Publication: Early Career Victorianists and Social Media (JVC 17.3 -- iFirst release)

Just a quick post to announce the publication of my article on academic blogging and tweeting:

‘Early career Victorianists and social media: impact, audience and online identities’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17:3 (2012)

It will appear in the autumn issue of the journal, but has been released early via iFirst alongside Rohan Maitzen’s article on ‘Scholarship 2.0: Blogging and/as Academic Practice’.

My article was written with the help of fellow bloggers Charlotte Mathieson, Bob Nicholson and Paul Dobraszczyk. It also owes a heavy debt to the various online communities fostered by social media and brought together via Twitter hastags: #phdchat #phdadvice #acwri #academia #highered #loveHE #twitterstorians #twitcrit #twitterature to name but a few!

Blog in the News: On Self-Promotion and Networking

Waiting by Dave Walker
Source: We Blog Cartoons

While a busy teaching schedule and writing projects have been keeping me away from the blog over the last few weeks, the blog has been active in my absence. Others have been taking notice, and the blog has been featured on the Journal of Victorian Culture Online website, in the Times Higher Education, and has even received a special mention at a Victorian Studies conference.

Last year I wrote a post inspired by the different life narratives emerging from two very similar objects: Victorian decoupage screens. In turn, this was quoted by Charlotte Mathieson in a short essay exploring literary tourism and readers’ responses to place. Mathieson has now revised this post for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online, providing a timely contribution to Dickens 2012 bicentenary debates. As a result, my blog has enjoyed increased traffic with readers clicking through…

Posts exploring the phenomenon of celebrity memoir have also been revived. Responding to a tweet from @TimesHigherArts asking followers to confess their guilty reading pleasures, I got in touch and admitted to reading Dawn French’s Dear Fatty, and what is more, declared I was willing to defend it in print! The result was a short snippet in the Times Higher Education’s ‘What Are You Reading?’ column -- a few words in defence of celebrity memoir and a link to my blog post reviewing the work.

And then, yesterday, I was sitting in the audience of a keynote lecture at a conference on Nineteenth-Century Memory: Approaches and Appropriations (held at Leeds Trinity University College) when my blog was mentioned in the Q&A session. Trev Broughton had delivered a fascinating talk on memory and forgetting in Victorian biography, part of which compared the urge to produce biography to the desire for souvenirs (i.e. biography as an aide-mémoire, sustaining the presence of something -- or someone -- past). I put up my hand and asked about the emergence of biographical series (such as Morley’s ‘English Men of Letters’) and how these might relate to the act of collecting souvenirs. In her response, Broughton referenced my post on souvenirs and self-fashioning (and the picture of me with a Bronte tea towel!) as a spur to her reading of souvenirs, biography and memory. In addition to being terribly flattering, this mention prompted several delegates to approach me and ask about the blog. The post in question has since received several hits and Google searches...

So what’s the value of all this shameless self-promotion? The three instances listed above provide a useful demonstration of the benefits of engaging with social media as an academic, particularly an early career academic: attention has been drawn to my work, I have engaged directly with other researchers on the social web, and I have forged new connections with new readers. Social media has thus helped me to ‘network’ – an oft-dreaded activity that used to be confined to the in-between times at conferences, involving awkward conversations over coffee cups. But networking can now extend beyond the temporal and physical space of a conference; conversations can start before an event and continue long after, with connections being made online. In fact, networking is no longer the preserve of conferences and other research events; plugged-in academics are networked and networking all the time.

Communities on the social web were a recurrent theme in my recent research into early career Victorianists’ use of blogging and Twitter. I have just completed a short article on this topic, the writing of which was a collegial affair: commissioned as a result of my blogging activity, and drawing on case studies and contributions from #phdchat and #phdpostdoc Twitter communities. So yes, all this blogging and tweeting is a form of shameless self-promotion, but it’s also something more. The clue is in the name: social media and the social web. It’s about making connections, forming communities, offering support. In getting your name ‘out there’, you are not a voice crying out in the wilderness. A blog ‘in the news’ is a blog in conversation.


Update: A revised version of this post has been published on the PhD2Published website.

On Blogging and Being Busy

Little Crackers
Source: Sky 1

Regular visitors to the blog will no doubt have realised this is not the long awaited third instalment of my series on celebrity memoir. Be assured this post is on its way and will feature a discussion of Little Crackers, a series of mini celebrity biopics aired on Sky 1 over Christmas.

But in my first post, I described this blog as ‘a life narrative of my very own’. And so, it only seems appropriate that I interject a brief, autobiographical account of what I’ve been up to, the projects I have on the go, and how these relate not only to life narrative, but also to the act of blogging.

What’s the phrase? We apologise for the disruption, normal blogging services will be resumed as soon as possible. But why the disruption? In brief, I’ve been busy. January has brought with it the beginning of a new semester and an increased teaching load. But there is much to look forward to, and two of the modules I am teaching will involve the study of life narratives. (Life writing continues to be under-represented on university syllabi, most often limited to specialist modules, read in isolation, and only rarely alongside other texts and genres.)

An Account of the Trial Execution and
Dying Behaviour of Henry Fauntleroy (1824)
Source: Criminal Broadsides Project
Harvard Law School Library

In Prison Voices at LJMU I will be making use of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criminal broadsides (many courtesy of the Old Bailey Online). Published and sold to accompany public executions, these pamphlets contain the fictive, “ventriloquised” confessions and laments of criminals -- a macabre souvenir of the day.

I will also be teaching a survey course for the Open University on The Arts Past and Present (AA100). The module ranges across disciplines, from philosophy to music, religion to architecture, literature to film. The course is arranged into four thematic books, the first of which is titled Reputations. This book investigates the concept of fame (and infamy) and how the biographical/historical record shifts and changes, how lives are constructed and reconstructed, how reputations wax and wane, ebb and flow.

This has been a topic of interest in my own work, and last year I published an article exploring competing accounts of Vita Sackville-West’s life and how her sexuality has been subject to successive concealments and revelations. It will be a treat to return to these issues, to investigate new and different case studies (and these will include Cleopatra, Stalin and the Dalai Lama).

I’ve also had a few exciting commissions in recent weeks. I’ve been invited to become a guest blogger at JVC Online (the virtual counterpart to the academic journal, Journal of Victorian Culture). So keep a look out for link ups and re-posts between this blog and JVC Online!

I’ve also been invited to write a short article on blogging and Twitter in the field of Victorian Studies. Now this may raise a few eyebrows. Academics have a reputation for resembling their research and many terrible stereotypes result: historians are as dusty as archives; artists are bohemian; mathematicians are bespectacled and methodical. From the outside looking in, therefore, Victorian Studies might not seem particularly fertile ground – surely we’d all be happier communicating via the telegraph and through letters with a penny black stamp? Well, you might be surprised. There are so many interesting Victorian bloggers and tweeters, and the field of Victorian Studies has produced a vast and diverse array of digital projects, such as the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, the Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration, and Charles Darwin Online (to name but a very few).

As I set out on my adventures through the Victorian Studies blogosphere, look out for posts and tweets asking for your opinions and input. To what uses are blogs and Twitter put in the field of Victorian Studies? Do users represent a distinct demographic? Are they PhD students and early career academics? Are they on the receiving end of bemused looks and skepticism from more senior (and older) colleagues? Or, is this an unfair distinction? What identities are adopted and performed by Victorian Studies academic and enthusiasts in the blogosphere and on Twitter? I’ll be considering all of these questions in the coming weeks, so get your thinking caps on!

Thank you for your patience; normal blogging services will now resume…