Anne Galloway has put together an interesting post on interdisciplinarity (specifically concerning sociology, anthropology and ubiquitous computing). The comments to her post link back to earlier questions about the balance between readability and complexity that I think are relevant, not only to academic blogs, but to all specialist writing (boy, the unadulterated geek talk of some tech blogs gets me down at times!).

There are two different issues here, though, aren’t there? One is interdisciplinary research/dialogue, and the other is the problem of finding an appropriate register for blog posts that connect to our research interests. The writing needs to be clear without being simplistic, and accurate without being dense, arcane, or simply boring. Annotation is also important here – most of the time it is possible to find something online that provides background or another perspective on the topic under discussion. And if the reader comes across something difficult or new, there’s always Google.

Clearly, the combination of lucidity and reasonable annotation in research blogs is an indication of a particular stance towards both (inter)disciplinarity and the world beyond the academy and is to be cheered. Again, coming from cultural studies, it is hard not to notice the jargonistic wankery of some writing – and more jargon, we don’t need.