Is BlogBuilder far off from being an academic writing tool?

Here's an example of the academic writing process that i'm developing using my blog. I'm doing this for real, so real requirements for how it can be used to support academic writing are emerging…

I've just created two entries, one called Bacon's malerisch, Van Gogh's diagram, and the baroque fold the other called The artistic diagram and its relation to the statistical diagram. They are follow-ups from another entry on Van Gogh's relation to Bacon (via Deleuze), which itself is a follow-up to some entries stretching back to an entry on Miro (quickly written whilst at the Miro Foundation). Those earlier entries were quite limited and not intended to be developed into anything in themselves.

These two latest entries, however, are intended to develop into chapters of a thesis. At the moment they are just notes, sketches of arguments, incomplete and relatively unlimited. They will be developed. Privacy is set to 'just me', but that will change as they develop.

There are some aspects of these entries that present different requirements for how they are treated and represented. Being both work in progress and more significant than standard entries, I would like them to be represented somewhere in a permanent list, so that I can easily keep working on them and keep writing new entries reflecting on them. At the moment there is a fairly straightforward relationship between these two entries. This may develop into one entry being the natural precursor of the other. There may also be more similar such significant entries. These could have more complex and changing relations, perhaps better represented in a mind-map style diagram which can aid the development of the overall thesis.

So why develop them in my blog? Because they have emerged as follow-ups to more blog like blog entries, and that's how philosophical writing happens, as a synthesis of smaller notes and ideas. Note that this implies that we should allow an entry to be a follow-up of more than one other entry, perhaps as a kind of summary entry. Also because Warwick Blogs is just so damn good, especially with its privacy control, editing facilities, commenting, track-backs and follow-ups, and its galleries. It just seems such a good place to do this.

So to conclude, I can see that with just a few small tweaks Warwick Blogs can become a superb tool for academic writing.

Robert O'Toole : 29 Aug 2004 08:31 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem