Last year Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa Cruz, ran an experiment with his latest academic book: He let readers of a popular blog to which he contributes peer review the book in public. This week he shared his final conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of his unusual approach.
The book’s publisher, MIT Press, administered a traditional peer review of the book, and Mr. Wardrip-Fruin was able to compare the two approaches. One major difference: Blog commenters tended to focus on discrete paragraphs and points, and rarely compared ideas in one chapter to those later in the work. But the blog readers offered more detailed input than the anonymous reviewers solicited by the press.
Mr. Wardrip-Fruin argues that blog reviewing works and that it should be tried again in the future. “Of course, widely read blogs won’t want to be completely taken over by manuscript review,” he writes. “But I can imagine them hosting two or three a year, selected for their level of interest or because they are written by one of the blog’s authors.” —Jeffrey R. Young
