I want to give a shout-out to Anthologize, a new tool that allows WordPress users (like myself) to organize, edit, and publish blog posts as fully-formed books. A while back, I discussed the increasing significance and sophistication of history blogs. Anthologize now allows historians and other academics to compile, well, anthologies of their best digital scholarship and distribute them in myriad formats. Since even academic blogs contain a wide variety of posts, ranging in quality as well as theme or topic, Anthologize offers a new way to organize and present interesting work that may be scattered or difficult to find online.

Yale professors who make extensive use of blogs in their courses can use Anthologize to generate thematic collections of student work. Other applications include organizing research material, compiling lecture notes or primary sources, producing a collaborative journal or creative work, and generating exhibition books based on a blog of archive or museum collections.

Impressively, Anthologize was developed, coded, and released in just one week by a team of twelve digital humanists. It is still only an alpha release, and many features do not work as well as one would hope. Some might wonder about the ramifications of taking an inherently dynamic format, with outside user comments, hyperlinks, and media files, and rendering it static. With all the advantages of digital interactivity, hyperlinking, mashups, social networking, etc., this transformation might seem a step back to a more “primitive” medium. Still, I think there is much potential here.