Blogging - why bother?

The benefits of blogging for academics have been well described and listed.

See these posts in the LSE Impact Blog http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/01/14/advice-for-potential-academic-bloggers/

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/02/24/five-minutes-patrick-dunleavy-chris-gilson/

and our own University of Kent advice http://www.kent.ac.uk/socialmedia/reasons.html

But in her workshop for PSSRU Kent, George Julian put a slightly different slant on it........

As an academic the likelihood is that the specific area of your research is only of direct relevance to a handful of other researchers worldwide.  The trick is to use social media to capture this small but significant audience.  This way you have a ready-made list of potential collaborators or reviewers.

This is in the context of research by Mewburn and Thomson which found that the blogs which academics write are read mostly by other academics. 

So how do you attract these followers? You’ve written a post, how are you going to get anyone to see it?

·         Tweet about it, link to it from other social media sites such as Linked In

·         Reference your blog in your email signature, presentation slides etc

·         Guest blog on other relevant sites

·         Comment on other people blogs

·         Think about the timing of your post.  Publish it to coincide with a national event (eg. an awareness week) and make sure you have sufficient time in your own diary to answer queries, respond to comments and engage immediately afterwards

Social media and academia

Dr James Baker, Curator, Digital Research, British Library
 University of Kent LibChat, 28 Jan 2014

Digital curation and research needs to be about more than just resource discovery

Can use Twitter in different ways- there are no rules:
to project information
harvest/gather information
link

You might use Twitter differently for different aspects of your life

To get the most out of Twitter you really need to engage and interact; something many organisations do not do.  Certainly the research unit I work for is keen to project but very cautious about interacting. Any thoughts?

Try Buffer http://bufferapp.com/ to queue up Tweets so that they are sent out at intervals throughout the day rather than all at once

I liked this phrase used in the discussion afterwards
"People aren't using Twitter to read articles, but to find out what people think about them"

As a result of the UK Web Archive  (Since April 2013 the British Library has begun to archive the whole of the UK web domain, under the terms of the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations 2013) the BL will soon hold more data than books

Fascinating use of Tumblr - the BL's Mechanical Curator "randomly selected small illustrations and ornamentations, posted on the hour"

The BL has uploaded over one million images to Flickr from 65,000 books from the 17th to the 19th century.  The images are illustrations, diagrams, maps, borders and illuminated letters. Each image is tagged with the metadata for the book from which it was taken. 

As James explained, initiatives such as these pose the question "What is a collection?" Is data derived from other collections in itself a collection?

Reference: Steven Jones (2013) Emergence of the Digital Humanities

Digitising the Event: Digital Approaches to the Peasant's Revolt 1381

Digital Humanities annual lecture at University of Kent
Professor Andrew Prescott, Head of Department of Digital Humanities, King's College, London

Digitised archives need to be "different shapes", not just digitised versions of 19th century initiatives and printed calendars. 

Digitised archives need to convey the uncertainty and "layering " of events. Users want to be able to engage with the images to build up the story and the layers.  For instance, you want to detect later insertions and additions to the original, link to other documents and to images of objects. 

Historical events tend to be referred to as centralised and as having a focus, but in fact they were often dispersed and dislocated. The participants were unlikely to have had a sense of a particular pivotal moment or symbolic image. This is reflected in the archives.  For example, information about the Peasant's Revolt is spread across a whole range of archives: King's Bench, Common Pleas, Gaol Delivery, Parliamentary Rolls as well as records of Chancery and Exchequer, local town and manorial records, chronicle writing and informal letters and records.

The great opportunity of digitisation is that it makes connections possible

But emphasis has so far been on digitisation of national archives rather than local, probably because of funding. There are very few digitised manorial or town records