Interactivity, Blogs, and the Ethics of Doing Sport History

This chapter explores the potential of blogs and blogging for sport historians. Blog posts, using a variety of media but largely focused on written text, are produced by single authors or collectives for a variety of purposes, including to “provide information, as self-representation, to tell a story, to work toward a political goal, or to represent a culture, experience, idea or issue, outside of mainstream media.” As such, blogs can be a research source for understanding the processes of collectively constructing cultural and social memories. Like other social media archives, blog posts contain a wealth of commentary and information that is potentially valuable to historians as they grapple with understanding meanings of particular pasts in the present. Moreover, blogs offer the potential for reflexive historical practice.