Week 3
I initially had trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of using a website, Twitter, or a blog to develop a professional identity as an academic. Not having worked in a field where I needed a professional identity apart from the one the corporation provided for me, I tend to think of maintaining a website or blog as something one does for a hobby, not as part of work. The readings were therefore enlightening to me. While going through them, it clicked with me that, in one sense, academics are professional writers and thus might benefit from the opportunity to use additional platforms to get their writing out into the world.
I appreciated the distinction that the authors seemed to draw between thinking of personal websites and blogs as unseemly “marketing” tools and thinking of them as ways to contribute to a larger discussion and potentially build community. In the past, when I have read articles about why I should be on Twitter or start a blog, the tone is usually one that suggests that minimal effort will produce great results; in other words, these articles make it seem that all you need to do is send out a few tweets or put a few items on a blog and you will suddenly attract hundreds of followers. The authors of the articles for class seem to have a more realistic perspective. They make it clear that you have to put time and effort into building a presence before you might see results.
The amount of time and effort that one could put into something like Twitter did give me pause when I thought of how quickly social media platforms gain and lose popularity. I expect academics might be more likely to stick with a platform instead of chasing the next cool thing, so investing time in Twitter may be worthwhile; however, I would hate to invest considerable time in putting content on a blog site only to have it all disappear if the company went out of business. I like the approach we are taking in class where we learn how to have control over the maintenance and distribution of our material.
I thought the authors did a good job of acknowledging that the new platforms may not be for everyone and explaining that blogs and websites are not meant to be an immediate replacement for traditional forms of academic publishing. I liked the way that they described the new platforms as a means of thinking in public – a different type of writing that may be somewhat informal but still has scholarly validity as long as thought is behind what is written. Scholarly blogs that I have found worthwhile seem to take this approach of combining informal presentation with formal thought.
Based on what I have seen in the comment sections of some scholarly blogs and from news articles I have read about academic bloggers who have found themselves enmeshed in controversy, I am of the opinion that the articles understated the risks that can come with thinking in public. Most of the articles were written a number of years ago, so I wonder if the authors would say something different if they wrote today.
Related to this concern is the question of how much of your personality or non-work life should be included in your academic web presence. I am the type of person who likes to keep my personal and professional life separate, so I would argue against including much personal content on an academic blog or social media feed. That said, I have a feeling that my approach is becoming more and more unrealistic in our increasingly networked age. The personal and professional may soon become indistinguishable.
The ProfHack article suggests that “creating your own site can also become an opportunity to learn more about, or keep attuned to, how the web works.” I agree with this idea based on my experience building a website as part of a programming class I took last semester. I feel that I am more savvy to how programmers and designers do what they do with websites. I expect that it will be easier to talk with programmers in my professional life after I graduate because I have the vocabulary and a grasp of the concepts. I am hoping that additional insights will come from learning the tools that we cover in HIST 698.
I take a bit of an issue with Chuck Tryon’s description of what may constitute “digital authorship.” The concept makes sense as he describes it for filter blogs: “connecting, or creating links between, disconnected texts,” but I would not want to see digital authorship reduced to just pulling together items that other people have written. I think the term “digital authorship” has a richer meaning when applied to the kinds of creative and innovative digital scholarship projects we discussed earlier in this class.