Thomas Söderqvist I’m often thinking about how my presence on social web media platforms — mainly blogging and some occasional twittering — enhances or weakens my other scholarly activities, like writing books and papers for traditional history of science journals.
Personally, I believe writing on social web media is a significant source of inspiration for more traditional scholarly writing. Or rather: It’s not a question of either-or, but both-and.
But I have many colleagues who believe the opposite (mainly those who’ve never tried it seriously 🙂 So it’s good that someone tries to dig up some empirical evidence for and against spending one’s precious scholarly time on the social web.
Carolyn Hank, a phd candidate in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill, is currently making a survey in support of her research study, ‘Scholars and their Blogs: Characteristics, Preferences and Perceptions Impacting Digital Preservation’.
Inspired by notions like ‘bloggership’ and ‘blogademia’, she’s asking questions about the publishing behaviour of blogging scholars, our perceptions of the blog vs. our scholarly activities, and our thoughts on how our writings can be preserved, i.e., questions like:
Are blogs scholarship? Where do they fit in relation to one’s cumulative scholarly record? […] Will the scholar blogs of today be available into the future?
I’ll be happy to answer Carolyn’s thoughtful questions (received by email yesterday). If somebody else wants to participate, you can perhaps pursuade her to send you the questionnaire.
