Below are the notes from my workshop at this weekend's THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy, along with a Storify of notes and tweets from the entire unconference.
Publishing Outside the Academy
Created for: THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy, October 2012
Google Doc: http://bit.ly/publishingoutsideac
Workshop Description: Although many traditional academic presses are struggling to stay afloat, it’s actually easier than ever for academics themselves to publish their work — outside the academy, that is. This workshop will address how and why scholars should write for publications outside “traditional” academic ones. This can include both writing about one’s scholarly research as well as writing about the academy itself. We’ll discuss some of the practicalities of doing so — blogging versus freelancing versus self-publishing, for example — and the technical, financial, rhetorical, political and licensing questions these raise. The workshop will also talk about promoting your work through various social networks (again, academic and otherwise).
The workshop will cover (what participants want to cover, most likely... but that could include):
The How:
Blog / Personal Website
Anonymity/Pseudonymity
Social Media Self-Promotion
Freelancing
Licensing
Blog-to-Book
The Why/What:
The case for (and against) academics speaking publicly -- about their scholarship (open access), peer review, about academia
Public digital humanities (outreach)
#Twittergate
Politics of Publishing: Higher Education
Politics of Publishing: K-12
Some resources:
Why / Why not publish outside the academy:
- Bloggers Need Not Apply (2005)
- Why Academics Should Blog (2008)
- The Ivory Tower and the Open Web (Introduction)
- What Are the Ethics of Live-Tweeting at Conferences? (2012)
- When Academic Disagreement Becomes Harassment (See also: Casualty of the Math Wars)
How / Where (Platforms):
- Which Blogging Platform Should I Use? -- e.g. Blogger, Wordpress (.com and .org), Tumblr, Drupal
- Benefits/Challenges of a .edu domain
- Data portability and data ownership
- Own your own domain -- e.g. Hover.com -- roughly $15/yr
- EC2 for Poets (setting up a server in Amazon's "cloud")
How (Form):
- Audience
- Length (Is short the answer to scholarly publishing?)
- The Lede
- Formatting (bullet points, sub-headers)
- Language
- Headline
- Frequency (i.e. how often do you update the blog?)
Syndication and Social Media
- RSS -- e.g. Feedburner
- IFTTT (If This Then That)
- Dlvr.it (Automatically posting a link your blog posts, via RSS, to Twitter or Facebook)
- How to Promote Your Blog Without Losing Your Soul
- Email ("Dark Social")
Pseudonymity:
Licensing:
Self-publishing:
- Anthologize (Wordpress to book plugin)
- GitHub + Prose.io (e.g. The Meta-Story: How Wired Published Its GitHub Story on GitHub; Why and How I Put Syllabi on GitHub)
Freelancing: