Don’t worry: I’m not going to blog the whole book. If I did I would never finish it. Or at least, I wouldn’t be able to finish it and also finish season 6 of Game of Thrones.

On the other hand, as academic bloggers know, the discipline of blogging is good for keeping our minds limber on a day-to-day basis. When Mark Simpson-Vos, my editor at the University of North Carolina Press, agreed with me that writing this book in public would be fun, I was thrilled. For a collection of essays on practicing history in the digital age, Digital U: Why Crowdsourcing, Social Media, Word Press and Google Hangouts Could Save the Historical Profession it seemed like exactly the right approach, We both realized that working out ideas in this space would naturally flow back into the process of revising the chapters that I had already drafted; and writing the chapters that I had only sketched out when we agreed to do the book together would be a more dynamic process if I started testing out ideas in a blog format. Some of those ideas may fail; some may succeed and never make it into the book. Others, improved by your questions and comment, will migrate into chapters. I hope my writing process over the next six months process will demonstrate how the academic commons that takes place on social media can be the next frontier of our intellectual history…….

Interested? For the rest of this post, and to participate in the project, go on over to the rest of the post at digitalulab.org.