus. Most of the traffic after all was generated from Google searches originating in Iowa.
Not only is the site traffic growing but so too is the “community” aspect of the Atlantic Community. Bent Sørensen, Associate Professor of English at Aalborg University has contributed a few great articles. His latest post, “Robert Gibbons” is now the second most viewed blog post on the site. Camelia Elias, Associate Professor of American Studies at Roskilde University joined us with “Exiled Writing, Translated Knowledge: Andrei Codrescu’s Inroads.” This article is also available on her own home page, listed as a pre-publication linking back to the Atlantic Community. Her article is the third most viewed post on the site. I feel fortunate to have their contributions. The website traffic statistics reveals that so too are our readers. The Atlantic Community is looking forward to welcoming additional voices in February including Anne Dvinge and Steen Christiansen.
Future plans include a new homepage design and individual profile pages for each of our contributors which will provide a platform for promoting individual scholarship. Additionally, more powerful self-publishing tools will allow for richer content and quicker formatting. I am also looking into new social networking tools and strategies to further promote the site and our contributors.
There is no shortage of ideas as to what academic blogging is or should be. Sean-Paul Kelly, a personal friend and founder of a popular economics and foreign affairs blog, the Agonist, told me blogging is unique because of the reverse-chronological format of the technology. “Blogging is in the moment much more so than other forms of writing.” Their contributors include an assortment of experience from the financial industries, academia, journalism and law. The strength of the Agonist is the collective process by which knowledge and writing is produced and shared. Public Reason, a group blog for 9 Atlantic Community political philosophers and theorists, exists “to create an open forum for the academic political philosophy and theory community where we can discuss our common work.” The forum is open in that anyone can access the site, as it’s on the World Wide Web. Only, “professional academic political philosophers and theorists are invited to join.” I spend a little time there peering in from the outside. Crooked Timber, one of the oldest academic blogs, and one of my favorites, is markedly political and engages with a much broader audience beyond the academy. The content ranges from esoteric to comical, deeply engaging to playful. Crooked Timber ranked in Technorati's Top 100 blogs between 2003 and 2005.
Blog communities develop both within a group blog like the , and as part of the larger blogosphere. David Nye recently started his own blog, After the American Century. Thomas Smith, who lectures at the University of East Anglia, heads their group blog, American Studies: University of East Anglia. We link to each others' websites and together form the nascent “American Studies Blogosphere.”
Brad DeLong, a long time blogger and economics professor at Berkeley describes the academic blogosphere as a kind of Invisible College. I think DeLong’s idea of an invisible college reflects not so much that the academic blogosphere is obscured in darkness, but rather traditional spatial structures and temporal limitations do not exist online. For me, I think of academic blogging akin to a university sponsored workshop or seminar which is open to public participation. The Atlantic Community perhaps means different things to different people. But I think, as a form of writing and publishing my philosophy of blogging favors process over product, conversation over authorship, community over institution. Our mission statement reads;
The Atlantic Community, a project-in-development, is a collaborative weblog and network for research, analysis and commentary on American society and culture. Our aim is to provide a public voice for European scholarship in American Studies, forging stronger communication between the academy and the public on both sides of the Atlantic. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. What you see here now is simply an early stage along the way toward that network. We encourage our readers and our writers to participate in setting the agenda for developing The Atlantic Community’s full potential.
I see the Atlantic Community not so much as an Invisible College but as part of an Open College. While the voices and content may be as diverse as our field, the main purpose will remain to provide an open space for collaboration and publication which showcases European Americanists. This is what makes the Atlantic Community unique as a niche in the blogosphere. Although a blog post may take many forms, from academic essay, personal diary, open discussion, or “work in progress,” I ultimately hope to see the site strike a balance, both in tone and content, which falls somewhere between academic and journalistic discourses. Trying to define blogging is as futile as trying to define “American Studies.” Yet there is a growing academic blogosphere which represents the broad diversity of “the academy.” Americanists, let alone European Americanists, remain woefully under-represented in this new forum. The Atlantic Community hopes to provide that representation and become an established online voice within the academic blogosphere and across the web.
Visit the Atlantic Community at:
http://atlanticcommunity.blogspot.com/
Stuart Towner Noble is a Graduate Candidate at the Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark
