A comment on the interview with James Crossley

In the most recent interview on Biblioblogs, that with James Crossley, of Earliest Christian History, I was intrigued to notice that he echoes something like my own reluctance to put pre-publication work on a blog.

"I think it is pretty clear to anyone who might read the blog that I am reluctant to put anything particularly new on the blog unless it is published or being published. I didn’t consciously make this decision but I just can’t bring myself to put too many pre-publication ideas."

True, he goes on to say that this was not why he started blogging anyway, but I still find in interesting that bloggers show such different attitudes to this issue.

I know that Jim Davila has put conference papers online (here and here), and that Mark Goodacre placed parts of his recent SBL paper on Galatians on his blog (starts here). Some more junior have also put unpublished conference papers on-line (e.g. Mariam Kamell, a PhD student at St Andrews, here and here). Christian Brady has even put his 'work in progress' paper, "God is not in this Classroom", originally available here, online as an MP3 file! Still others have started on-line commentaries, putting large amounts of work onto the web (e.g. Michael Pahl on 1 Thessalonians). Others have asked for papers to be put on line they have heard or can't hear at the SBL (here). So why are they so happy to do it and I (and James ) am (are) not?

Without a great deal of thought, I am beginning to wonder if this has something to do with how you approach blogging as an outlet for your work. You might, of course, not care about publishing your work in academic outlets, but I doubt that is the case with Mark and Jim (or with the others mentioned above). I am sure they are confident that their work is still publishable despite their blog offerings (after all, Mark has now published a 'substantially revised version' of his previously offered review of The Nativity Story in the--admittedly not very prestigious-- SBL forum). From his comments Mark appears to value the feedback he has received, apparently seeing it as akin to that which he might receive at a conference. Yet to me there is something public about the internet that makes me doubt anyone will want to take it for a journal. I have no evidence for this, but it seems very real to me. I'll have to think on about this.