Digital HSS Workshop on Academic Blogging

Transcription

1 About this workshop Today we will be looking at Academic Blogging from how to establish a blog, to how to create great content, and how to make the most of the content you create. We ll consider best practice as well as pitfalls to avoid and you should leave the session with lots of ideas to take forward. The first section of this handout covers the tasks for today, the remaining materials are resources, URLs and notes that may be helpful for your blogging after today s workshop. There will be opportunity to comment, ask questions and raise concerns throughout the session. If you need any follow up advice the resources included here should prove useful and you are welcome to contact me with questions. TASK 1: Who are your audience(s) Think about your current blog, or the blog you plan to start and consider: (1) Who are you writing for? (2) Is there anything special about what your audience(s) want or need from your blog? TASK 2: Planning Content Take a look at blogs from those in your research area, blogs you ve read before, blogs you see as good examples that strike the right tone: (1)What do you think is particularly appealing about the content on these blogs? What motivates you to read or share a post? (2)What content would work for your own blog? How much time can you spend on the blog? Do you already have content you could blog about? Are there events you've attended you would like to compare notes on, share and discuss? Can your current research interests be shared? Are there papers or publications you could make more accesible and reflect upon, act to, enrich with new updates, images, etc? Are there issues of public debate that you could use to highlight the application and relevance of your research? Are there teaching topics you'd like to contextualise?

2 Think about what works well on others blogs - can you take a similar approach? (3)Are there key dates that some of those posts would be most appropriate for? Perhaps a major conference, a key public event, specific teaching dates, to mark a presentation or publication, or to coincide with a major exhibition at a museum or gallery/film release/book launch, etc? TASK 3: Write a draft blog post Plan and begin drafting a post for your blog. You will want to consider: The topic you want to discuss. What you want to say, what your perspective is. The people who will be reading the post and what they will understand - do you need to explain any particular phrases? How you will include or reference literature, artefacts, other posts etc. How you would break the post into readable sections, use images etc. If you already have a blog then please draft your blogpost using your normal blog login and save it as a draft. If you do not already have a blog then it may be best to draft your post in Word or in an to yourself so that you can use it as a the basis for a post once you have your own blog set up.

3 Resources & Information In this section you will find resources to help you establish or develop your blog. Setting Up Your Blog: Blogging Tools This is an overview of some of the most popular and free blogging tools. Some tools (e.g. TypePad) are only available as paid-for options whilst others (e.g. LiveJournal) are free but have fallen out of use. The tools here are widely adopted, reliable and can work well for academic blogs. Wordpress is currently the most widely used Blogging platform in the world. WordPress blogs are very flexible it is essentially a complex content management system allowing you to divide up your posts and add pages in a very flexible way. The content is structured in a very search engine friendly way this means your individual blog posts are likely to do well in any internet search and may be found long after they have been posted if they are particular popular or authoritative. There are two types of WordPress blogs, either of which may be appropriate for your blog: WordPress.com is a web service allowing you to create your own blog either with a <blogname>.wordpress.com URL or (for a fee) your own custom URL. The site is free to use for most blogging requirements but there are also premium features (hosting large content such as videos, some themes, some advanced settings, etc.) that you can add to your blog on an ad hoc basis. WordPress.org is the open source software that is the core of WordPress. You can host a WordPress blog on your own server and it is relatively easy to set up although as regular updates are released it can be some work to maintain your own installation. The University of Edinburgh has set up a small number of EASE authenticated blogs based upon WordPress and BuddyPress (a social networking Plugin for WordPress) so it is worth contacting Information Services if you are interested in setting up a self-hosted blog as they may be able to offer advice or support. When you host WordPress yourself you can choose to install a number of Plugins these are small applications that extend the functionality of WordPress and allow you to further customise your blog. Blogger.com is the free blogging service run by Google. You can create your own blog with a <blogname>.blogspot.com URL. It is free and both the blogs and posts are relatively search engine friendly although Blogger is not as well or flexibly structured as WordPress. You can customise the look and feel of the blog through existing themes (easy to do) or via editing the CSS for your blog. Tumblr is a free blogging service which lets you set up a blog with a <blogname>.tumblt.com URL. Most functionality is free (including using your own domain name) and the look and feel is flexible (sometimes for a fee). It acts as a cross between blogging, social bookmarking and tweeting. In addition to being able to post new blog posts from the Tumblr website you can also grab items from across the web to share, and you can repost between different Tumblr blogs. It s a site where you will see a lot of social sharing taking place but it can be a more edgy and informal space because of it s more visual style. Posterous Spaces is a free blogging service recently purchased by Twitter. You can create your own blog with a <blogname>.posterous.com URL (you can also use your own domain name but the process here is more fiddly). The site handles uploaded images, video and other files better

4 than most other free tools and is very customisable. Like Tumblr the site has more of a social sharing and informal tone. PebblePad is technically an eportfolio service but it is also a blog. This service is centrally supported by the University of Edinburgh and is therefore free to use and well supported with courses and documentation locally. It is an EASE authenticated blogging option and allows you to select the audience for each piece of content making it an excellent tool for a blog that you wish to share only with specific individuals or groups such as a workgroup or project team. Access/login here: Setting up your blog: Profiles and About pages Registering for a blog is generally a very simple process but varies for all of the above tools so for support with this their own help sections are usually the best place to look if needed. Searching YouTube for how to guides can also be very helpful. Once you have set up your blog you will need to add some background information to ensure your readers understand who you are, what you do, what your academic interests are, and how to find out more about you. If the blogging tool you are using allows you to create a profile: Complete your Profile include your name, your job title, your affiliation(s), a link to your own institutional profile and your organisation or another suitable website for authoritative information. The tone can be informal and you can include some more personal information relevant hobbies, interests, etc. but that key professional information should be present and the tone should be clear enough to give your blog appropriate credibility. Create your About page. All blog tools allow you to create an About section where you should let readers know what you will be blogging about, roughly how often (to help you manage your readers and your own expectations), and give a little further context to your work. If your blog does not ask you to complete a profile then this is also the place to add the personal information that says who you are and what you are about (see above). And Keep Profiles and About pages up to date and ensure that you record any major change in role, add key publications etc. You may also want to add links to other relevant social media presences. On your About page you might perhaps have a link to your institutional profile, your departmental website, your Twitter presence and a YouTube channel you use for your teaching. Do not link to presences just for the sake of it if you don t want to build new connections on LinkedIn or have your students add you on Facebook then don t add links to them on your blog. It can be tempting to complete all information you can when you set up a new blog but it is important to think about what you want to share and what will be relevant to readers here. For a few more useful and simple tips on linking social media presences together and doing it well see: Eridon, Corey (2011). 10 Sloppy social media mistakes to fix now. Hubspot Blog, 21st November Social-Media-Mistakes-to-Fix-NOW.aspx

5 Osborne, Nicola (2011). Managing Academic Identities in Social Media. Presentation for the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences programme, 24 th November 2011, Setting up your blog: Look and feel Most blog tools allow you to use or customise themes or templates. These can look fantastic but, because there are hundreds of thousands of blogs using any given tool and only (usually) hundreds of themes, these designs can start to look very familiar. You can change the look and feel over time but start by: Select a simple design or theme that you like if possible make sure it is readable for others, looks good on mobiles, etc. Use a custom Header image this is the visual banner at the top of your blog and choosing something unique to you is relatively easy to do and can be very simple. If you have an image you like an object, texture, scene that would make sense with your academic interests you just need to either upload it and crop it to size, or open in an image editor (e.g. Gimp) and resize to match the standard Header size for your blog (it will either be shown or you should be able to Google for that blog and theme combination to find the correct dimensions). Include an RSS feed link and subscribe by link most blog tools will either do this for you or give you the option of adding these as widgets in the sidebar, header, or footer of your blog. Add a Copyright notice or Creative Commons license let readers know what they can and cannot do with your blog posts. For instance Professor Mary Beard writes her blog for the TLS and uses a standard Copyright notice: Copyright The Times Literary Supplement Limited You could do likewise retaining the copyright to your own name or the University depending upon the context. There are other forms of license e.g. Copyleft so, for instance, if you are happy for readers to reuse, copy, modify new versions of your posts you can opt for a Creative Commons license (which I use): This work by Nicola Osborne, EDINA Social Media Officer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at nicolaosborne.blogs.edina.ac.uk. Add a notice with the University charity number if you are blogging in a professional capacity you need to include this as this like your is a publication of the University. The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC Credit any appropriate funders if you are personally conducting research supported by a specific funding body or are blogging for a project which has been funded under a particular

6 programme, funding agency or research council then you should indicate this on your blog. You can do this either on your about page or, as with other notices mentioned in this section, this may be most appropriate in the footer or sidebar your blog so it will appear on every page and post. Add an indication of the Cookies and Privacy policy around your blog usually you will merely need to point to the appropriate policy of your blogging tool. It is, however, a legal requirement to notify users of the use of cookies so this is important to do. You may also want to link to the University of Edinburgh Privacy and Cookies Policy: You should be able to quickly find the Cookies or Privacy and Cookies policy for your blog tool and can then add text such as: For information on the use of cookies on this site please see the <University of Edinburgh Privacy and Cookies Policy> and the <Blogger Privacy Policy>. Add elements as you feel they are relevant you might start with a link to your Twitter account and may eventually want to add various badges, links, feeds of recent bookmarks or comments, etc. You can build these up over time though and starting small makes your blog much more readable. Setting up your blog: Monitoring your presence Google Analytics offer a thorough and free web analytics service which will provide you with rich detail on the content that is proving most popular, the people who are reading your blog, and where and how they are accessing your blog from. For team blogs you can either register a team Google account or add each team member as an admin for the Google Analytics account. Set up requires you to set up a new site and use the tracking code or tracking number on your own blog most sites make this easy to do either through boxes you can complete in your blog settings or by letting you edit the design of your blog. If you are putting the Analytics tracking code into the HTML the footer is a good place to locate it it will not slow down loading of the rest of the page and will appear on every post and page. Most blog tools include their own analytics which will give you headline data on number of unique visitors, location, content viewed etc. These are a good alternative to or comparison with the Google Analytics data (often varying widely). Whichever monitoring tool you use do make sure you login and check your stats every so often just to get an idea of how your blog is doing, how it is being read, which content is proving most successful, etc. Social Media Guidelines and Support The University of Edinburgh Social Media Guidelines, which provide useful and practical guidance on using social media (particularly blogs) can be found at:

7 The EDINA Social Media Guidelines, which the UoE Guidelines are based on, are worth reading, particularly if you are planning to blog for a project: Beltane Network supports Public Engagement activity of all types offering training, events, expertise and networking events for researchers and academics across Edinburgh. If you want to use your blog for public engagement and outreach they can help you develop your ideas and help you spread the word about your blog: The Institute for Academic Development (IAD) supports staff and students across the university to develop their skills. If you are interested in using blogs in your teaching you may find their Online Tutoring course useful. More information from: The MSc in elearning programme has been pioneering the use of blogs in teaching and learning and many of these blogs are partly or fully public so can be viewed, enjoyed and reflected upon. For more information see the course website: IS Skills Writing for the Web courses run regularly (usually as 2 hour sessions) offers an introduction to writing and communicating on the web considering aspects such as the most appropriate ways to structure text to make them readable on screen. More information here: Get Your Blog Posts Noticed Always tag your posts including metadata to your blog posts - things like the title, the category, tags, etc. - will make a huge difference to how easily that post is found by search engines and, therefore, by the people you want reading your posts. Always share your own posts this might mean tweeting a link to a new post, sharing it on Facebook, or ing appropriate people when you blog about a topic of interest to them. If you mention a particular person or organisation it is always both good practice and good marketing to let them know about it. Use an image in your post whenever possible Images can add huge value to your blog post. They can really help you contextualise your blog post and bring aspects of your post to life. They help to make a post more memorable. They allow readers and subscribers to browse through and bookmark your site more easily and allow it to be shared via Pinterest. And images help break up the flow of the text very effectively. To source suitable images the easiest way is to use your own take pictures on your phone or a digital camera whenever you spot something suitable or are attending an event so that you have visual material easily to hand that you know you have rights to use. Sometimes you want something different - for Creative Commons Licensed images searches of Flickr.com (use the advanced search - - and tick the boxes for Creative Commons content) and Flickr Commons ( often yield great images that you just need to attribute appropriately. Sites like the Internet Archive ( can also be very useful for finding suitable Creative Commons images but be aware that the US concept of fair use does not apply in the UK (there is no exemption for using copyrighted works in educational contexts) so if you have reasonable doubt about the provenance or copyright status of an image or video it s best avoided.

8 Remember: Whenever you use an image you will want to provide alt text or alternative text for that image this ensures that readers with screen readers and other assistive technologies have some idea of what the image is of, and helps ensure that the images and blog posts are more easily found and shared. Showcase Your Blog In addition to everyday ways to get your blog posts noticed there are also some more occasional or one-off actions you should consider once your blog is well established: The LSE Impact Blog is open to publishing blog posts from anyone interested in contributing comments, posts, articles, event notices or research materials on the impact of social sciences. The blog is widely read, well respected and influential so it is a great way to showcase your work. More information and the address for proposing new posts (impactofsocialsciences@lse.ac.uk) can be found here: Guardian Higher Education Blog Network is a new portal launched 5 th October 2012 showcasing bloggers from across Higher Education. The process of approving a new blog for the site is manual and may not be quick but it is an open process anyone can tweet or the editors that their blog be included: The Guardian Higher Education Network also recently held an online chat about blogging which may be of interest:

9 Recommended Academic Blogs I asked my Twitter followers to recommend their favourite academic blogs and this is my pick of those recommendations plus a number of my own: Individual Academics There are loads of academics who blog some are mainly blogging on professional issues, some more on personal issues and a number who blend the two. I ve tried to indicate the style for these recommendations: A Don s Life is Mary Beard s very engaging blog on her research, her interests and whatever is preoccupying her thoughts. Usually she skilfully weaves a connection between her work and current affairs or activities. She also writes about current projects and her working process helping to raise the profile of these but also sharing valuable reflections: Dr Charlotte Mathieson, from the University of Warwick, blogs about her research on Victorian literature and culture. Her blog combines semi-formal event reports, highlights such a presentations, publications, etc. with reflective comment and discussion of research: Charlotte has also shared a great post guiding academics on how to Get out there! : getting-out-there - with-your-research/. Urbanity history ( Thoughts from my office, oot in the sticks ) is where Dr Peter Matthews of Heriot Watt University, shares his research on the built environment and discussion around his work. It is very informal in tone and blends personal interests with research work which lends the blog a real personality and making posts engaging and readable: Melissa Terras Blog ( Adventures in Digital Humanities and digital cultural heritage. Plus some musings on Academia ) charts Melissa s work at the UCL Centre for the Digital Humanities through brief, interesting, personal posts including short summaries of events. Melissa s blog is updated regularly but with short posts a great way to use blogging to add value to other activities and fit it into a busy schedule: Bad Science is Dr Ben Goldacre s widely read blog on health sciences and medicine in the media. The blog has a very specific purpose which helps readers understand what to expect, what will be posted and how this relates to Ben s day job as a medical doctor. Publications both consumer non fiction based on the blog and government and scientific papers are a major part of the blog and by summarising and drawing on key aspects overlooked by others Ben has carved out a rich niche for his writing: Bon Stewart is Bonnie Stewart s blog about culture and the internet. She is a lecturer and PhD student at Prince Edward Island and this blog very much tracks her ideas as they are forming and developing making for posts which are rich reflections and discussions of key theory although they are also somewhat longer than might be readable for wider audiences: Confessions of an Aca Fan ( The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins ) is the home to writings, musings, provocations, ideas or this prolific blogger on internet culture. Henry regularly uses video in his post as a core part of those posts allowing him to show the text he is comment on and then discuss it. Because those he discusses often also read his blog he often receives comment and triggers active discussion with the communities examined. The blog also acts as a

10 preview of published work as much of what is written for the blog is eventually captured in publications: Supporting Students & Colleagues These blogs are all loosely about supporting your students and colleagues they are academic blogs but often about the processes of academia as much as the research. The Thesis Whisperer ( Just like the horse whisperer but with more pages ) blog supporting research students across the world. It has an informal, often chatty tone but is thoughtful and practical. It is co-authored by the editor, Dr Inger Mewburn an academic specialising in the research of research processes, and guest contributors from across the world: 3 Month Thesis ( Uncommon Approaches to Thesis Writing and PhD Life ) a blog charting one PhD student s experience of writing their these in three months. Although the site seems to now be as much advertising for PhD coaching there are thoughtful, brief, well articulated blog posts on the PhD process and are structured in very sharable and search engine friendly ways. The site is authored by James Hayton, PhD: Vitae Research Staff Blog gathers the thoughts of PhD students and early career researchers on their work, their activities, their thoughts on the research process. Multiple contributors keeps content lively and varied: Project Blogs These projects are charting their progress through their blogs. Some have elected to blog about there work but some are required to blog about their progress as part of their funding agreement and offer good examples of how to post interesting content in these contexts. The Trading Consequences Blog is tracking progress on this 2 year Digging Into Data project with partners at University of Edinburgh, EDINA, University of St Andrews and researchers at York University in Canada. The project is highly technical in nature and crosses several distinct disciplines making this a rich but challenging environment for writing coherent interesting blog posts that will appeal to a wide variety of academic audiences: IIGLU was a JISC-funded project to create learning and teaching materials around geospatial tools and data. The team had to blog their project and chose to not only include updates on project progress but also to examine their thoughts on interviews, on research into what users of these materials would want and need, to reflect upon their own process. The team also used images and video very effectively to compliment and add value to posts. The resulting blog tracks processes and developing thoughts as well as project progress: