Who is writing this blog?
“A theme here is blogging’s tendency to summon a strange double, a second self that seems both alien yet which cannot entirely be disavowed.”
Are we seeing a turn back towards the Open Web?
From today’s Protocol newsletter: There’s a clear trend here. I’ve talked to a lot of folks recently about the return of blogging, the rise of Substack, and what it means that people are branching out on their own again. Medium clearly understands the underlying goal behind that trend, which is […]
Getting hold of ideas while they are clear: note taking as a creative practice
I often come out of meetings feeling that what we’ve been discussing is utterly transparent to me. I feel I hold the issue in my hands, seeing how the initial steps connect to a broader horizon of action. It couldn’t feel more straight forward. However partly for that reason, I […]
Social Media and Doing a PhD: what do you need to know?
I organised a Sociological Review workshop at the weekend with Jenny Thatcher, Pat Thomson and Inger Mewburn. I’m sufficiently snowed under at the moment that I don’t have the time/energy to reflect on it properly but here’s a sneak preview of the graphic produced by Julia Hayes (below), links to […]
What will it mean when blogs are decades old?
Reading the philosopher Daniel Little’s reflection on eleven years of Understanding Society, I found myself wondering how blogging will be seen when we are surrounded by personal blogs which are decades old? The blog you are reading is eight years old this month, superseding a sequence of blogs which covered […]
Some thoughts on intellectual self-archiving
Anyone who has read my blog for a while will be aware that I use it to self-archive. As Cory Doctorow explains in this wonderful piece, it’s a mode of information storage suitable for those whose working lives revolve around the identification, evaluation and retrieval of information: I consume, digest, and […]
The transformation of academic writing and the challenge of ephemera
What does social media mean for academic writing? Most answers to this question focus on how such platforms might constrain or enable the expression of complex ideas. For instance, we might encounter scepticism that one could express conceptual nuance in 140 characters or an enthusiasm for blogging as offering new ways to explore theoretical questions […]
Bloggers and their role in the dissemination of scholarly information
Notes from this Webinar. I had to leave after the second speaker so they’re not complete. Alt metrics are a complement to existing metrics, addressing some of the key issues posed by metrics: the lag time of citations, the limitations of impact factor, the time to publication and their focus on a […]
The cultural significance of blogging
In his Uberworked and Underpaid, Trebor Scholz offers an important reflection on the cultural significance of blogging. While its uptake has been exaggerated, dependent upon questionable assumptions concerning the relationship between users and blogs, it nonetheless represents a transformation of and expansion of cultural agency which needs to be taken […]
The difference between philosophy and talk about philosophy
A distinction I find rather tenuous, invoked by Ray Brassier in his attack on the self-importance of the speculative realist blogging community: What is peculiar to them is the claim that this is the first philosophy movement to have been generated and facilitated by the internet: a presumption rooted in the […]
The Thesis Whisperer: Starting an Academic Blog
A great lecture by Inger Mewburn, also known as The Thesis Whisperer, recorded at an event in the UK last year.
40 reasons why you should blog about your research
It helps you become more clear about your ideas. It gives you practice at presenting your ideas for a non-specialist audience. It increases your visibility within academia. It increases your visibility outside academia and makes it much easier for journalists, campaigners and practitioners to find you. It increases your visibility more than […]
Why should academics blog about their research? An answer in pictures
Thanks to Jacqueline Bartram who drew these great cartoons as I was talking at a Hull event last yearabout academic blogging. Why should academics blog about their research? It provides a home for things you reluctantly cut from your publications: It allows you to get early feedback on ideas and […]
There are many ways to keep a digital research journal other than blogging
At a talk I did earlier in the week, I was asked about my focus on using social media to work ideas out in public. This is something I find myself talking about a lot, not least of all because it has been such a consistently valuable experience for me. But as the […]
The Pleasures of Scholarly Blogging
There’s a lovely extract of the Academic Diary in which Les Back reflects on the life and work of the social theorist Vic Seidler. Remarking on the vast range of topics on which Seidler has written, Les suggests that this deeply committed man “writes not because his academic position expects it […]
call for contributions to the @sociowarwick centre for women and gender blog
An initiative from the Centre for Women and Gender in Sociology at Warwick, where the centre for social ontology is also based: A reminder that we are now accepting submissions to the CSWG blog. This academic focussed blog aims to promote the work of academics and students conducting research around […]
blogging as an outboard brain
This superb post by Cory Doctorow offers a philosophy of blogging extremely similar to what I’ve described as continuous publishing: As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, […]
blogging your fieldwork
Pat Thompson has written a fascinating post reflecting on her use of blogging to record field notes during an ethnographic project at the Tate summer school. She stresses the ethical challenges of such an activity – particularly the need to negotiate consent with participants, including around photos, as well as […]
Cory Doctorow’s Philosophy of Blogging
Are academics very well-educated journalists who write badly but will work for free?
A few years ago I wrote a short article about the relationship between academic blogging and journalism which received a pretty positive reaction online. My suggestion was that academic blogging increasingly constitutes a ‘third space’ between the academy and journalism which facilitates translation between the two institutional spheres. It becomes […]
