The Moby Dick Model for Deeper Blogging

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When blogging, getting beyond the superficial to the substantial takes conscious effort. After all, as a casual and social medium, a blog can trap us in the tidepools of everyday novelties and low-level commentary. 

But a blog can be used to sound a subject, to go deep. Derrick Clements has already used Moby Dick as a model for better engagement of topics in his "Going Deep in Digital Culture" post. He says Melville's novel is an example of "the type of profound commitment and thoroughness to a subject that twenty-first-century bloggers may employ" and that "just as Moby Dick stands as a testament to the human ability to commit to a single subject for more than a few minutes, blogs can, if one so chooses, be a great way to dive deep – as long as community-minded creators can budget their attention..."

Profound commitment to subject via blogging? Thoroughness? Can these really go together with blogging? Yes they can, but not usually without some conscious effort. Earlier I discussed three phases of academic blogging. A lot of the magic happens in that second stage where one shows diligence and discipline in honing a topic. One can move from the superficial to the substantial (to paraphrase my prior post) by including these four things:

1. Analysis of primary texts
2. Use of secondary texts
3. Curation of content  
4. Social proof

I would like to use the novel, Moby Dick, to teach each of these four components, on the way to asking my students to follow this algorithm for deepened blogging.

The Three Phases of Academic Blogging

As I have taught blogging to students over several years, I've noted that the best academic blogging happens in three distinct phases. This post is written for those who are in phase one of academic blogging and preparing to take it to the next level.

While I am describing the blogging of undergraduates in literature, I believe these phases to be just as relevant for students in general and for scholars of all disciplines. (See, for example, how Jessie Daniels describes going from a tweet, to a blog, to a published scholarly article). 

Elsewhere I have written on using Twitter for academic research. While I am not focusing in this post on such microblogging services as Twitter and Google+, they are a significant means for finding and testing ideas and can greatly complement academic blogging. 

Blogging doesn't automagically result in anything. It requires thought and discipline to lead to something worthwhile academically. It can. Here's how.