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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A great lecture by Inger Mewburn, also known as The Thesis Whisperer, recorded at an event in the UK last year.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Looking for an Evernote alternative? Centrallo might be what you’re looking for Why I am quitting the British Sociological Association (must admit I considered deleting this) The sociology of ‘hipsters’ How not to use twitter as an academic The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality Qualitative self-tracking and the Qualified Self […]
The potential value and dangers of sociological blogging arise because of an environment in which the demands of audit culture incentivise the production of ‘unread’ and ‘unloved’ publications which are too often written to be counted rather than to be read. The risk is that sociological blogging gets drawn into the […]
One of the more elusive benefits of blogging has been the implications for my professional identity. As a part-time PhD student, without funding but committed to an academic career trajectory (albeit at times waveringly), I found myself engaged in a diverse array of short term roles within the academy. Some […]
I recently interviewed Daniel Little, author of Understanding Society, as part of the research feeding into Social Media for Academics. Here are some extracts from an extremely thought provoking conversation:
One of my favourite academic blogs is Understanding Society. Written by the philosopher Daniel Little, it covers a diverse range of topics across the social sciences while continually coming back to a number of core theoretical questions that fascinate me. Reflecting on its seventh anniversary, Little offers some interesting thoughts on the role that […]
This is a good list by John Danaher. Read it in full here: 1. It helps to build the habit of writing: 2. It helps to generate writing flow states: 3. It helps you to really understand your area of research: 4. It allows you to systematically develop the elements […]
