Writing and your imagined audience
Do you imagine an audience when you write? I’ve become aware recently of how rarely I do this. The main reason for this has been the jarring experience of finding myself overly conscious about the...
View ArticleThe regulation of academic social media use
This is a subject I’ve wanted to research for some time but have struggled to see how. I suspect we are seeing the very early stages of a backlash against the uptake of social media by academics –...
View ArticleUsing blogs to publish working papers
The potential role of blogs in helping disseminate working papers and other grey literature is something that has fascinated me for a long time – I’m curious about all the interesting unpublished work...
View Article10 ways to promote your university that don’t involve viral videos
I don’t like ‘viral videos’. I like many videos that have gone viral. But the notion of producing ‘viral videos’, with a deliberate strategy to engender virality, irritates me – it entrenches...
View ArticleIncorporating blogging into an academic CV
These are the four options I’ve suggested in my chapter on this: Listing blog posts as individual publications under a specific subheading of your publications list e.g. giving ‘blog posts’ the same...
View ArticleHow to Delete Your Facebook Account
And avoid my mistake of rejoining only to delete your account once more… interesting that this has been viewed 344,000 times and that this in itself merited a mention on the radio 4 programme I was...
View ArticleBourdieusian Hipsters Explain Foucauldian Memes
After a couple of years using Buffer to maintain the @soc_imagination twitter feed and occasionally looking through the analytics, I’ve noticed lots of key words that inevitably lead to a click through...
View ArticleLots and lots of blogging
I think I registered my Blogger account in December 2003 (during the Christmas holiday of my first year at university) so it seems I’ll soon have been blogging for 11 years. It seems slightly careless...
View ArticleSolving the problem of finding images for blog posts
I just used the Getty Images plug in for the first and it’s great - absolutely seamless search & embed for hundreds of thousands of high quality images. Unfortunately they can’t be used as featured...
View ArticleAn introduction to curation tools
I realised when looking back over old notes that someone asked me to write this for them and then never published it. So here’s a quick post about curation I wrote a couple of years ago: For all that...
View ArticleThe future of social science blogging in the UK
Earlier this week, NatCen Social Research hosted a meeting between myself, Chris Gilson (USApp), Cristina Costa and Mark Murphy (Social Theory Applied), Donna Peach (PhD Forum) and Kelsey Beninger...
View ArticleWhat do you actually use Evernote for?
I’ve written in the past about my dislike for Evernote and near continuous search for an alternative to it. I won’t rehearse my issues with it here but the one that really matters is that I simply...
View ArticleHow not to use twitter as an academic
I usually tend towards the view that there’s no right or wrong way to use social media. These evaluations only make sense relative to some prior purpose and so I’m sceptical when blog posts pronounce...
View Article“I have no idea what to tweet about!”
Are you a social researcher who feels this way? Here are some ideas which might help: Have you read any interesting papers recently? Link to them and briefly explain why you liked them. Are you going...
View ArticleWhy don’t more early career researchers produce podcasts?
I’ve never understood why more PhD students and Early Career Researchers don’t produce podcasts. I’ve wondered this for a long time and the question came back to me when reading this post on LSE...
View ArticleProblem with post scheduling in wordpress 4.0
Unfortunately it seems the new version of WordPress has an irritating tendency to miss scheduled posts. This won’t be an issue for many blogs but if you schedule a lot of posts in advance then it can...
View ArticleResonance and subjectivity on twitter
In four years of using Twitter regularly, I’ve often found others tweeting things that resonate with me and vice versa. In fact one could plausibly suggest that these experiences play an important role...
View ArticleSeven 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleThe myth of ‘us’ in a digital age
In his A necessary disenchantment: myth, agency and injustice in a digital world, Nick Couldry argues that transitions in media infrastructure are facilitating the emergence of a new myth of...
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