To Blog or Not to Blog?

So far the second and final year of my Public History graduate program at Duquesne University is full of new experiences, both exciting and mildly terrifying:

• Preparing for a presentation at an international oral history conference in October

• Reading avant-garde poetry in the first Literature class I've taken in eight years

• Blogging!

I've been thinking about blogging for years. I have many thoughts/questions/daydreams and it would be nice to have them all in one place. Plus, I love the thought of using a blog as a vehicle for sharing informal and not-quite-polished scholarship! One of the first pieces we read for my Digital Humanities & the Historian course this semester explored this idea. In a selection from Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities, Mark Sample defines his blogging practice as a precursor to scholarship. He shares "ideas in incubation that will eventually surface...the posts are placeholders, in a sense, for the real intellectual work that lies ahead." I'm using this as my inspiration from here on out. Let the blogging begin!