In the Dark

This morning I saw this bit of guidance about writing a blog produced by a colleague from Maynooth:

I’m not sure how well I’ve followed this guidance over the last 14 years or so but was struck by the assertion that “a blogpost is a publication”. It reminded me of a webinar I did a while ago about Open Access publication which led to a discussion of whether or not a preprint is a publication. Taking the definition of “publish” to be “to issue to the public”, I think it is. In the digital era methods of publication are much simpler and more diverse than in the days when everything was circulated on paper and although I haven’t thought much about it before, I agree on this basis that a blog post is indeed a publication.

That means I have 5942 publications! Or actually 5943 after I’ve published this one. Not counting a couple of hundred “proper” ones, of course…

Anyway I have never really seen a good reason why this blog should be entirely about my professional life. It is true that the most popular posts have proved to be about my research interests but people seem to read the other stuff too so I see no reason to be restrictive.

A dozen years ago I wrote a post about how and why I started blogging, and what follows is an edited version of that.

Lots of people have asked me over the years why I have a blog and why I apparently spend so much time writing it. Well, for me, there are two answers. The first is just that I enjoy writing. I think because of that I’ve always been able to write stuff fairly quickly and developed a little bit of a knack for it. I also sometimes find it easiest to figure out what I actually think about something by trying to write about it. Publishing a post written for this reason is almost irrelevant and there have been a few occasions when I’ve regretted posting items in which I’ve been “thinking out loud” in this way. Sometimes it’s good to remember that people may actually read what you write…

When I started blogging I realized that it gave me the chance to write about things quite different from the usual themes I had previously tackled in publications. I’d written scientific papers, textbooks, lecture notes, popular books and newspaper articles before but most had  been quite strictly controlled by editors and were always related to my scientific work.

It was only after I’d been blogging quite a while that I started doing music and poetry items, entirely for my own amusement, like keeping a scrapbook, but if people actually enjoy things that I’ve put up that they’d never seen before then all the better. I know a lot of people think I’m a pretentious twat for posting about poetry or Opera or modern jazz – some have said as much to my face, in fact – but that’s what I like. There’s enough blogs about pop music, TV celebrities and computer games already, not that I’d be able to write about them. I’m flattered too by the fact that some of my music and other posts have been linked to Wikipedia articles – and, no, I didn’t put them there!

The other reason I had for starting to blog is much more personal. I moved job from Nottingham to Cardiff in 2007, but I got caught up in the credit crunch and was unable to sell my old house for quite a while. I spent far too much time commuting from Nottingham to Cardiff and back for the weekends and got thoroughly depressed, a state of mind not helped by some other issues which I won’t go into. In the middle of this my father died. Though not entirely unexpected, I did have to take some time out to deal with it. He hadn’t left a will, and I had to sort out the legal side of things as well as dispose of his belongings and arrange the funeral. In the aftermath of all that I had pangs of nostalgia for my childhood in Newcastle and an urge to connect with all that through writing down some thoughts and memories. Many of my early posts on here were quite morbidly introspective and probably not much fun for anyone to read, but I found writing them quite cathartic, as indeed I’ve found other posts for different reasons.

Anyway, knowing my tendency to write bits and bobs and then forget about them, quite a few people had encouraged me to start writing a blog but I hadn’t done it because I didn’t know how to go about setting one up. Fortunately, after a public talk I’d given, Phil Brown of the British Association for the Advancement of Science gave me a few pointers to getting started writing a blog. After finally managing to sell off the Nottingham house and after relocating fully to Cardiff, I started blogging in 2008.

So there you are.  That’s some of why and most of how I came to start writing this blog. I wish I could say I had a mission to change the world, but it’s really just partly a big exercise in self-indulgence and partly a piece of occupational therapy.

I would add two things in my defence. One is that I think that among all the other stuff, I do a bit of public service on here. Any bits of news about funding, exciting or controversial science results and things I think my colleagues might find interesting tend to go on here and I do think that’s a useful thing to do. People in my own Department sometimes find things first from reading here, which I think adds a healthy bit of transparency to the otherwise closed world of academic life. The other thing to say is that, contrary to popular opinion, I don’t actually spend a huge amount of time writing the blog. Much of it is recycled and the rest thrown together quite quickly. I know it’s rubbish, but at least its fast…

Some time ago I came across the idea of a “commonplace book“. To paraphrase Wikipedia

Such books came into use in the middle ages and were essentially scrapbooks, filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as aids for remembering or developing useful concepts ideas or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests.

Dare I say, just like a blog?

This entry was posted on June 8, 2022 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Biographical, Maynooth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.