Sample: Supervalent Thought, by Lauren Berlant, 2007-2019
What is it: “A blog (a truncation of the expression “weblog“) is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, “multi-author blogs” (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other “microblogging” systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”
Knowledge Design: what is the research question? what new knowledge is being created?
This is Lauren Berlant’s research blog, tracking academic and random engagements with two scenes and concepts: ordinary life and attachment/detachment. I want to know why people stay attached to lives that don’t work. This is a political and a personal question. Psychoanalysis meets affect theory and Marxist critical theory. The projected book’s title was originally Detachment Theory, but the object/scene has multiplied and the focus will be serial: its aim is still to describe non-sovereign subjectivity in a variety of states–of anxiety, limerence, passive aggression, flat affect, rape, torture, the comedic, and affective labor–because, as it turns out that detachment is not antithetical to attachment but one of its styles, it would be better to focus on perspectives on the disorganization and reorganization of subjects and worlds rather than to presume the possibility of reversals and negations.
Who is it for: a research community, students, the public, specific interest groups
Who makes it: one ore more authors; author collective (edited blogs)
Medium/Media: a website
System requirements: blogging platform such as wordpress
How to measure impact: number of clicks and views; citations and links online; convergence with other publications by the author or author team; grant support; conference presentations; community outreach; publications resulting from blog posts
Resources:
digital scholarship evaluation 