Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Tapera-DHH Survey of History Blogs

A couple weeks ago, I filled out a questionaire for the Tapera-DHH Survey of History Blogs, sponsored by Tapera and Digital History Hacks. They have now put their results online and are looking for more respondents. First, here is the questionaire:
Questionnaire

Blog:

URL:

Authors:

First post (mm/dd/Y):

Questions:

  1. Which history-related blogs do you visit most frequently? (1-5)
  2. What factors do you think are involved in your choice of blogs to read? (For example: quality of information, writing, institution, author profile, rankings, entertainment value…)
  3. What factors characterize your own blog? Which are most important?
  4. Have you changed the objectives of your blog since you created it?
The most interesting data is contained within this graphic of the links between history blogs (I love these web-like/linkage things!). From what they've compiled, I find it interesting that 3 of the history blogs that I indicated that I visited most frequently (Question 1) didn't respond to the survey themselves nor did they have any other links from other history bloggers. These were Blogenspiel (15), Albion's Seedlings (50) and In The Middle (51). (Supplemental data--including reference numbers--is in this spreadsheet). One of my "top 5" is The Rhine River (27), who also didn't respond to the survey, but is mentioned in the top 5 of The History Librarian (76) and Far Outliers (101). The final one of my top 5 is the King of All History Blogs, Cliopatria (17). Looking at the graph, it looks like I'm clustered with Far Outliers and Rhine River. Interesting.

Here are the Top 5 (according to the survey)

Cliopatria
Digital History Hacks
Old is the New New
Early Modern Notes
Edwired

No real surprise, though I think that DHH's involvement in the survey has biased the results a bit (no slight intended guys!). The rest of the top 5 seem right on, even Edwired, which I would deem more academic than history-related. After all, most history bloggers are in academia. Not me.

2 comments:

William J. Turkel said...

Dear Marc, No slight taken! I totally agree that my participation in the survey biased the results. Also, the fact that we are only collecting in two languages is bound to skew things. As more people respond, hopefully the biases will be reduced. Best, Bill.

Anonymous said...

Dear Marc: I pray that my participation bias the results. If you look again the graph you will see that no spanish's blog has chosen to me...