Dear list,
please forgive me for rushing in, but I have been having some difficulties in finding people with corresponding experiences and willingness to share their thoughts:
When planning to set up a platform on which an international and interdisciplinary community of humanities researchers (most probably not all versed in digital technologies) is invited to exchange their ideas, questions, announcements around a certain thematic focus consisting in a "historically localizable" discourse (in this case the so-called "School of Salamanca" of the 16th and 17th centuries), what type of platform would you prefer, and why? Blog, Mailing list, Bulletin Board, Wiki, ...? How do you perceive access and participation thresholds, popularity/dissemination/visibility, feedback likelihood, etc?
To possibly provoke some comments, here are a few intuitions of mine. Please contradict and challenge (or confirm) based on your experiences, or your intuitions:
- Blogs are easily accessible and can be viewed/read comfortable, but they tend to have a restriced set of authors. Can anyone imagine applying for authorship rights to a blog administration in order to just pose one question or to advertise one conference?
- The same holds for wiki sites.
- Social networks like academia.edu, itergateway groups etc. depend on people to focus on one such network which might not be their favorite one, so a too large portion of interested persons is kept out.
- Bulletin Boards are a mess.
- Twitter messages are too short.
- Mailing lists are not subscribed to because they look old-fashioned. Being somewhat nerdy myself, they are my personal favorites, however.
On the other hand, when I have asked that same question on my facebook profile, the only response I did get was a suggestion to go for a blog. In other social networks or fora (academia.edu, community.itergateway.org, researchgate.net etc.) I did not get any reply at all (although some are watching/following the question).
I would be very grateful for any insights shared...
Best regards,
Andreas