The Digital Scholar

There’s nothing like owning a piece of real estate. You can build on it, shape its landscape, and eventually people come to identify you as the unique owner of that piece of property. Unfortunately, due to its finite nature, real estate tends to be quite expensive.

Earning a scholarly reputation can be a lot like buying real estate. You first stake a claim on a particular field of knowledge, you build your knowledge base through research, and finally you shape your particular perspective on that topic. After a while, people come to identify you as an owner of expertise in that particular field of knowledge. Fortunately, scholarly real estate today is cheaper than ever in the infinite world of digital publishing.

Digital publishing gives authors and scholars the opportunity to control the promotion of their writing and research interests like never before. Writing a regular blog, creating a website, publishing e-books, and filming videos to post on the Web are all great ways to become well-known in a particular scholarly field. One particularly effective way to bring all of these publishing mediums together for maximum promotion is to purchase a domain name (i.e., a URL).

Domain names are cheap and buying one is incredibly easy. I purchased the two domains I own through my web hosting service for about $10 a year each, which is the standard rate, but there are many other websites where you can buy one.

You don’t necessarily need to purchase an expensive web-hosting service in order to use your domain to create a blog or website. Some free blog-hosting websites, like WordPress.com or Blogger.com, allow you to map your own domain to their hosting service for free or for a nominal yearly fee. That is, instead of having “wordpress.com” added on to your blog name when you create a blog through their website (e.g., “yourblog.wordpress.com”), you can arrange for the URL to appear as your own domain (“yourblog.com”). (The downside of using free services like these to create your own blog or website, rather than using a more expensive paid service, is that you lose full control over the function of your blog or website and sometimes you are limited by what you are allowed to display. The more control you want over your blog or website, the more you have to pay.)

Think long and hard about choosing your domain name. You want to use it for a long time. If your goal is to promote yourself as an individual scholar, and you already have a fairly widespread reputation, you may want to use your own name. Another way to go is to incorporate your area of interest into the domain name like I did for mine (www.EarlyAmericanCrime.com). Or, you can make up a clever-sounding word like many websites do, although you generally need a heavy marketing blitz to make it stick.

My advice is to go with something descriptive, whether it be your name, your area of interest, or some kind of moniker that represents who you are and what you are about. If you decide to go with an area of interest for your domain name, choose something that is specific, so that people know what to expect when they visit your site, yet still broad enough to incorporate new research interests you may want to pursue down the line.

By purchasing a domain name, you are gaining a powerful tool that you can use to promote yourself or your research. You can display your domain on business cards, on e-mail signatures, and on your cv or resume. Depending on the hosting service you select, you can even use an e-mail address that includes your own domain name, e.g., “yourname@yourblog.com.”

A well-defined and a memorable domain name can help you build your scholarly reputation. As soon as I purchased the domain for EarlyAmericanCrime.com, I suddenly realized that I now “owned” this area of knowledge on the Web. Of course, it was now my job to fill this space with quality content if I wanted to build my scholarly reputation, but getting people to identify my name with this particular area of knowledge was mine for the taking. I no longer needed to rely on editors of academic publications and the arbiters of scholarly conferences to help spread my scholarly reputation. I could still pursue these usual outlets for sharing my scholarly work, but now I had the means for securing a more public and immediate audience for it.

I started Recollecting Nemasket as a local history blog for two principal reasons: as a means of personal fulfillment and as an effort to make local history more readily available to the community.

Like all scholars, digital or otherwise, I feel passionately about my subject. Writing about local history gives me a means of self-expression, and digitally publishing my scholarship in a field in which I have expertise easily allows me to share what I learn with the public.

Michael J. Maddigan

By publishing digitally, I am afforded a number of advantages that are not always available through more “traditional” publishing. For 11 years, I have written a local history newspaper column also known as “Recollecting Nemasket” for the Middleboro Gazette. However, a newspaper column can be restrictive in regards to the limitations that are placed on the subject or format of an article. Topics that require a more lengthy, more detailed, or more technical analysis are generally not best served in a newspaper column. Because digital publishing is less restrictive, it permits me to publish longer works, more technical works, works with more images, portions of longer works that I have yet to complete–essentially whatever I choose. A website may also be used as a “proving ground” where articles can be subjected to criticism and comment before they are published elsewhere.

I find that digital scholarship is also advantageous because it is more immediate, more interactive, more accessible, and less ephemeral than traditional publishing. It is also less expensive. My blog costs me nothing beyond the time that I put into it. Readers can read my posts as they are published and respond to them nearly instantaneously, providing feedback on what I write and occasionally offering a differing perspective. With traditional publishing, the process of receiving feedback is much more arduous. And unlike traditional scholarship published in books, magazines, and journals, digital scholarship does not necessarily go out of print or become unavailable when the next issue is published.

As with more traditionally published scholarship, the caliber of digital scholarship on the Web varies greatly. My intention is to maintain a high standard of scholarship for Recollecting Nemasket, partly in keeping with the goal of developing the website as a local history resource for the community. Despite the fact that its subject matter–the history of Middleborough and Lakeville, Massachusetts–is relatively esoteric with probably a limited appeal beyond these two communities, it is no less deserving of serious scholarly treatment. I believe that the best digital scholarship is that which draws upon the advantages of both digital and traditional publishing, combining the small expense, the immediacy, the interactive nature, the accessibility for readers, and the frequency that digital publishing affords with the high level of academic standards that is associated with more traditional scholarship.

Michael J. Maddigan is the author/publisher of Recollecting Nemasket, a blog devoted to the history of Middleborough and Lakeville, Massachusetts. He currently serves as Curator of the Middleborough Historical Museum, and his book Middleborough (Images of America) is due to be published in October 2009.

If you want to become a Digital Scholar, where should you start?

There are many easy ways to get the ball rolling in becoming a Digital Scholar, and you may already be doing some of them. Setting up an account with LinkedIn or Facebook to network more easily with friends and colleagues–especially those with whom you have lost touch–is one way. Setting up a Twitter account for similar reasons is another. You can go to Amazon.com and create recommendation lists to help other readers identify the seminal books in your field of expertise, or you can even start contributing articles to Wikipedia.

All of the above activities can help spread your reputation as a scholar. But if you are serious about preparing yourself for the new world of publishing, starting a blog is the best way to go.

One of the reasons why writing a blog is such a powerful tool for participating in the new world of publishing is that once it is up and running, you are perfectly positioned to utilize to the fullest the new publishing technologies for producing, distributing, and drawing attention to your scholarship.

Here are some other reasons why blogs are one of the best publishing tools for the Digital Scholar:

• Blogs are relatively easy to set up and maintain. Even though setting up a blog can be time consuming and a bit tricky at first, it is still much easier and faster to put together than designing your own website. Once you get your blog up and running, adding content to it is a breeze, so you can focus on your writing and scholarship, not website design. (See the Digital Scholar Toolkit for some links and tips to help you get started building your blog.)
• People can easily discover you and your scholarship through your blog. People turn to the web to answer questions and find information about topics that interest them all the time. Your blog can become an authoritative source on the web for providing information about your area of expertise.
• Blogs are a great showcase for you and your work. You can easily direct people to your blog, where they can gain a deeper understanding of what you and your scholarship are all about. You can include the URL for your blog in e-mail signatures, on business cards, and on your Facebook profile. If your URL is catchy enough, you can even verbally encourage friends and colleagues to check out your blog.
• You can build a regular readership with a blog. The regular-article format of a blog gives people who are interested in your area of expertise a reason to return to your site to read your next article.
• You become an instant author/publisher of your own work with a blog. As soon as you hit the “Publish” button, people from around the world can read and comment on your work. A blog is a great place to try out new ideas and see what people think about them before taking those ideas to a traditional publisher. It also lets you build or enhance your reputation in that subject area while you are still testing out those ideas.
• A blog can help you create content for other publishing formats. If you find the task of sitting down to write a book or journal article daunting, the short-article format usually associated with a blog can help you break your subject down into smaller chunks. Keep writing these small articles, and before you know it, you will have plenty of material for that article or book.
• You can use your blog to get a traditional publishing contract. If you write an active blog, you become more attractive to traditional publishers because of the attention you can generate through it.
• You can use your blog to advertise your book or other writing. Whether you publish a book independently, go through a traditional book publisher, or write an article for another venue, you can use your blog to market it. In turn, you can use these other writing opportunities to drive more traffic to your blog.

Blogs can produce big dividends for the Digital Scholar, because they are an idea and content generator, publishing mechanism, and marketing venue all rolled up into one. Blogs require some effort to get started, but once they are up and running, they can pack a powerful punch in the publishing world.

1. . . . you want to share your knowledge with the world. I just checked the statistics for my Early American Crime website. At least one person from 43 out of the 50 states in the U.S. has visited my website, and I regularly get visitors from all over the world. I have even gained the following of an early American crime fan in Sweden.
2. . . . you have an old manuscript or a bunch of research notes lying around, but don’t know what to do with them. A blog gives this hidden information a chance to see the light of day, and who knows, it all may become a book or scholarly journal article one day.
3. . . . you want to connect with other scholars and people who share similar scholarly interests. I regularly receive e-mail from people who have questions and want to share ideas about crime in early America. Some of the people who have contacted me are academics, and some are simply people who have an interest in what I write about.
4. . . . you want to add the role of “public intellectual” to your professional standing. Academics often bemoan the fact that they don’t get to interact with people outside of academia very much and worry that their profession is becoming too insular. A blog can give you a forum to reach out to lots of people and explain what you do and why it is important. Your blog’s statistics will tell you how successful you have been at reaching that wider audience.
5. . . . you have an interest that lies outside of your normal scholarly research activity and you want to explore it in a serious way. A blog gives you the freedom to explore topics and subjects that you might not ordinarily tackle because they are outside of your area of expertise. Over time, these topics may become areas of expertise, and you’ll already be recognized as an expert when that happens.
6. . . . your approach to writing lacks structure and regularity. A blog forces you to write relatively short articles on a regular basis. The time element that attaches itself to every post serves as a reminder of the last time you produced some writing. If you keep producing for your blog, before you know it you will have generated enough material to put together into a journal article or a book.
7. . . . you want to see published results faster than what a book or journal publisher can offer. Publishing on a blog is almost instantaneous. If you love the satisfaction of seeing your writing “in print,” a blog gives you that feeling every time you hit the “Publish” button.
8. . . . you need motivation to sit and write. A blog offers all kinds of opportunities for motivation, and what writer doesn’t need motivation? By writing a blog, you can take satisfaction that your writing will actually matter to someone out there. You will receive e-mail from people who respect and appreciate what you do. You will be contacted by people offering you other writing opportunities. You may even make a little bit of money from your blog if you decide to run ads or publicize books on it. All of these things can help you find reason to sit down and write.
9. . . . you need more than motivation; you need some kind of “outside force” to make you sit and write. When you first start a blog, the statistics can be pretty dismal, but as you keep writing, they start to pick up. Watching your statistics slope upwards can become an addiction, and the way to feed this addiction is to keep writing, because the more you write, the better your statistics.
10. . . . you want to give publishers a reason to publish your book. Not only does a blog help you generate content for your next book, it can serve as a means for publicizing your next book, and publishers are well aware of the latter. Your book idea becomes much more attractive to a publisher if you can prove that you have a built-in following for the topic on a blog, because the readers of your website can turn into potential customers of your book.

For tips and links to resources that can help you get a blog up and running, visit the Digital Scholar Toolkit.

Comment Question:

If you have a blog, what are some of the reasons you would use to convince someone else to start one?

Serious blogging is an oxymoron, at least that’s what I thought.

When I decided to start a website where I could display my research and writing on early American crime, the first problem I faced was finding the mechanism for making that happen. I knew some HTML, so I could create a website from scratch, but having done so a couple times in the past, I knew how difficult and time-consuming it could be. I also knew that my coding skills were rudimentary at best, so if I wanted to create a good-looking website, I would have to devote a lot of time to learning web design. This option was not optimal. I wanted to spend my time research and writing, not learning how to code and design websites.

The alternative was to create a blog. This option was a tough one to swallow. How could I align myself with a genre that seemed to celebrate the expression of outrageous opinions, public displays of private feelings, and droll reflections on popular culture? In the end, the technological ease that made it possible for anyone and everyone to create a blog was too enticing for me to pass up.

If I were going to start a blog, I decided, I was going to do something different. Rather than conform to the principle of writing short posts on blogs, my posts were going to be as long as I needed them to be to cover the topic I was writing about. Rather than write in an offhand, conversational style, my writing was going to be more academically formal. And rather than keep a thematic series of posts to no more than a handful, my thematic series were going to be epic in proportion.

Of course, I soon discovered that there were many serious and scholarly blogs that were being written well before I started mine and that they were employing some of the same practices that I thought were so radical in my approach.

This past Sunday, the New York Times ran an article titled “Blogs Falling In an Empty Forest” that cites a 2008 survey by Technorati stating that out of the 133 million blogs the search site tracks, only 7.4 million have been updated in the last 120 days. In other words, 95% of the blogs out there now lie dormant.

One reason the article gives for this drop in blog activity is that people have started to grow weary of revealing too much of their personal lives online. Another reason is that the number of visitors that many bloggers expected, or the amount of money they thought they would make from it, never materialized. Many of these ex-bloggers, the article speculates, now spend their time on Facebook or Twitter.

The demise of frivolous blogs reminds me of when the World Wide Web was just beginning to catch on. At the time, anyone and everyone seemed to have a website about their wacky interests. Of course, most of those websites have since disappeared and have been replaced by more serious ones.

Perhaps the age of serious blogging is now upon us.

Still, I can’t quite bring myself to refer to my Early American Crime website as my blog.

For tips and links to resources that can help you get a blog up and running, visit the Blogging section of this website.