Lynne Murphy‘s blog began life as a ‘limbering up exercise’ before she wrote work for peer-review. A somewhat accidental academic blogger, she notes that her online presence has become part of her professional profile… even if it occassionally serves as a distraction. Lynne also questions whether she is working for the University when she blogs, but doubts a future model of higher education that involves timetabling blog time for academics.
I’m not sure that I would have agreed to write a post for the LSE Impact blog if I had known that it would send me into the depths of a blogsistential crisis. But here I am: I am a blogger. I am a successful blogger, even. And I am an academic. But am I an academic blogger?
Before I address or sidestep these questions, let me introduce myself. At work, I am M Lynne Murphy, academic linguist at Sussex University. My research mainly concerns the organisation of vocabulary in the mind and the role of opposites in shaping word meanings and discourse. But on the internet, I am Lynneguist, who writes the Separated by a Common Language blog and the @lynneguist Twitter feed. Both the blog and the Twitter feed concern the differences between British and American English and (British and American communication) from my perspective as both a trained linguist and an American immigrant to the UK (and I do this in my own parenthetical writing style).
The blog is a success – I’m not going to be particularly modest about that because I do get a kick out of it. It has readers (usually 700-800 a day) and media attention. It gets me invitations for public speaking, and it even has a day dedicated to it. On Twitter, where I post a ‘Difference of the Day’ each day, I’ve passed 4300 Twitter followers. I’m no Steven Pinker or LanguageLog, but neither do I try to be as I work my niche. And every so often, my blog is held up as an interesting example of academic blogging.
But then when I read about academic blogging (on this blog or elsewhere) or when I hear the calls for academics to engage with social media, I see academic blogging categorised in two ways: (1) a way to disseminate (or think through) one’s research or (2) a way to engage students in the learning process. In other words, we’re encouraged to use blogs to do our jobs: to produce peer-reviewed research in a way that gets noticed and to teach the students who we are paid to teach.
I love both of those kinds of blogs -but mine is neither. While writing posts involves some research, the research is either what Mark Liberman calls Breakfast Experiments™ or it’s like the research that I’d do in writing a textbook or contributing to a dictionary. These are all things I’ve done in my (non-blogging) career, but none of them are REFable or lead to anything REFable.
What I blog is educational, though. (For my sins, I also try to entertain.) Its readers are language enthusiasts, travellers and expats, English learners, editors, and an awful lot of people (10-15% of my traffic each week, it seems) who want to settle an argument about whether the exclamation is whoa or woah. Yes, some linguists read it too (it’s even been cited in a couple of academic papers), but the effect I have is in busting linguistic myths, offering translations or interpretations, and making disconcerting cross-cultural experiences more understandable through the delicate introduction of useful theoretical concepts. The comments and Twitter conversations are productive and cooperative–which is, to my mind, the greatest marker of a blog’s success.
I am an academic. I am a blogger. I am a linguist. I blog about language. But is blogging part of my job or a distraction from it?
This has been an issue for me since I started the blog while on research leave in 2006. It served me then as a limbering-up exercise before writing the “hard” stuff that would be subjected to peer review. At the start, I was meticulously careful about keeping blog and work separate. I acknowledged my qualifications and title, but only in order to give readers some reason to think I knew what I was talking about. I don’t blog at the office. And I still defensively refer to blogging as my ‘hobby’ on my Blogger profile. But when I became aware that my blogging was (being acknowledged as) a selling point for the University and the programmes I teach on, I started being less meticulous about separating blogging/tweeting activities from my academic life. A few months ago, I added mention of my employer to my Twitter profile and I’ve started asking media contacts to mention the University when the introduce me, because otherwise I can’t be listed among the staff ‘in the news’. But it is still a constant question for me: Am I working for the University when I blog? Should I be?
The answer to the Am I question is ‘no’. There’s nothing in my contract about educating the non-paying public, nor about popularising my discipline and no one at the University asked me to do it, nor is anyone taking the trouble to performance-review it.
Should my blog be part of my job, though? As much as I would like to be paid* for the time I spend on it, I think I have to answer ‘no’ to this one too. (* I briefly tried taking advertising and decided it wasn’t for me.)
I would hope that there could be (is?) some level of symbiosis between Lynneguist and the University (and academia in general). Lynneguist may not have a contract with the University, but she does contribute to it and to the mission of higher and continuing education. But at the same time, we don’t have a way of measuring the blog’s impact on the University itself, and I’m only comfortable thinking that it might be part of my job now that it is successful – and I think that’s right. I can’t imagine a model of higher education that involves timetabling blog time for any academic who wants to try their hand at popular writing on the web.
So. I think I’m an academic who blogs, rather than a blogger who’s an academic. But whether I’m an academic blogger, I’m still not sure.
And, oh yes, before I go: I was asked to give tips for academic blogging. I’ll give you instead the readership-maximisation tips of an academic who blogs:
- Make the theme broad enough to allow for an indefinite number of posts; make it specific enough that you have a clear niche that will attract a readership.
- Post regularly, and be prepared to post often at the start. You need to build up some content to make it seem worth people’s effort to come back again.
- Don’t get discouraged when you’re not an overnight success. The comments section may be lonely at first.
- Network (by following and commenting on other blogs and Twitter streams). Don’t limit yourself to other academics. Be generous about linking to others in your posts.
- Don’t set out to compete with other blogs, but to complement them.
- Try to be patient and polite in all internet interactions and always read responses to your writing in the most favourable tone possible.
- Avoid jargon where it’s not necessary and introduce it gently where it’s helpful.
- A memorable blog name or handle doesn’t hurt.
- Relate what you’re writing about to everyday experience or current events. If it’s your own everyday experience, be aware of the boundaries between you and your online persona and of the privacy of others who are part of that experience.
- Don’t automatically assume that the university’s website is the best place for your blog.
Some universities’ seem much more accessible than others in terms of format, findability and searchability. And you may want to move someday. - Tweet. At a minimum, you should announce new blog posts or to link to old ones when they become topical again. But Twitter works best as a networking tool. Following and re-tweeting others is key. (But then find strategies for not spending all day on Twitter.)
- Do it because you want to do it.
Rush straight to the Internet (where else?) and read “The Digital Scholar”: http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/book-ba-9781849666275.xml
Got any more questions? Thought not 🙂
I think you should get paid (or at least some kind of credit) by the university. You’ve brought a lot of positive attention to your department and you work hard at the blog. AND you don’t cross the line and “sully” the uni’s reputation by silly posts, or TMI’s.
And look, I won’t even mention my book! LOL
Lynne – Wonderful reflections and a very thoughtful piece on some of the opportunities and dilemmas of blogging as an academic. Thank you for this.
I am new to blogging and posted a different take on this in a recent piece I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education. One overlap between our pieces is that I also asked similar questions about whether I was a scholar or a blogger and concluded that: I am not a blogger. But a scholar who blogs. Slowly and sometimes. (If interested, the post can be viewed via my website). I look forward to following your blog.
Surely if you are your blogging about your work and interests as an academic then your work is scholarly activity.
Furthermore you say “There’s nothing in my contract about educating the non-paying public”. Since when did not educating people unless they are paying become part of the role of the university? In future it will be clearly recognised as part of academic activity and those who have established their academic blogging reputations will benefit most.
BTW I am not an academic but I used to be.
Cheers
Mark
Lynne, I saw your anguished tweet, so felt compelled to post a comment as someone who follows your blog and has run his own blog for nearly a year.
I agree with your list of bullet points and think IP Draughts (my blog) complies with most of them.
I am a practitioner rather than an academic, but dip my toes in the academic waters. Yesterday I gave a 2 hour seminar on an LLM course at UCL, and my most recent posting (on a patent licensing code) was timed to be of relevance to the students.
We made a conscious decision to brand the blog differently to our law firm website, so as to separate the two and allow guest bloggers to feel they weren’t just contributing to a commercial venture.
One of the great things about a blog is that it doesn’t have to follow a set format – you can make it up as you go along. Sometimes, my articles are a bit like an editorial in a journal. At other times, they are more entertaining (!)
Please keep blogging and don’t be distracted too much by the instant attraction of tweets!
Best wishes
Mark
Just because something is ‘scholarly activity’ doesn’t mean it’s part of my job. My job is not to be a generic scholar but to contribute to the teaching of degrees, to produce valuable research and contribute to the administration of the university. I am permitted to do other scholarly activities as part of my job so long as they do not interfere with the things I was hired to do. I do believe that the University has a role to play in creating an informed society outside the boundaries of degree programmes, but now that the bulk of our teaching funding comes directly from students themselves, they–not entirely unreasonably–expect that the time that they’re paying for should be spent on them.
My blogging can enrich what I do as a teacher or researcher (but more often, it’s the other way round). But it’s not enough to say ‘it’s scholarly activity, so it’s my job’. I could fill my whole week with scholarly activity that doesn’t contribute to any of my direct responsibilities (and I don’t have enough hours in the week to do any of those, either). On my view, if it contributes to promotion, it’s part of my job. If it’s scholarly activity, it’s part of my vocation. As an individual, it’s healthy, I think, to distinguish between the two. But the ‘promotion’ question becomes more complicated the more successful the blog is as a reputation-and-recruitment-enhancer. Hence my crisis.
Damn. I seem to be writing my post again in the comments. Back to work!
I agree that it is probably not part of your job, but if you want to get all legal about it, you should take a look at your contract of employment and see what it says about your duties.
You may also want to look at the university financial regulations (which may have been incorporated into your contract of employment) and see whether the Sussex IP policy forms part of your contract.
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/res/documents/exploitation_policy_of_ip.pdf Paragraph 15 looks a bit dangerous where it refers to website content, but you might argue that your blog postings are (a) completely outside your contract, or (b) are analogous to academic articles and covered by paragraph 14.
Now I must get back to work!
Thanks, Mark. I was looking at my contract when drafting the original post, and it basically says I can do anything my manager asks me to do or anything that doesn’t interfere with what my manager’s asked me to do–which is what raises the ‘distraction’ question. The IP issues are another reason why I continue to refer to it as my ‘hobby’. Thanks for your attention to it!
I don’t feel these anxieties, because I see my blogging as one part of being a scholar as a whole. As a (mostly) publicly-funded researcher in a land grant institution (with a mission statement that includes serving the broader community, which is quite common in public universities in the US), I see my outreach as an important component of my work. I blog to reach the broader community, I blog as a service to my discipline, I blog for professional development. I don’t find compartmentalizing myself in the way you’re describing to be productive– we’re not “paid,” per se, to perform a lot of services to our field, like reviewing grants and papers, attending workshops, or talking to the press. I, at least, do these things because I see them as fundamentally integrated in my research and teaching (which I in turn see as integrated with one another). I personally find that perspective more fulfilling and less anxiety-inducing than what you’re describing.
I enjoyed this post very much, thanks Lynne. How would you – or others – mention/list your blogging on an academic CV or in future job/funding applications?
I enjoyed your post. This its the way I engage with my students at http://carvica1.blogspot.com/2012/02/como-podemos-utilizar-las-redes.html
Its in spanish but it has a great translator (Well….). I blog because I express myself and help to order my ideas and to put in a place where anaybody can read it.
Keep blogging … for you…
Octoweb., established in 2005, accomplices with different company to arrange, construct, and oversee application programming to empower their business methodologies. This is proficient through its Business Consulting, Application Development, Web Development Company NYC, Web Designing, Logo Designing, and Application Development and Management.