Elisa, Amod, and I often discuss ways to enhance the Blog and better serve our readership (both potential and actual). In conversation with some of our core contributors, here are a few plans we have:
1. A stable “Resources” page with links to materials that would serve the research and teaching of our community. We had a thread devoted to this here, but the idea in play now is something more fixed and visible than a single thread. I invite everybody to please email me with suggestions (mdasti@bridgew.edu).
2. A feature called “Continuing the Discussion” where authors may respond to reviews, inviting further dialogue and development of their ideas and work. A number of scholars have mentioned to us that a blog is the ideal place for this sort of thing to happen, given the limitations of print-journals to allow for immediate feedback and discussion. Our blog would be an ideal location for persons in our field to have a voice in responding to, and engaging in dialogue with reviews and treatment of their work. For obvious reasons, we will carefully monitor such posts for tone, avoiding pettiness, but given our successes in this regard so far, we are confident that this won’t be a problem.
3. A regular review of published work in Indian philosophy, perhaps posted semi-annually. This may be the most ambitious part of our plans. The idea would be to have a thread that would list (and if possible, link to), recent relevant work in Indian philosophy.
4. A “Question and Answers” feature, where people may put forth questions from students or their own questions about issues in Indian philosophy, and our contributors and readers may chime in to help.
5. A series of posts dedicated to honest reviews of books. Just as it happens on Warp, Weft and Way, we could announce that we would be happy to review books, if they are relevant for the discipline and if we can find a suitable book review editor to volunteer for our blog.
Please share your thoughts on these proposals below. Most importantly, we need help, especially with #3 and #5. For #3, we need curators/editors for different languages (French, German, Japanese, English, etc.). We would urge anyone who is interested to communicate with us. For #5, we need a single review editor to identify competent reviewers and work with them. Such positions will have titles, and will be noted on the site, being “service to the profession” of the most cutting-edge kind!
On that topic, generally, for initiatives like these, we need the community to step up and help. We have many listed contributors, but we need more people to support the blog through active participation for these things to materialize.
Hi I just wanted to offer my help. I would like to help where I can. I can do book reviews.
great, Anand, many thanks!
This is great, Anand. Thank you, and let’s chat offline sometime soon.