Now that I’m coming up on, um, about thirty years of publications it’s finally dawning on me that maybe no one knows what I’ve written because they don’t bump into it. So for the last month or so I’ve been mulling over my online presence, both for my sake and as a model for my students who are interested in digital scholarship—we all want our good work to get noticed!
If you look at the featured image above and full mindmap below, you’ll see that it has evolved considerably since my first go at it here. The reason?: well, there’s a lot of competition out there for your digital presence. I’ve now got most of it figured out and updated, and there’s a little guide at top left for you WordPress folks on the key plugins and widgets I’m using. (Just pan/zoom on that mindmap below, or click at upper right to expand; you’ll see summaries/links to all resources.)
I must admit, though, that the social media part is something I’m still getting comfortable doing—yet I need to because that’s how you recruit visitors to your site:
- Facebook is a convenient way to connect with professional and personal friends, and it’s easy to push content automatically to Facebook, but all that noise and all those ads!…I can barely stomach it. My apologies, FB friends, for all the important things you write that I routinely miss.
- Instagram is much funner to me than FB, because it’s mostly images!…I can look at pictures all day. I just used it a bunch for my trip to Ireland (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here). The problem is that it’s not where academics tend to congregate; that place happens to be…
- Twitter…which to me is unfortunately the epitome of noise and wordbites—though e.g. this tweet struck me as concise/funny/deep. My first tweet in about three years should be coming out soon, once I make the plunge and organize a way to view and recruit follows.
Now, there’s a good argument for avoiding an online presence entirely, just retreating to your cave, writing a brilliant paper, and handing it out on the street. And that may be what I’ll be doing in about six months once I get tired of this digital re-entry…feel free to place bets now as to how long this will last. Happy mid-summer!
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