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… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘blogging’
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… Read More ›
Cyborgology is looking for new regular contributors!
The excellent blog Cyborgology is looking for new contributors: For nearly six years Cyborgology has been dedicated to producing thoughtful essays and commentary about society’s relationship to technology. Writers enjoy significant freedom to write essays and stories of varying length, style,… Read More ›
Social Media and Academic Labour
It is increasingly hard to move without encountering the idea that social media is something of value for academics. The reasons offered are probably quite familiar by now. It helps ensure your research is visible, both inside and outside the… Read More ›
A brilliant job for those interested in social media and higher education
The LSE Impact Blog is recruiting for a new editor: The LSE Impact Blog is an award-winning, highly popular blog aimed at academics, researchers, and HE professionals. It publishes regular blog posts on scholarly publishing, research methods, and maximizing the… Read More ›
The value of university managed online spaces
A superb article by Sierra Williams, editor of the LSE Impact Blog, building on a talk she did at an event in Sheffield last week:
40 reasons why you should blog about you research
We recently had some new submissions to this post. I had thought it was finished but seemingly there are more reasons yet to be shared… can we get it up to 50 reasons to blog about your research?
Blogging as an outboard brain
This superb post by Cory Doctorow, novelist and editor of Boing Boing, offers a philosophy of blogging extremely similar to what I’ve described in the past as continuous publishing. I really identify with what he’s saying here and it goes some way to explaining why… Read More ›
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… Read More ›
Returning to blogging
Around two months ago I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I no longer had time to maintain two blogs. I won’t go into the reasons here, but the case seemed pretty unanswerable. So I closed down this blog and… Read More ›
Blogging as ‘writing without a parachute’
What does it mean to write with energy? That’s a question Patter addresses on her blog this morning, reflecting on the notion of ‘writing without a parachute’. As she summarises this approach to writing: 1. write what comes up for… Read More ›
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 week about academic blogging. Why should academics blog about their research? It provides a home for things you reluctantly cut from your… Read More ›
Early retirement blogging
Would you like to retire? While many might have this thought as a fleeting whim on a bad day at work, the internet is giving rise to a subculture in which strategies to achieve retirement earlier are shared and refined…. Read More ›
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… Read More ›
Some thoughts on sociological blogging
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 More ›
Treating ideas with seriousness
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:
The value of blogging for part-time PhD students
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… Read More ›
Seven reasons why blogging is academically valuable
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… Read More ›
The intellectual legitimacy of academic blogging
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… Read More ›
7 ways to use a blog as a research journal
Recording particularly powerful extracts of texts to which I might wish to refer later. This can serve a practical purpose, constituting a form of reference management which both indexes a source amongst a heterogeneous range of other materials and foregrounds… Read More ›
Bloggers blogging about blogging
An interesting post on patter’s site reflects upon the tendency of bloggers to blog about blogging. This is something I do a lot and I’m not alone in this. Why is it so common? A useful answer to that question… Read More ›
An introduction to blogging and twitter for social researchers
Given the increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact of social research, it is inevitable that researchers are looking towards the opportunities offered by social media. This one day course offers an accessible introduction to the use of blogging and twitter,… Read More ›
How to be a blogger without having your own blog
It’s a common assumption that ‘bloggers’ and ‘blogs’ are unavoidably intertwined. There’s a sense in which it’s true but it can also be slightly misleading. It’s possible to be a blogger without having your own blog. In fact, there are… Read More ›
Patrick Dunleavy on the Republic of Blogs
After a long period of monopolising academic discourse, European universities went into decline as classical scholasticism, which was primarily inward and backward looking, gave way to the ideas of Enlightenment. Intellectual development moved outside the walled gardens of academia, because… Read More ›
Your ‘daily dose of Sociological Imagination’: reflections on social media and public sociology
Your ‘daily dose of Sociological Imagination’: reflections on social media and public sociology by Mark Carrigan and Milena Kremakova This website’s raison d’etre was initially nebulous, tentative and ambitious all at the same time: we wanted to create a new online… Read More ›
Why Medium might be pretty great for academics
I just tried using Medium for the first time and I loved it. I suspect I won’t be alone in this. Here’s a few reasons why I think it’s a good fit for academic blogging: The interface is lovely. It does exactly what it… Read More ›
Introducing a Blog: The Geek Anthropologist
I was surfing the web over breakfast (as one does) and found a fellow anthropology site bearing the cute name The Geek Anthropologist that I thought many of our readers would like. It is a community blog run by anthropology student Marie-Pierre… Read More ›
An Illustrated Guide to Academic Blogging
The Just Publics @ 365 blog recently posted a wonderful guide to academic blogging. It has some fantastic advice from a range of experienced academic bloggers – it also has cartoons! Check it out here.