Things it has taken me 8 years to learn

19 June 2019 by Leave a comment

Photo by Daniel Cheung | unsplash.com

Our good buddy The Thesis Whisperer wrote a fab post on ‘how to run a blog for 8 years and not go insane‘ in 2018. It is a cracker of a post and gives excellent insight into how TW has managed to maintain such quality and longevity!

At the time it was published, I read it with great interest, hoping that I’d be able to implement some of the strategies and not be writing things at 11pm the night before our weekly publication slot…

Alas, dear readers, Tseen did not implement any strategies.

Is she sitting on her sofa right now writing this post at 10:36pm? Indeed, she is.

The Research Whisperer celebrated its 8th birthday recently, and we posted this on our Facebook page:

Today, we have published 383 posts, have almost 42,000 followers on Twitter, over 6400 subscribers to the blog, and over 9200 followers on our Facebook page.

It was heartening to think about the community that surrounds RW these days, and the wonderful allies and friends we’ve made. For me, it has been a career transformative time. Just before we hatched RW, I was at a low, low career point. Working with Jonathan has been a delight, and I would never have thought that we’d have travelled this far down the road with our blog, being led by doing what we thought was fun. Read more of this post

Filed under Miscellany, Networking, Research communication Tagged with , , ,

What viral means for us

4 October 2016 by Leave a comment

This is based on a talk I gave recently to research administrators at Northwestern University in Chicago. Thanks to the Australasian Research Management Society (ARMS) and the US National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) for their fellowship, which made it possible. Thanks also to Kirsten Yehl for making my trip a fantastic success.

Recently, we posted It Gets Worse, an article about the crisis of casualisation in universities. I wrote it in collaboration with the wonderful Karina Luzia and Kate Bowles of CASA, and it was cross-posted to the CASA blog. We thought that it was an important problem.

So, it seems, did a lot of other people.

Graph of daily views, showing a consistent pattern of 200 - 900 views, except for the latest day, which shows almost 3,000

This is what viral looks like for us

The response was amazing – heartfelt and very real. Hopefully, it adds another pebble to the avalanche that will be needed to bring reform to the sector.

While a lot of people were clearly interested in the issue, I thought some might be interested in how it played out behind the scenes, so to speak. This is how we work, and how Research Whisperer got to this point.

Read more of this post

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The unwritten code of conduct

15 December 2015 by 24 Comments

The author of this post has chosen to remain anonymous for good reasons. The Whisperers know the author, and consider this to be a very important issue in contemporary academe.

Impact and public scholarship have become ever more popular elements in institutions, and more attention and pressure on researchers around questions of what academics are ‘allowed’ to say comes very much to the fore.

Photo by Ondrej Supitar | unsplash.com

Photo by Ondrej Supitar | unsplash.com

Each day this week, my supervisor has walked into my office and made verbal demands that I remove content from my beloved blog.

Each day, the boundaries of appropriate social media usage shift a little, and my requests for some clear written guidance are rebuffed.

I’m a postdoc at a research-intensive organisation.

I work in a typical physical science department. That is, it’s a highly male dominated environment with an age profile skewed towards the era of peak Bob Dylan fandom. This isn’t necessarily a problem. But, in my case, it is.

My department has chronic cultural problems. Bullying, gender and race-based discrimination are commonplace, and things are particularly toxic for early career researchers and female academics. I am both, and have experienced first-hand sexist, homophobic and racist comments, and inappropriate physical contact from senior academics in my workplace. Read more of this post

Filed under Research communication, Research culture Tagged with , , , , , ,

Can blogging be a hobby?

31 March 2015 by 22 Comments

Keep up and blog on (Photo by Alexander Baxevanis | www.flickr.com/photos/futureshape)

Keep up and blog on (Photo by Alexander Baxevanis | http://www.flickr.com/photos/futureshape)

It is ironic that I’m writing this blogpost on whether blogging can be a hobby at 11pm on a Saturday night when I’m technically on annual leave for a week.

I’m working this late because I made time to have a family dinner and catch up with my sister and her partner.

I also chatted with my partner about our well-intentioned and erratic packing for the camping trip that starts tomorrow.

What I didn’t do was spend time working on the post… until now.

This post is about how academics choose to spend our time, and how – quite often – when I’m not working, I’m blogging, or thinking about blogging.

I’m realising that writing for blogs has become my hobby. Other people may knit, play instruments, or cook.

I blog.

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Filed under Research communication, Research culture Tagged with , , , , , , ,

What gets covered in science blogs?

4 November 2014 by 1 Comment

Portrait of Paige Brown JarreauPaige Brown Jarreau is a PhD candidate in mass media and public affairs at the Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University. She studies the intersection of science communication, journalism and new media. She uses a variety of approaches, both quantitative and qualitative, to study science news norms, beliefs and values of science communicators, environmental psychology and science media framing effects.

She is the author of From the Lab Bench, a science blog hosted on SciLogs.com, where she is a community manager. She  writes on a semi-regular basis for the Science & Society section of EMBO Reports.  She tweets at @FromTheLabBench. Her ORCID is 0000-0002-3963-2641. 

A version of this post originally appeared on From the Lab Bench, as Something is wrong on the Internet! What does the Science Blogger do?

Full disclosure: This article discusses a fundraising campaign. One of the editors (@jod999) has contributed to that campaign.

Some of the most common words mentioned during 33 of Paige's interviews with science bloggers.

Some of the most common words mentioned during 33 of Paige’s interviews with science bloggers.

Science blogging is one of those curious social media phenomena that has moved mainstream in the science news ecosystem.

Once known as ranty opinion forums, blogs have become one of the best resources of science and science communication online.

Science blogs have spread their influence into the worlds of scientific publishing, science journalism, science policy and popular science. But as they have, we could argue that science bloggers themselves are becoming more accountable to the broader science news ecosystem, even more professionalized.

What do modern science blogging practices and values look like? How are science bloggers deciding what to cover, and what impacts are these decisions having? What does the modern science blogging network look like, and how are bloggers being rewarded for their dogged fixing of science on the internet?

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Filed under Research communication, Research culture Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Something you want us to blog? #tabit!

30 September 2014 by 1 Comment

tabit

I sent out a heartfelt and somewhat random tweet the other day, about loving how people use the #tabit tag.

No doubt, there were those of you who thought, ‘What the heck is #tabit? What’s she on about? Why am I following this person?”

#tabit is a hashtag that stands for “there’s a blogpost in that”. This phrase is dropped regularly into face-to-face and online conversations among various #circleofniceness buddies, including myself and Inger Mewburn (@thesiswhisperer).

In the discussion that followed my tweet, Francis Woodhouse (@fwoodhouse) suggested #tametabit: ‘there’s a meta blogpost in writing about using #tabit to flag good material’.

And, as is so often the case though we wish it were otherwise, Francis was correct.

When managing a blog, and speaking with others who do, a constant issue that’s brought up is the difficulty of maintaining the flow of content. It’s the key issue for whether blogs survive or fail in their first year. New bloggers may go nuts with posts for the first few months, then settle into a pattern of slightly sparser postings. As long as these postings stay constant and valuable, that’s not a problem.

It’s when they start getting further apart, with months of no activity, that problems set in. This is how blogs start to die.

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