blogging

Jason Antrosio has composed a short report on the "Anthropology Blogosphere 2013 – Ecology of Online Anthropology". I appreciate his kind words about my work here, and love how he has connected the new media activity of many prominent anthropologists, the move to open access by Cultural Anthropology, and the increased activity of social media networks dedicated to connecting anthropologists. It really is an ecology with many niches for people to increase their engagement and connections across fields.

I've had a paper on my desktop for more than a week expecting to write a comment on it, and now happily I discover that the first author, Becky Farbstein, has described the work in a blog post: "First Epigravettian Ceramics in Europe". The paper [1] describes ceramic figurines from 12,000-15,000 years ago in Croatia -- not the earliest instance of ceramic technology in the world, but one of three very early instances that suggest a pattern:

There are major implications for the rapidly accumulating body of evidence of both artistic and functional ceramics in pre-Neolithic contexts (remember this post?), but most importantly, we can no longer equate ceramic technologies with sedentary societies. The finds from Vela Spila encourage us to reconsider our ideas about the multiple inventions and diverse roles of ceramics throughout prehistory. Clearly, in lots of different places across Eurasia, throughout the late Palaeolithic, people were experimenting with ceramic materials, intentionally firing them, and developing new artistic traditions associated with their innovations. Ceramics should not necessarily be considered an anachronism (or contamination) when found in Palaeolithic horizons.

I love it when I can read about work from the authors, and hope more and more people will take up this challenge!

References

Paul Knoepfler, a UC-Davis cell biologist, runs a very active blog in which he discusses the science of stem cells. One of his recurrent themes is strong criticism of clinics and physicians who provide unapproved stem cell "treatments" to patients, sometimes with fatal side effects. He reflects on the importance of blogging for him as a researcher: "The Blob versus the blog: arguing how social media is changing science".

My main point of this line of discussion is that I can’t think of how I could have made a difference in the area of dubious stem cell treatments without this blog. It’s become a powerful tool for good and I take that very seriously.

More broadly I also discuss on my blog key issues in science that are important but are rarely discussed because they are awkward issues or taboo areas. Mainstream journals are frankly too wimpy to ever allow discussions of such touchy issues, but such issues do indeed need to be talked about.

Knoepfler famously described his start in blogging in a Nature editorial last year: "My year as a stem-cell blogger".

The battle against the cancer was the most difficult of my life and I still worry that it may come back. But the experience also had positive effects. For one, I still missed The Niche, and assumed that others did too. Once I recovered, I found the courage to start a replacement. After all, how hard can blogging be when compared with facing cancer? A year on, it has been a remarkable experience.

He describes some of the private "concerns" expressed by colleagues, worrying for the future of his funding. What can I say? People have often expressed the same concerns to me. I cannot claim, as Knoepfler does, that these concerns have been empty. On the contrary, some of my grant reviews have made it clear that blogging has worked against me in funding applications. Funding rates are so low that I will never know whether this has scuttled applications or whether they would have been rejected anyway, and so I don't let the naysayers bother me. But clearly we need to keep working to change the climate.

Maria Konnikova takes a psychological experiment on memory into an excursion on literature: "On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik".

In this view, talking something through—completing it, so to speak, off the page—impedes the ability to actually create it to its fullest potential. Somehow, that act of closure, of having talked through a piece of work, takes away the motivation to finish. It’s like the order has already been delivered to the waiting customer. Once done, it escapes from the mind to make way for the next client. And the best of both worlds may or may not exist.

This for me is one of the perils of blogging. Once I've written something up, it has a sense of completion, so I'm not typically in a hurry to publish it elsewhere. This weakness of course is counterbalanced by a great strength: having more eyes on something makes the idea stronger. But it does take discipline to carry a research agenda through of the many strains of writing. I think it's also a fundamental element of interdisciplinary research, carrying an idea through the excursions into the different lines of evidence needed to examine it.