A-Z of Favourite Scholarly Film and Moving Image Blogs

Film Studies For Free has recently been infected by two viruses: one nasty but better now, thanks (ach-oo); the other relatively benign, but still totally brain-scrambling in its own way.

The latter is the dratted 'alphabet meme' still doing the film-blogospheric round (issuing from the Blog Cabins site).

As this metablog doesn't write about films (oh no), the forced A-Z of its choice is 'Favourite Scholarly Film/Moving Image Blogs' mostly in the English language, or 'Favourite [anglophone] Film/Moving Image Blogs with a Sizeable Scholarly Component or Impact'.

And, yes (note to FSFF's more litigious readers), all of the usual rules of this exercise are broken below (and more); but this piece of favouriting frenzy is a service to the community: FSFF's formal film blogroll currently has just under 200 entries, so the below choices will form the basis of a new 'Highly Recommended Scholarly Blogs List' to sit near the top of FSFF's right-hand menu.

Comments on this list are most welcome. And do please let FSFF know if it's missing any really important blogs from its various lists. Thank you.

• annett's blog missing image


• Bigger Picture Research for coverage of its film biz angle; Bright Lights After Dark for all else (for recognition of The Bioscope's excellence, see under 'T');


• Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog (this was a close one: apologies to Henry Jenkins fans (his is easily the best Media Studies blog), and also to those many fans of Will Scheibel, Kimberly Lindbergs, Scott Kirsner, Michael E. Grost and the guys at Cinemetrics (all very good runners-up), but Chris Cagle's research-led blogging was one of the biggest inspirations for FSFF


• DinaView; Digital Poetics; and Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope (yup, a genuine three way tie)


• Edit Room: The Wide Screen journal editors' blog; and Expanded Cinema


• Film of the Month Club; FSFF also likes Flickhead (not intentionally scholarly, perhaps, but scrupulously informative; keep an eye also on Foreigner's Guide to Film Culture in Korea)


• girish and GreenCine Daily (what would a blogger's life be like without these two - not the happy one it is, that's for sure). An honorable mention, too, for Bob Rehak's Graphic Engine, which FSFF only recently (shamefully) discovered (joyfully).


• House of Mirth and Movies


• I Screen Studies


• Jason Sperb's Jamais Vu ties with Jason Mittell's Just TV and Jonathan Rosenbaum's JonathanRosenbaum.com
  
• Kino-Eye.com


• Like Anna Karina's Sweater


• Alexandra Juhasz's Media Praxis edged out Mystery Man on Film and Michael Barrier on Animation


• notcoming.com is a good film review site, often looking at classic or off-the beaten track films


• Observations on film art and FILM ART sine qua non; but FSFF also loves Only The Cinema


• Parallax View is a worthy P-winner, but FSFF also adores Pedro Almodóvar's Blog...


• Q Branch (it has to be)


• rear window views : sweiv wodniw raer (very specific and somehow all the better for scholars for that)


• Spectacular Attractions is FSFF's S-daddy, but mentions très honorables, aussi, for the absolutely S-fabuleux Strictly Film School (Acquarello), Shooting Down Pictures, Screenville, Self-Styled Siren and Spectres du Cinéma


• The Bioscope, The Chutry Experiment (FSFF wouldn't have made it any any easier for itself by omitting the 'The', sadly...) and Tativille for consistently superb writing on film


• Unspoken Cinema (now that was easy)


• Vertigo Ramblings (Dan Auiler) and videoarcadia (the latter hiatus-ing at the mo', but it credibly assures us it will be back)


• What's New at the Internet Archive; runner-up: Winds From The East


• The Extratextuals (phew, thank you, Jonathan Gray!)
• You must be Mistaken, I'm alive (aka Polar Bear's Film Journal)
• zigzigger

More on Scholarly Publishing: MediaCommons

As a result of following up some links on Alexandra Juhasz's great blog, Media Praxis: Integrating Media Theory, Practice and Politics, I decided to set up a new list of weblogs, on Film Studies For Free, which discuss digital scholarship in useful ways, I believe, for Film Studies researchers in an age in which we struggle not only with issues of research quality but also with evolving forms of research audit.

One of the blogs I've listed, MediaCommons: A Digital Scholarly Network, took me off to the following resource of interest: an article published as a work-in-progress on MediaCommons in March 2007: 'MediaCommons: Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet'. It covers the emergence of digital scholarly publishing, MLA Taskforce Recommendations, the 'Born-Digital Monograph', Trackback, Versioning, Comments, Peer Review, and Peer-to-Peer Review.

MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation, is attempting to establish a network in which

scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network. (Quotation from HERE)

Through the MediaCommons site I also found a link to the following fascinating posting about Open Access publishing, 'Open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals', on the blog apophenia by Danah Boyd. The posting contains links to further discussions about Open Access, too. These include the highly useful piece 'Six things that researchers need to know about open access' by Peter Suber, with plenty of great links to further sites of interest.

Which are the best scholarly film and media blogs?

Over the next two months or so, Film Studies For Free is running a little poll to gather views about the best of the scholarly film and media blogs currently out there. Perhaps the identity of the very best scholarly blog is a foregone conclusion... But I hope, along the way, to generate some fruitful discussion about what scholarliness (see below for some definitions) can be in the blogosphere. I hope also to discover some more 'film blogs of note'.

So, to this end, please vote on the (so far) twelve websites I've listed on the right of this blog (all of which already appear FSFF's Blog Roll). If any film and media weblogs you value highly do not appear in the list, please email FSFF with your suggestions or use the comments options at the foot of this post. I will add all relevant sites both to the poll listing and to the blogroll (to which new items are added pretty frequently anyway).

By the way, of relevance HERE is a link an online article, which I have just added to my list of Open Access websites: it's a discussion piece entitled 'Open Access 2.0: Access to Scholarly Publications Moves to a New Phase' by Joseph J. Esposito. It sets out what may or may not be possible in emerging versions of scholarly web publishing.

And HERE's a link to a similarly interesting set of discussions about blog scholarliness in general by Alex Halavais.

Get voting!


S C H O L A R L Y (adj.) - characteristic of scholars or scholarship; "scholarly pursuits"; "a scholarly treatise"; "a scholarly attitude"

critical - characterized by careful evaluation and judgment; "a critical reading"; "a critical dissertation"; "a critical analysis of Melville's writings"
intellectual - appealing to or using the intellect; "satire is an intellectual weapon"; "intellectual workers engaged in creative literary or artistic or scientific labor"; "has tremendous intellectual sympathy for oppressed people"; "coldly intellectual"; "sort of the intellectual type"; "intellectual literature"
profound - showing intellectual penetration or emotional depth; "the differences are profound"; "a profound insight"; "a profound book"; "a profound mind"; "profound contempt"; "profound regret"
unscholarly - not scholarly