Last week’s Chronicle report on an experiment in blog-based peer review has inspired comments hither and yon. (The 12-second version of the Chronicle story: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who teaches communication at the U. of California at San Diego, has asked readers of the group blog Grand Text Auto to comment on the manuscript of his forthcoming book on video games. Meanwhile, his publisher, MIT Press, is sending the manuscript out to anonymous referees for a standard review. Wardrip-Fruin is curious to see which comments will prove more useful.)

At Info-Fetishist, Anne-Marie Deitering, an undergraduate-services librarian at Oregon State U., is pleased that Wardrip-Fruin chose a well-established blog for this experiment rather than conjuring a new blog from the ether:

I find this interesting because of the way it recognizes the importance of the existing community on this blog. If they’d gone the “special site for the book” route, I’ve no doubt that a community would have formed there (and would have included many members of this one). But the community would have been different, and the resulting discourse would have been different. This definitely bears thinking more about — I’ve been thinking for a while that these knowledge communities that grow up around certain blogs are a powerful thing, and I think this project could potentially get at that.

Some of the conversations this week have, inevitably, wandered into broader debates about the nature and value of scholarly blogging. At the Valve, Lehigh U.’s Amardeep Singh takes the new experiment as an occasion to revisit a Valve discussion from last spring about a scheme for peer-reviewing scholarly blog entries.

And at Progressive Historians, Jeremy Young, a graduate student at Indiana U., argues that the most natural role for historian-bloggers isn’t peer-reviewing original research, but opening up new kinds of communication:

Instead, blogging is about something else: distilling historical knowledge into something juicy, fun, and intelligible and sharing that richness with laypeople and with one another. In some ways, it’s like teaching, but the goal is not to impart knowledge to people who are there for the purpose; it is to reach out into the community and begin a discussion on historical issues of importance. Though we utilize our training as academics, we take a very egalitarian role as facilitators of the discussion, not authorities who know the answers to society’s problems. Most importantly, we bring historical knowledge to bear on topics of direct importance to ordinary people….

(Photo by the Flickr user caterina. Used under a Creative Commons license.)