Crooked Timber Symposium ...

Crooked Timber presents a symposium of posts on China Mieville's latest novel, Iron Council. Henry Farrell introduces the symposium here. John Holbo, Belle Waring, , Henry Farrell, Cliopatria's Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, and John Quiggen each contribute essays to the symposium and Mieville responds to them here, in a post with very substantial footnotes. Although the primary discussion takes place at Mievall's response, comments are enabled at each post and the discussion is of a very high quality. All of this is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

I don't know enough about the history and geography of blogging to claim that this symposium format is unprecedented, but it does strike me as an interesting experiment in the uses of the medium. Farrell and Daniel Drezner have been two of the keenest contributors to discussions about blogging and scholarship; and, now, Farrell and Crooked Timber make a concerted effort at it. I can think of all kinds of possibilities for it being done by historians: reflections on the work of a single major historian, essays in comparative regional or area studies, a period symposium, etc. For such a symposium, a blog might invite special contributions from historians who are not members of the group, as the Crooked Timberites have done.

Symposia always involve concentrated work and it would not do for them simply to scroll rapidly down the screen when I post some scattered links to varieties of other interesting things on the net. Maybe, if Cliopatria were to sponsor such an event, we could ask History News Network to reserve a special page for it and feature the link on the mainpage for a week or so. Crooked Timber suspended regular posting for a day or so, when it was doing fund raising for the tsunami victims and I imagine that it will suspend ordinary posting to give this symposium due attention. There is much to think about here.