We’re now at the end of the academic year. Undergraduates have gone home, staff have gone on holiday or more likely are writing articles, books and presenting to conferences. Me? The department building is getting refurbished, so I’m working from home.
Quite a lot has happened to me since I started my PhD last year. I’ve presented a proper paper at an academic conference for the first time, and then had that paper accepted for publication. I’ve officially graduated from my Masters degree. I’ve had ten months of PhD study, writing about party organisation theory, party system theory, and designing a questionnaire for distribution. I’ve also started and maintained this blog, and I’d like to share some thoughts about it has evolved so far, and how it might continue to evolve.
How did the blog come about? For some, a great and original idea leads to a blog forming. For some, anger or frustration at an event leads them to writing a post. For me, it just seemed a useful thing to do. As postgraduates, we were invited to set up a blog to discuss our time at Newcastle University. Another student also decided to take up the opportunity.
My instructions were simple: blog at least once a month. The topics and content? Up to me. As a consequence, the first couple of months were quiet. I wasn’t sure what I wanted the blog to do. Would it be a monthly blog where I’d simply update a small number of readers on my progress, or would it be something else? As the year has gone, I’ve decided largely to focus on specific events related to my study, such as presenting at a conference, or my supervisory meetings, or on certain aspects of British politics, such as the prospects of Liberal Democrat gains at next year’s general election.
In total, there have been roughly 2000 views to this blog since it started. The most viewed post thus far covered publishing academic work, followed by a discussion of opinion polls and what to do with them. More people have viewed it than I expected, and the hope over the course of the PhD is that the blog becomes not just a aimless site for the occasional muttering, but a place that is useful for various audiences in one way or another. In this regard, I take my cue from Alex Marsh, who said the following on his own blog:
The immediacy of blogging makes it the ideal format for such engagement. It offers the closeted academic opportunities to come down from that mythical ivory tower and engage with the contemporary policy agenda in ways that are impossible through conventional academic writing. An academic paper can take anything up to three years from conception to publication in a journal, and the response from academic peers can arrive months or even years later.
In comparison, a timely blog post offering a rapid response to a policy pronouncement will get most of its hits and comments within two or three days of publication. And a rapid response at least opens up the possibility that something you say will connect more directly with participants in the policy debate in a way that, however marginally, has some influence over the course of events. I’ve had enough backlinks, retweets, and the like – and enough kind and positive comments on my posts – to suggest that what I’m saying is connecting now and again.
That’s my objective with this blog over the next few years. Whether the posts are useful to prospective postgraduate students, fellow postgraduate students, academics or just interested observers, if they connect now and again, I’m happy.
Until next time.