From Blogs to Books: Blogging as Community, Practice and Platform

This article expands a 2008 article prepared by William Caraher for Archaeology Online which celebrated the first generation of scholarly blogging in archaeology and classics. Caraher remains tremendously optimistic that the widespread accessibility of blogging platforms, the growth of social media, and new expectation for academic publication has created new communities of scholarly practice poised to revolutionize archaeological communication. Andrew Reinhard offers a more cautionary perspective on the relationship between blogging and publishing by introducing a global perspective on academic publishing and some of the practical issues related to including blogs within the larger tent of scholarly communication. Reinhard's perspectives reveal that the communities of practice in academia may not always be compatible, but like both article authors, they leave plenty of room for new publishing possibilities in a range of rapidly changing digital media and platforms.Online-only publication: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue39/7