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!

JVC Bloggers Fair

The Journal of Victorian Culture Online website is staging a Bloggers Fair this month. Each day a new blog is featured; the author reflects on its content and discusses their motive(s) for writing.  So far, Rohan Maitzen’s Novel Readings and Mark Blacklock’s The Fairyland of Geometry have enjoyed the spotlight, as has Looking Glasses At Odd Corners.

Looking Glasses At Odd Corners as featured in the JVC Online Bloggers Fair,
2 May 2012

A feature on this blog was used to ‘launch’ the Bloggers Fair and very soon my article on early career Victorianists and social media will be published (and made open access). This article will, I hope, help to contextualise JVC's Bloggers Fair by exploring the processes, purposes and motives at work in the Victorian (and neo-Victorian) blogosphere.


I will update the following list as the Bloggers Fair progresses:

1. Looking Glasses At Odd Corners by Amber Regis

Life-writing and life narrative across media and genres.


2. The Fairyland of Geometry by Mark Blacklock

Nineteenth-century engagements with ‘higher dimensional’ space.


3. Novel Readings by Rohan Maitzen

Reflections on reading, research and teaching.


4. Art and Perfume by Christina Bradstreet
Smell in nineteenth-century art and culture.


5. A Special Mention by Gaby Malcolm
Reflections on research, with particular reference to Mary Braddon.


6. The Old Curiosity Shop by Jolette Roodt
Links to Victorian-related websites and posts that focus on new books about the period.


7. Research Blog and Teaching Blog by Charlotte Mathieson
Reflections, reviews and discussions of nineteenth-century literature and contemporary resonances.


8. Neo-Victorian Thoughts by Louisa Yates
Reflections on how the Victorians and Victoriana reveal themselves in contemporary culture.


9. Girls' Literature and Culture by Michelle Smith
Reflections on how girls are situated in nineteenth-century and contemporary popular culture.


10. Scotland's History Uncovered by Lynne Wilson
Scottish social history, with particular reference to the Victorian period.


11. North East Nineteenth Century by the North East Postgraduate Research Group for the Long Nineteenth Century
Community blog run by postgraduates at the Universities of Newcastle, Northumbria and Durham. Events, calls for papers, discussion and information about group members.

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 Academic Blogging

Become a Famous Blogger by Dave Walker
Source: We Blog Cartoons

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging recently, and about academic blogging in particular. Why do academics turn to the blogosphere? What motives lurk behind this practice, and how do academics perceive their online identity? Do they view their online presence as part of, or separate from, the multiple performances that comprise their professional identity, e.g. conference participation, print publication and teaching?

Over the last few days I’ve put together a rather crude questionnaire intended to probe academic bloggers, to get an insight into their motives, uses and the benefits of their blogging activities. Since the result of my ponderings will be distilled into an article for a Victorianist journal, I have sent this questionnaire to three bloggers working in the broad field of Victorian Studies:

• Paul Dobraszczyk, a Leverhulme Early-Career Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, an historian with interests in art, architecture and material culture. Paul blogs at ‘Rag Picking History’ and he provides a strikingly visual account of his travels and research into Victorian ironworks and unusual spaces (such as a recent post on the Williamson Tunnels in Liverpool).

• Charlotte Mathieson, a literary scholar and Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick. Charlotte blogs on two institution-hosted sites: her own research blog dedicated to her work on mobility and travel in the nineteenth century, and she contributes to 'Researcher Life', a communal blog designed to support early-career researchers.

• Bob Nicholson, an historian and doctoral student at the University of Manchester who has recently taken up a Lectureship at Swansea University. Bob­—or his online alter-ego—blogs at ‘The Digital Victorianist’ site, complete with his own logo. As the name suggests, one of Bob's many interests is the impact of digital and online technologies on humanities research.

If you are not familiar with these blogs, I urge you to visit and explore!

You may have noticed a further link between these three 'case study' bloggers, something other than their shared interest in all things Victorian. All are early-career researchers, much like myself (all this means is that the PhD is being worked towards, or has been awarded in recent years—eight years, for the purposes of the AHRC). I’m particularly interested in why these young, up-and-coming researchers have turned to social media, and I’m looking forward to receiving their responses to the questionnaire!

All this questioning of others, however, has made me consider more closely my own motives for starting a blog. In the first instance, I wanted to write something that people might actually read (doctoral theses tend to collect dust on University library shelves) and to do this in a style, a language that was more conversational, more open and less exclusive than the ‘academic voice’ I had used elsewhere. I also wanted to get beyond the Victorian and the early-modernist period, much as I love them. I wanted to extend my interest in life narratives beyond the boundaries I had previously set in my research, broadening my view to include contemporary events, new media, film and television. Though, if you scan through my posts, you will find a lot of Victorian-inspired delights, you’ll also find posts on biopic, documentary, Monty Python and souvenir tea-towels (yes, seriously). I wanted to make the process of research visible (in posts such as this) as well as the polished final product. And yes, I wanted to raise my profile, to engage in shameless self-promotion -- the nebulous concept of 'impact' is something I will have to tackle as I write the article.

I’ll be examining these motives more closely as I write my article over the next few weeks, and it will be an interesting challenge to adopt this reflective writing position.

But dear reader, do you blog? And why? What are the reasons and what are the benefits? Pray, do tell…