
Academics and students should take blogging and social media seriously - Quanttek
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/10/26/why-academics-and-students-should-take-blogging-social-media-seriously/
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azangru
> Making sure someone reads your research.

There are several motivations to write and publish, and being read (by the
widest possible audience) is only one of them. Even if we put the most mundane
reasons (publish or perish, publish to make money) aside, there is at least
writing (and publishing) for the purely selfish reason of recording your ideas
and, by doing so, making them more permanent and more real, as it were. I
remember, during my academically active years, I never cared in the slightest
whether anyone was going to read my papers or my book. If anyone was
interested in my subject and were curious enough to discover them, they were
most welcome to them; but it was entirely immaterial to me whether anyone
actually did. This doesn’t mean I didn’t put any effort into writing those
texts; quite the contrary. But writing them was a goal in itself; it was never
a means to anything for which it would require wide audience.

I can’t imagine this attitude is unique.

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FlagsAreFun
I have worked in the academic sector and been exposed to it for a number of
additional years. Reading and disseminating research, and more importantly
citations, are a key intrinsic metric for researchers, and a KPI providing
extrinsic motivation from administration and research funding bodies.

Research impact is a huge force in the academic world these days, and research
can only have impact if read, understood and scrutinised by other researchers
- as well as the public.

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gubbrora
My internal monologue when reading this:

Imagine if people got funding based on Twitter engagement - what a disaster.

Why?

Well people buy Twitter engagement from bots.

And they don't buy citations?

Oh nooo, I can see that become a trend too. We are doomed!

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aaavl2821
I would love to see more academic scientists blogging, especially if they
wrote "laypersons" summaries of their scientific papers. I think this would be
a clear net positive for the world: scientific literacy would increase, people
would learn about all the amazing things going on in academic labs, and
professors and grad students could get more recognition (and maybe income?)
for jobs that are quite demanding but often dont pay a ton

But I wonder if blogging / social media would be viewed as "not serious" by
academics, or even make the blogger's peers think they are sell outs? I've
heard of grant funding decisions getting denied because a researcher issued a
press release, which one reviewer thought was too self-promotional. No idea
how widespread this attitude is however

~~~
throwayEngineer
I blog about my research applying industrial engineering to life at home.

Today my website is popular, but it's hard to direct traffic when getting
started. I should be the top Google result for Save Money On Food, but I'm
beat out by others with bigger name websites.

~~~
opportune
I've been to your website before. I think the other issue is that there just
aren't enough articles. I was also somewhat disappointed in the polyphasic
sleep articles since I found them pretty lacking in content

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opportune
I don't think twitter really counts as blogging. It is too low signal/noise
and doesn't leave enough room to seriously cover anything "academic" other
than linking to real blogs and articles

For actual blogging, there are a few considerations you need to take into
account. One is that academics will probably only blog if it can help their
career in some way. If you are a graduate student or associate professor it's
probably very low on your list of priorities - it also has a long payoff time
as you build up a following whereas a good publication has much more immediate
benefits. Another consideration is that for blogging to be worthwhile, there
needs to be a low number of producers for every X consumers. Right now I think
academic blogging doesn't have enough producers, but the size of the consumer
market is limited, so I don't think it makes sense for everyone to blog

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ve55
Good post. A lot of people see platforms like Twitter as inherently terrible,
but if you follow the right people, Twitter can be a very good platform to
learn new things and talk to interesting and smart people on. You just have to
carefully curate who you follow, remembering to unfollow anyone that posts bad
or excessively polarizing or uninteresting content.

The same goes for blogs, which are often looked down upon more than they
should be due to the negative connotations of referencing a blogpost rather
than a paper in a published journal, even though there are clearly some blogs
that are better than some journals.

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50656E6973
Doesnt twitter still force tweets into your feed from people you dont follow?

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bongobongo
Yes.

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possiblelion
Not if you use lists. They are one of the most underrated tools in Twitter;
allowing you to clean up and arrange your feed, Not having people you're not
following injected into your feed is just another bonus.

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errantspark
While I see worth in twitter the idea that in order to succeed in academia one
needs to participate in that stuff is stomach turning. It should be something
we resist, not encourage.

Academia shouldn't be a popularity contest. Social media is.

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matthewmacleod
Why do you feel it is a “popularity contest”?

When used in an academic context, I see it as a tool to more widely
disseminate research, with the particular benefit of reaching non-traditional
consumers.

~~~
jamesrcole
I agree. Not everyone uses social media as a popularity contest. No reason why
academic uses of it would need to be like that.

And trying to reach a wide audience is not the same as engaging in a shallow
popularity contest.

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romwell
Hello from the world of mathematics.

We already have ArXiV[0]. Think of it as a blogging platform. Any result worth
sharing ends up on ArXiV way before it gets published, and anyone who cares
about it will get notified.

This addresses all problems the author writes about: the research doesn't live
beyond a paywall, and people who are interested and qualified to read your
work will get notified about it.

Of course, putting a paper on ArXiV doesn't mean someone will read it. That's
what conferences are for, for better or worse: spreading the word about your
work, whether it's giving a talk, a poster, or just having a conversation over
beer (non-drinkers must have an awfully hard time in this field). Mathematics
is much more about people than one might think, and the best way to spread
ideas is to talk to people who can be interested in them _in the real world_.

Does it mean there's no place for blogging? Absolutely not; papers that get
posted on ArXiV often are too dry to understand, and lack the informal
motivation and intuition behind the research. We have lost the tradition of
informal writing in mathematics, and it needs to come back.

To that end, mathematicians _do_ blog, but the thing is: _it is hard_. It is
very hard to express the idea in a few words, to popularize it even to the
peers in your field. It certainly doesn't take 30 minutes to write anything
that others would be able to read. So math blogs exist, but are rather rare.

And most certainly, Twitter is not the right platform for that.

\-------------------------------------

TL;DR: the author should take ArXiV seriously.

[0][https://arxiv.org/](https://arxiv.org/)

~~~
killjoywashere
> mathematicians do blog, but the thing is: it is hard

I'm on the applied side of science and I think it's definitely hard but worth
doing when on the applied side. I have blogged and if you're purely
theoretical, I have no idea if it would be worth it. My research has a 1
sentence tagline that's awesome, but as soon as anyone wants more than that 1
sentence, they look under the covers and take a real pause as they see the
writhing mass of intertwined domains involved.

To get people from sentence 1 through to a basic but sound understanding of
the issues, from which I can start talking about 'where do we go from here'
requires what I dare say borders on performance art. Over several years and
untold presentations, I've gotten it down to about 7 minutes with the right
words and pictures and audience, and the audience response will be that sort
of perfect moment of hushed silence at the end, but the piles of errors and
failures, reams of words never read, data never even looked at, reels the
mind. I think back on all of that and cringe even as I wipe the sweat from my
brow and uncramp my fingers.

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romwell
It doesn't border on, it definitely _is_ performance art.

And yes, totally worth it; just wanted to point out that doing something like
that is not as easy as the author of this article makes it out to be ("look, I
made this in 30 minutes, so everyone else can, too!"). No appreciation for the
sweat and dread you went through to get there.

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thecleaner
Wait so now academics have to take social freaking media seriously ? Like
society's best brains have to take something that goes by the name of Facebook
(like a book for your ugly face ??) seriously. I doubt that the people who
take FB that seriously so as to get their information from it have the brains
to digest new knowledge. And there's Medium - the so-called publishing
platform that doesn't support math equations. The only blogs I will ever take
information from would be the Github pages because somebody atleast went to
the trouble of setting up Jekyll or even writing their own css and putting it
on Github. Not some website that has blue or greenish black colored shit
painted all over their UIs.

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Hnrobert42
This blog post demonstrates the exact opposite of the authors intent. The post
could have been reduced to 2 or 3 sentences. It is opinion supported by
anecdote. A post written in 30 minutes isn’t worth the 30 seconds it takes me
to read it.

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m0zg
Youtube, maybe. Put all your talks on Youtube for sure. But twitter is
purpose-built to for bullshit and manufactured outrage. I fail to see how it
can be useful to a scientist in any way other than to mine the firehose stream
for data.

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RosanaAnaDana
I'd put youtube right up there, especially considering how many high quality
introductions and how-to's are out there.

~~~
opportune
This is actually something I really want to work on. There are many very poor
academic-oriented videos on youtube, most of which are either someone with a
tenuous grasp of the material explaining something in poor english, or a
straight copy of a long lecture.

I think there is definitely a niche for bite-sized 5-10 minute videos covering
focused topics in the undergrad/early grad curriculum in Math and CS. Like
this is what a doubly linked list is, this is what dropout is, this is a
walkthrough of a real analysis proof, etc.

You could add links to code snippets, github repos, latex papers, etc. And use
animations/editing to make the presentation concise and visually appealing.
Dabbling in something like this has been on my todo list for almost 4 years at
this point

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anonymous5133
The academics putting stuff on youtube is almost laughable. It really exposes
their flaws outright. Their lectures are boring and dull. Heck, it even shows
how poorly some of these people are at teaching. Sure, we get it, you have a
PHD in physics and you're smart but who cares about that if you can't actually
teach the material.

No wonder so many kids these days are flocking to youtube to learn stuff. It
is because of how horrible the current education system is. We put people in
teaching positions when they can't even teach in the first place.

The truth is youtube, the internet and computers are absolutely game changing
technology when it comes to education. With the right tools, youtube +
internet + right computer tools will be able to provide the best learning
experience for the student, even beating out top-tier education institutions.

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PunksATawnyFill
Always hated the misuse of "web log" to mean some kind of diary.

