Why create a research blog for a project? How to feed it, which formats of articles to put forth, and which disciplinary traditions to embrace? Indeed, if historians extensively blog, this is not a common practice among other disciplines, such as computer science. Moreover, which collective processes to adopt for a project that does not mobilize all its members equally and along the same temporality? Starting with these questions, this article discusses key elements that guided the editorial project of this blog.
When ObARDI’s research program started in January 2021, it appeared important to take the time to reflect about its online research blog and to determine a clear editorial policy. To that end, we reviewed various blogs which content appealed to us, such as those of French social scientists Caroline Muller (Acquis de conscience. Histoire(s) de XIXe siècle), Aurore Turbiau (Littératures engagées. Féminisme et lesbianisme dans l’histoire littéraire), or Émilien Ruiz (Devenir historien-ne. Méthodologie de la recherche et historiographie); as well as other sites and blogs, both in French (e.g., Politka and EHNE) and in English (e.g., VoxEU, The Long Run, or Broadstreet). These helped structure our thoughts about our potential readership and the type of content to offer to them.

Organizing the Conversational Space
Initially, it was clear that the blog had to be at the centre of the project’s reflection process, as both the brewing space of our thoughts and—we hope—a crossroad of exchanges with our audiences. In this perspective, choosing hypotheses.org rather than more local platforms was obvious: its ability to promote content published in different languages on its portals is paramount to us.
Indeed, the project aims at reaching both an English and a French-speaking audience. This choice is not without raising questions: should we open a blog which interface and content are exclusively in English or mix both languages on the same blog? Furthermore, the blog is constructed as a multimedia and evolving object. Multimedia, as we do no think that a solely textual format is legitimate: we will also offer articles that integrate audio, video, and data content. Evolving as well: our objective is to enhance and update articles by including reflective feedback or by adding new content.
This organization is combined with a reflection—that started many years ago here and there—about the type of discourse to develop, as we would like this space to be as much a tool for scientific popularization toward a non-specialist audience as a space of dialogue among peers. For this reason, we propose two types of articles, along with thematic and disciplinary paths within the blog. As such, we hope that this space will enable the emergence of a scientific conversation as defined by Marin Dacos and Pierre Mounier.
A specific space is dedicated to the iconography: entirely licenced in CC BY, this iconography is as much illustrative as it is visual. We thereby benefit from the plasticity of the Gutenberg editor to illustrate sources, diagrams, and images, close to the argument. The choice of imagery is accompanied with a reflection on the graphical charter of the blog and on the versatility of numerical objects. Icons in flat design are used along with article titles and lead paragraphs to help quickly identify their themes.
Finally, organizing the conversational space also means to uncover the workshop of the project in the sense of Antoine Prost in his Twelve Lessons on History [Douze leçons sur l’histoire]. The idea is to reveal interdisciplinary practices as they proceed through collective learning, without any systematic or automatic rule, and where all is about dosage and comprehension—this is the meaning of the blog title.
In this editorial perspective, making our blog a reflective tool might come at the expense of its role as an institutional communication tool—which is oftentimes the form research projects’ blog. Indeed, we have chosen to disseminate our project through our reflections and the disputation it might generate rather than through its news. This is, we believe, one of the main characteristics of the digital humanities: to think about the tools mobilized, about what is produced, on the form of these writings, and on the ways to address readers online. Of course, the institutional aspect is not rejected entirely from the blog: it is however not central and essentially serves to document the different steps of the project.

Designing Content
To unveil the projects’ workshop, we have chosen to think about the various publics that might read us as well as the specificities of web reading. Indeed, writing for one’s peers is different from writing for those in another discipline—just as writing a blog post is different from writing a journal article. It is therefore important to consider adapted formats to different types of readers and to different ways of reading.
In this perspective, the content of this blog revolves around three distinct formats:
- Blog posts: these are brief messages designed to provide rapid information about the evolution of the project. They record and document the advancement of the project.
- Pages: these are static and are meant to present the project, the team, or the institutional communication.
- Articles: these are relatively long messages that develop a reflection about a given object. They are the main reflective spaces relevant to the development of the project and can either be an article of scientific popularization or an article directed toward one’s peers.
The non-specialist article operates a knowledge and cultural transfer from an expert in one discipline toward another discipline, and uses a simplified semantic—for instance, an article written by computer scientists for historians without using specialized vocabulary, carefully explaining notions and contexts.
The article of specialist is directed toward peers within the same discipline and keeps the specialized semantic—for instance, an article written by computers scientists for other computer scientists using specialized vocabulary, with little explanation of notions and contexts.
Being able to explain objects, concepts, and methods of each of the disciplines that constitute the project requires these two levels of expression. As a result, these articles should enable the creation of a Lingua Franca that is common to the members of the projects. This question is of first order importance in a project that combines this many disciplines around an essentially numerical object.

Writing to be Read
Contrary to paper reading, web reading imposes alternative behaviors to readers: one reads slower and auxiliary information is more frequent, which generates impatience and the desire to skim through the text. Concretely, web reading behavior follows an F-pattern, whereby the user skims through the page while forming the shape of an “F” in order to find information. The page’s layout therefore has to accommodate for this practice and propose adapted content.
The article of scientific popularization sets the tone: it needs to entice the reader and for this reason, it is limited to 12,000 characters—the maximum volume above which the risk of loosing the reader is great. Its title is short, attractive, and comprehensible to non-specialists—in a nutshell, it is the antithesis of the very detailed and overly specialized academic article. A header introduces the argument by summarizing the content of the article; highlighted in bold and of a different color, it complements the title. Short subheadings structure paragraphs to convey information consistent with F-pattern reading. Finally, paragraphs are relatively light, which is a necessary concession to the plurality of elements used for reading articles.
Specialized vocabulary should be avoided as much as possible, which implies the necessary reformulation and reframing of notions and contexts and/or the use of hyperlinks to forward to another website or a general audience journal (Wikipedia, Larousse, CNRTL, L’Histoire, Journal of Economic Perspectives, etc.). Forwards to scientific articles should be avoided except if they are meant for pedagogy and popularization.
Footnotes are not allowed: they weigh the navigation down, although this type of article does not need a critical apparatus. In the same vein, the reference list is located at the end of the article and is limited to 10 references—any curious reader will thereby be able to continue reading.
All of these elements also concern the article for specialist, so that they are not markedly different: it is slightly longer (up to 14,000 characters), it might point the reader to scientific articles, and it has footnotes and a bibliography amidst its text. Furthermore, it provides access to data and archival material hosted on ObARDI’s Dataverse, as it appeared crucial to us to uncover and give access to the data produced during our research process. We thereby aim at deepening our thinking on standards of the burden of proof and what could constitute a critical numerical apparatus. These singularities proceed from the duality of this type of article: it is a paper directed toward readers who possess the necessary knowledge for its understanding; it is also an object that will be reused in other forms of scientific outputs: an article or a book.
A Global Editorial Schema

Though the blog is the cornerstone of our reflective process, it is not the only one. Still with the objective to be read by as many as possible, we would like to offer thematic articles to media outlets that are already well known and benefit from their own communities, which are necessarily wider than ours. A tutorial about the use of the ontology editor Protégé by historians could for instance be proposed to the blog La Boîte à Outils des Historien.nes; an article about how economists use historical information could be of interest to blogs in economics. For instance, a debate among historians and economists about the nature of historical data could be the topic of a podcast on Paroles d’Histoire.
We would especially welcome our articles to be discussed during scientific conferences or in the social media, which would lead members of the project to re-write some blog articles or change their scientific processes. Relatedly, we decided not to open a Twitter account dedicated to ObARDI; we would like instead to use our respective accounts as a relay toward our followers. This practice seems to us more efficient and more conducive to discussions than a unique institutional account.
Finally, this overall schema will also be useful in preparing future scientific output. Articles of popularization or toward specialists, enhanced by Twitter or in-presence discussions will be the basis for the production or scientific articles, data papers—or to prepare the required activity reports!
Translation by Victor Gay
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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Sébastien Poublanc (10 décembre 2021). How to Blog: Organizing the Decentered Space of Scientific Conversation. ObARDI's Workshop. Consulté le 26 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://obardieng.hypotheses.org/141