From the introduction:
This special volume of Internet Archaeology collects the leading voices of blogging in archaeology to provide a critical examination of informal, online self-publication. This collection of articles is one result of over a decade of digital communication; the confluence of a conversation that grew from a few lonely voices to a tumultuous cacophony. Even so, blogging has had very little scrutiny in wider archaeological publication (but see Caraher2008; Kansa and Deblauwe 2011). The first movement toward this volume was the Blogging Archaeology session at the 2011 Society for American Archaeology meetings, accompanied by a “Blog Carnival,” a groundbreaking effort to foment reflexive discussion prior to the conference. Several participants of this original session and blog carnival have contributed to this volume; these articles are intermingled with perspectives from contributors who have started blogging in the intervening time, and with peer review comments from archaeologists who have blogged for a long time, and from those who do not blog at all.
In this volume, we have attempted to capture and present this colourful digital noise through the more traditional form of peer reviewed journal publication. To meaningfully circumscribe archaeological blogging, we present this introduction as a form of paradata—details about the decisions that went into forming this volume. These paradata include a brief background of blogging in archaeology, the context and connectivity of the articles in this volume, and the contingencies of the experimental publication employed by Internet Archaeology in including open peer review and the addition of a comments section that will be archived with the original articles. Finally, we invite you to join this conversation, through commenting on these articles, engaging with #CritBlogArch on Twitter, or starting your own blog.
Internet Archaeol. Issue 39. Critical Blogging in Archaeoology. Themed Issue. Table of Contents..