Or, towards a scholarship for the 21st century. A colleague in the UK Japanese studies community has
declared 2015 to be the year of social media for his research efforts. For a few reasons – the new year, the release of the REF results and looking towards the next iteration, planning my own personal goals, who knows what else – I also have been doing a bit of thinking about my future research plans and how and where I am going to try to disseminate the results. Indeed I’ve been trying to think longer term, to decide how I imagine the future of academia and how I should shape my own intentions and actions accordingly.
I can’t shake the feeling that some of the mainstays of the academic research world – the products of how things have been done in the past – are creaking a bit in the face of rapid technological change and new and different priorities. Where once the ‘high quality’ journals presumably were the gatekeepers through whom you had to go to get your work read at all, now all journals are more-or-less equal in the face of a database query. Likewise, whilst reputations are made in the humanities through the publication of monographs — book length works on a single piece of research — they are expensive and often have small sales figures. If I want my research to be read by as many people as possible, if I want to open academic debate as widely as possible, if I want my own students to be able to read my work, then it’s not clear to me that the best form of output is a £60 book that’s destined to languish on the shelves of a few libraries and colleagues’ offices.
That’s not to say that I think journal articles and monographs are going to be swept away, replaced by research-in-140-characters. For now I’m mostly thinking about alternative routes to bring people to my work – how to make the most of growing electronic resources, and how to make my research output reflect the nature of my own practices of research consumption. Ultimately perhaps, the medium shapes the content, so by exploring different platforms to share work I think I’ll inevitably start to think about the nature of the work I create (and eventually even the nature of the research I do) but that’s a longer term project. As a thought experiment: if I decided to publish my thesis not with an academic publisher, but for free, online, what would it lose as a piece of research? Peer review, prestige, and some measure of marketing/sales, is what springs to mind. Of these, only prestige seems insurmountable, but at the same time it’s a bit intangible. And what might it gain? Wider accessibility and a hopefully wider readership as a result.
Some of this is perhaps a ship that has already sailed – I think that open access journal publication is going to become the standard, and it’s just a question of how & when the economics gets sorted out. When I’m looking for readings for my own research and for building teaching lists, I pretty much don’t care where an article has been published in weighing how useful I think it is, provided my students have access to it. Likewise, when looking for readings for myself I use a range of approaches to find new articles – our internal search, google scholar, and the rabbit warren of link and counter link, citation and re-citation. So how can you best take advantage of that? I’m not sure,
I do think that a well-maintained online presence is only going to become more useful in terms of research profile. That does require some work – personally I need to put some time into making, say, my academia.edu page up to date, and hopefully interesting and informative. Relatedly, I’ve noticed a growing number of graduate and even undergraduate students appearing on academia.edu or LinkedIn or the like, blurring the line between teaching and research, and making these sites all the more useful/important.
I think that a blog is a perfect medium for exploring meta-topics, marginal cast-offs from mainstream research, and the like; as such it could be a valuable complement to traditional research outputs and the general landscape of academic debate, but it’s hard to keep a blog a going concern. The immediate concerns of marking and teaching and so on and so on have certainly put my blog into the shadows during term time.
So those are my current objectives: expand my engagement online, and enhance my own profiles/pages; think seriously about my priorities for where I want to publish, rather than just sticking to a legacy set of objectives; and ultimately give some serious thought to the possibility for (much) more imaginative forms of output.
Fireflies 