Friday, July 18, 2014

The Value of Blogging and Social Media for Academics

I absolutely believe – see Alan Liu tweets below – that blogging and other social media can be invaluable for academics and, in particular, are central to the long-term revitalization of the interchange between the (humanities) academy and the public at large. (See my post, Alan Liu: Reengaging the Humanities.) For example, literature scholars could conduct reading groups for specific texts where the groups could be drawn from both "civilians" and academics from anywhere and everywhere.

I've been arguing that literary scholars need better descriptions (far more detail) of the texts we deal with. We need these descriptions for all the canonical texts and for a useful sample of the others. (See the crowd sourcing section at the end of my post, Some example descriptions: two poems, a novella, two manga texts, and two films; also, various posts on citizen science.)



When she was my colleague at The Valve Rohan led group readings on Adam Bede and Villette (the links go to the first post in each series; there's no easy to capture the whole series in a single link). 

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