Making it public

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This notion of reflective journalling through the process of researching is a slightly nuanced version of public PhD writing on an openly, accessible blog space. As a result of the Watt (2007) article, I’ve done some deeper thinking about the differences I see between blogging and journalling. For now, I’m using the purpose as the determining factor in decision making. Will I post this on my blog or will I tag it as a research journal entry? How will I inform my audience of this difference and how will I manage to keep these ‘tagged’ and organized. The other issue I’m debating is whether to make the blog post public, private or password protected. This will become a bigger decision as I dip into more personal materials that, for the purpose of research ethics and rich analysis, may need to remain out of the public eye. I’ll keep this in the writing equation as I continue to blog openly and continue to make it public.

I’ve set up blog categories to help manage the search-ability and organization of the blog content. These categories are instrumental in separating and compartmentalizing the writing by purpose – reflections, research focused, talking about topics of interest, course related conversations or thoughts, etc. I’m applying tags that are specific to the content in each post which may help with searchability, particularly when topics, ideas, methods, processes and prominent researchers appear or reappear in my writing. I could include a word cloud of common tags, but for now, I’ve made a decision not to include this information since it may close down rather than keep the ideation as open as possible.

When I finished reading Watt’s article, I searched the literature listing to follow up on finding articles that caught my attention within the research document. After completing library requests for a few of these articles, I went on an open search – finding Deborah Lupton on Twitter, exploring her web site, locating some video recordings and podcasts that potentially connect to my upcoming assignments and then into a video recording by The Thesis Whisperer: Starting an Academic Blog by Inger Mewburn, who’s also found on Twitter.

Here’s the video – taking time to think more about public presence as an academic in open digital places.