Metamedia

Metamedia announces the creation of the first scholarly collaborative blog dedicated to all matters philological. Philolog.org was launched today by Metamedia and is under the direction James Collins, Corby Kelly and Jack Mitchell of the Department of Classics at Stanford University.

Here is a commentary by Jack Mitchell's on the nature of the blog:

"I might as well start by asking, "Were there weblogs in the ancient world?" Or rather, equivalents?

What, o Socrates, /is/ a blog? First of all, a blog is chronological discourse, organised by day and hour. It is continuous, but episodic. It may be collaborative (like this blog) or exclusive (with a single author); it provokes comment from its readers, whose comments become part of the blog and in turn stimulate new comment; yet all is centered on the post as an (expansive) entity.

Perhaps, in ancient terms, the blog most resembles epic poetry. Epic, too, is episodic; and the basic idea behind each episode (eg. "Heracles slew the beast with his sword") would stimulate expansion by later tongues ("Tell me, goddess, the genealogy of the best . . ." or "The forging of the sword"). Of course, epic expansion would involve the total reworking of each post every time someone commented upon it -- the later version erased the earlier. So the analogy breaks down.

Perhaps, rather, the blog is like a /catena/ - a Late Antique multi-sourced commentary on a canonical text, by means of which a manuscript would bring, say, Zigabenus', Theophylact's, and Cyril the Alexandrian's commentaries on the Gospel of Luke onto a single page, "indexed" by chapter or passage. This analogy works even in terms of physical medium - the script of exegesis typically being smaller (say, 6pt) than the script of the canonical text (say, 10pt), just as comments tend to be in small-sized Arial font. The difficulty with a "canonical" analogy is that the blog is always in the process of being written; it never achieves a definitive form, and comments posted too many days after the original post tend to be disregarded: the blog's readership has moved on. This entirely contradicts the idea of the canon.

Perhaps, rather, the blog is like a long day in the Ecclesia? The strategos, say, makes a long and interesting speech (the post), and the citizens rise without regard to rank or race or ready money, each tacking on his impassioned, sometimes irrational comment on the main event? The comment section is certainly volatile, like the Athenian demos: inclined to overrate Sicily, destined to irritate Plato. And the principle of the Ecclesia is non-telic: it will continue forever, just like a blog, addressing whatever the moment requires."