I'm cheating on my blog with two other blogs.

I do love a side project. Maybe it's a hangover from my days working in advertising where I would often work for several clients at the same time. Or perhaps it's simply the product of an overactive imagination (or the inadvertent outcome of a short attention span). Whatever the reason, working several projects at the same time seems to help keep me feeling inspired, engaged and productive. An unfortunate side effect of this intellectual promiscuity has been the neglect of historypunk, a shortcoming I am determined to rectify with a series of new posts. And in the meantime? Here's what I've been doing over the past few months...

The Digital Antipodes

In September 2012, I co-founded the Digital Antipodes, an interdisciplinary Digital Humanities reading group at UWA, with my colleague James Smith. Since this time we've built a small but enthusiastic network of digital humanists and had some fascinating conversations. Professionally, it's been a great way for me to structure learning about digital humanities outside of my PhD thesis (which is not a dedicated DH project). I hope to blog about the process of building this network soon to assist others who may like to launch a similar group.

Exhibit A: The Digital Antipodes.

The History Diaries

I've also been teaching WA History and Heritage alongside Prof. Andrea Gaynor which I have been enjoying immensely. We recently launched an online platform where our students can express their ideas and analysis during the semester. They're working in four publishing teams to contribute to a class blog -  The History Diaries. This curriculum development project is an adaptation of a previous assessment which required individual students to hand in a 'Diary' at the end of the semester containing their reflections on heritage site visits. So many great ideas. We wanted to share them. We're encouraging our students to become critical thinkers and the aim of the project is to 'make thinking visible'. Students are not only required to blog, but to read and comment on each other's work. It's a way to extend thinking and learning outside of the classroom and engage our wider community. And once we're done, the blog will become a permanent archive of class conversations. My pedagogical approach benefited greatly from reading about the experiences of others who have attempted similar projects and I hope to contribute to this conversation soon with a blog post outlining the mechanics of the assessment in more detail.

Exhibit B: Our class blog,  The History Diaries

Of course, my day job is still my PhD thesis. At the beginning of the year I spent six weeks in Canberra conducting archival research at the National Archives of Australia and am currently writing my second chapter.  It's looking to be an action packed year!

Why is military history so popular?

Gallipoli (1981 film)

Storytelling about war is an ancient form of historical writing. Stories of war feature prominently in the oldest recorded histories and earliest known examples of literature in the western world: for example, Homer’s Illiad. These stories tend to celebrate the achievements of military commanders and marginalise the efforts and suffering of soldiers and civilians: a trope that remained dominant for thousands of years.

The development of social history in the 1970s revolutionised the ways in which stories about war were told. In Australia, historians wrote new military histories that illuminated the experiences of ordinary soldiers. Titles such as The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (1974) by Bill Gammage and The Anzacs by Patsy Adam Smith (1978) drew heavily from soldiers’ diaries and letters, injecting the historical genre with new life.  They also provided a foundation from which to create new fictional works. Peter Weir has cited The Broken Years as a key text when writing the 1981 blockbuster film, 'Gallipoli’, hiring Gammage to work on set as a historical consultant.

Over the past twenty years, Australians have developed an insatiable appetite for all things Anzac. Military history is big business. Australians read books about Anzac history, watch documentaries and films, visit museums and overseas battlefields, and attend commemorative events such as the AFL Anzac Day Clash. Few of these projects involve academic historians. Why?

Popular narratives of war are beset with intense human drama and emotion, yet tend to fall into comfortable dichotomies of right and wrong. The heroes and villains of past wars are easily recognisable, offering reassurance in a world comprised of shades of grey. While exposing us to the worst of humanity, perhaps we also feel it celebrates the best? Bookshelves and cinemas are dominated by stories of heroism and sacrifice. Do tales of risk and adventure hold a particular appeal to those who wish to escape the sanitised and structured boundaries of modern life? Paradoxically then, the search for ‘authenticity’ leads consumers into imagined worlds. The terrible dichotomies of war provide us with a satisfying catharsis, allowing us to express anger and grief, yet ultimately entertains us - offering a range of exciting and compelling stories.

Not only have the types of stories we tell about war changed, we have developed new ways to tell them.  Television, documentaries, film, publishing and tourism convey history with vivid realism, employing evocative imagined sights and sounds. Alison Landsburg argues that “the modern marketplace has developed an unprecedented ability to create and disseminate evocative, hyper-real, representations of the past to large numbers of people who did not experience these events for themselves”(1). 

Military history is the best-selling genre of historical writing in Australia, yet remains unpopular with historians, many of whom feel uncomfortable with the kinds of narratives disseminated by consumer culture. Michelle Arrow has recognised that “the sense of emotional connection popular histories aim to evoke – the idea that the viewer can know what those in the past thought and felt – runs counter to most historians’ notions of historical understanding”(2).

Today, most best selling military histories are written by journalists and amateur historians, yet professional scholars have shown signs of re-entering this territory. In 2012, historian Bruce Scates published On Dangerous Ground: A Gallipoli Story, a fictional account of the Gallipoli campaign based on robust historical research. With the Anzac Centenary looming, I hope others follow his lead.

Footnotes:
(1) Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
(2) Michelle Arrow, 'The Making History initiative and Australian popular history', Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, Vol 15, No. 2, 2011, p.154.

Digital humanities and the future of universities

Are we really going to let accountants
decide the future of universities?

It's been an eventful few weeks in Australian higher education. The Conversation launched a series of articles exploring the future of higher education, culminating in a symposium on Tuesday 22 October in collaboration with the Office for Learning and Teaching.

The same day, the federal government announced a midyear budget that included cuts of around $1 billion dollars to the university sector.

On Wednesday 23 October, an apocalyptic Ernst & Young report investigating the University of the Future decreed that "over the next 10-15 years, the current public university model in Australia will prove unviable in all but a few cases".

The report was immediately critiqued by academics and policy makers, many of whom argued the conclusions were not based on robust evidence - noting the lack of depth and omission of several previous studies - and questioned the motivations, bias and vested interests of a large accounting firm. Australian senator and higher education spokesperson, Lee Rhiannon, slated the report as a "gloom and doom picture designed to grease the way for the private sector to profit from universities" insisting that the "the challenges facing public university education in Australia can be best met by increased government funding to restore decade long cuts".

There is no doubt that Australian higher education is in dire need of new business models. A real commitment to change and innovation is required to meet the challenges facing the  sector.  But are we really prepared to let a large accountancy firm dictate this future?

The new digital economy requires new ways of thinking and the creation of new spaces within universities to facilitate this at all levels. In the midst of this I came across a new article in DH quarterly that outlined the small but important contribution that digital humanities departments can play in creating spaces within which to generate debate and discussion from the ground up. 

"Over the last couple of years, it has become increasingly clear that the digital humanities is associated with a visionary and forward-looking sentiment, and that the field has come to constitute a site for far-reaching discussions about the future of the field itself as well as the humanities at large. Based on a rich set of materials closely associated with the formation of the digital humanities, this article explores the visions and expectations associated with the digital humanities and how the digital humanities often becomes a laboratory and means for thinking about the state and future of the humanities. It is argued that this forward-looking sentiment comes both from inside and outside the field, and is arguably an important reason for the attraction and importance of the field."

Patrik Svensson, "Envisioning the Digital Humanities", Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 6, No. 1, 2012.

While I would never suggest that digital humanities departments should lead change within the sector, the article eloquently articulated the kind of culture that is being nurtured in these departments -  one that I think needs to develop within all faculties and schools. A culture of openness, innovation and dialogue - rather than fear, silence and nostalgia for a long gone status quo.

"Tell your story": Blogging & social media strategy for academics

There is nothing that gets me more excited than empowering creative thinkers to spread good ideas. The complex global challenges of our time necessitate new ways to harness academic innovation and connect critical thinkers with public audiences - and technology offers new opportunities for digital storytelling. Luckily for me, I happen to work at a university where I am continually surrounded by incredible talent.

I always enjoyed working in advertising and marketing and the decision to pursue a PhD in Australian history was not an easy one. But here I am, 6 months into my PhD, and I am constantly surprised at how my previous career impacts upon my thinking and practice. Indeed, I can hardly call it my previous career at all - such is the way that it informs my approach to scholarship every single day.

This year, I have been thinking a lot about communication strategies to help academics articulate their research to communities that matter and I was thrilled to be able to present some of these ideas to a group of UWA postgraduate students this week. You can view the presentation on slideshare. It was a fantastic experience - we had some thought-provoking conversations and I think I learned just as much as the students did. I'd love your thoughts on the pilot session!

A few additional resources (added on 1 October, 2012):

1. Fantastic video: Noam Chomsky on "concision" (From "Chomsky and the Media", 1992).
2. Ideas have value. They are not 'free'. We spoke a little about the ways in which technology has acted to devalue creative outputs. If you're interested in different perspectives on "freeconomics" check out this Wired Magazine article by Chris Anderson 'Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business'. You can also check out Anderson's book Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
3. UWA does have a social media policy and you can read it here. You can also read UWA's web policy (draft) here.

The Employable PhD: How to prepare for your future career before you submit

Postgraduate students are intellectual entrepreneurs: creative, highly motivated freethinkers who are expert at solving problems. So, why is it that they often feel least prepared to enter the workforce?

I'm really excited to be speaking at short seminar series, presented by the wonderful University of Western Australia Postgraduate Students Association - "The Employable PhD".

The aim of the seminars? To explore strategies that can help postgraduate students prepare for their post-PhD career before they submit their thesis.

We’re all aware it’s getting more challenging to secure academic roles. What other options are available and how can students better prepare for these opportunities?

The seminar series will feature business coach & educator, Arjun Murthy, and topics include: how to identify key strengths, market academic skill-sets to non-academic employers, navigate hidden job markets, network effectively and optimise your online presence.

Here's an overview of the three sessions...

Tuesday, 25 September - “Know thy self": Identify your strengths and skills

The essential first step in career management is to understand the strengths and  skills that you can offer employers. This seminar will be presented by coach and trainer Arjun Murthy, who will assist you to better understand your personality preferences and transferable skills.
+ RSVP on Facebook

Wednesday, 26 September - "Tell your story" Promoting yourself and your research online

With more and more employers using Google to screen job candidates, establishing a strong online presence is now one of the most powerful ways to gain a competitive advantage in job markets. This interactive session, presented by myself, will address common concerns that prevent academics from promoting their research online and outline how to develop a communications strategy that will allow you to tell your story to a global audience, build a community around your research, and become an influencer in your discipline area.

Please bring an ipad or laptop to this session if you can as we will take a tour of the interwebs at some point. However,  if I see you on Facebook I will cut off your hands. Kidding*!

+ RSVP on Facebook

Thursday, 27 September - “Don’t just sit there!”: Strategies to proactively seek out career opportunities

Discover a toolbox of strategies to help you seek out opportunities in your chosen job market - or even create new ones. Arjun Murthy and myself will explore career management and goal setting, tips for effective networking, and how to identify hidden job markets.
+ RSVP on Facebook

I'm looking forward to sharing the results and will report back in a few weeks!

*I'm not really kidding.

Promoting yourself & your research: Creating a personal website

image courtesy of Threadless

I meet a lot of PhD students and early career researchers who are interested in establishing an online presence. Many are aware that communicating research online can give them a competitive advantage but are not sure where to start.

Essentially, creating an online communications strategy for your research involves two activities: creating a space online that tells a story about yourself and your research, and driving traffic to this location.

This blog post will provide a guide to choosing a content platform that will bring your research to life in the limited time you have available. My next blog post will outline how to drive traffic to this content platform.

Step 1. What’s your strategy?

Starting a blog without a strategy is like commencing a research project without a proposal. A great way to waste your valuable time.  What outcomes do you want to achieve as a result of this activity? What specific audience are you writing for?  Do you want to build an academic community around your work, engage practitioners who will apply your research, or communicate with public audiences? Focus is essential. These audiences have very different concerns.  How will you measure success?  Blogs and social media are not low cost communication channels. While they may cost very little to set up, the opportunity costs are enormous. In fact - thinking strategically about online reputation building is so important I have written an entire blog post about it: read this first.

Step 2.  Choose a domain name.

Think carefully about your website domain name because changing it later is not easy. Blogging involves spending years and months growing an active, engaged community around a specific topic. Changing your blog name, target audience or topic area should be avoided.

Confession time! Guilty as charged. I initially started Historypunk in 2010 as a public facing blog to share stories about Australian history. Two years later, I made the decision to change direction and build an academic community around my research interests instead. I was lucky to be able to keep my blog name the same, but I (initially) lost some readers.

Tips for choosing a domain name

• Your blog name should be unique, easy to remember, and easy to spell (avoid hyphens).  
• Aim for consistency. Your blog title and domain name (URL) should match. If possible, your social media accounts should match too.
• Do you want to include key words in the domain name?  These can help communicate the topic clearly and also boost search engine rankings. Academic blogs that use topic key words in their titles include the brilliant Early Modern John blog by historian John Gallagher, Feminist Frequency by pop culture critic Anita Sakeesan and Georgian London by the wonderful Lucy Inglis.
• Do you want to invent something new? You might wish to invent a unique domain name that you can define in your own way (a bit like a brand name). This is the approach I chose. Being less specific can also allow you more flexibility when it comes to content. For example, Ryan Hunt’s digital humanities blog IvryTwr, Tim Sheratts’ Discontents, and medical history blog - Wonders and Marvels.
• Think carefully about the future. How quickly will you outgrow your blog name? What would happen if you changed your field of research? To avoid these kind of issues, many scholars choose to blog under their own name. This includes digital humanist Dan Cohen and urban historian Katrina Gulliver.  Historian Fred Gibbs recently wrote a wonderful post on this subject - outlining the reasons why he changed his blog name from Historyproef to Fredgibs.net.

 

"I’ve got a couple of ideas for a domain name. What should I do next?"

1. Google them! Before you decide on a name you should explore the search landscape. Eventually you want your blog to appear at the top of Google search rankings. Are there any major competitors that will prevent this?  For example, if you share your name with a well known celebrity. When I first googled ‘Jo Hawkins’ and ‘Historypunk’ I discovered a search landscape dominated by ‘Betty Jo Hawkins’, a female wrestler who toured the USA in the 1950s*, and several websites that explored the history of punk music. After a few years blogging my site now appears above these topics in search rankings.
2.  Check if the URL is available
3. Are corresponding Twitter and Facebook accounts available?

*I know! I was utterly thrilled.

Step 3. Purchase your domain name.

If you have come up with a good domain name, purchase it as soon as you can. You can set up the website later. They are fairly cheap so if you have a few potential names, perhaps secure a couple of them.

I purchased both www.historypunk.com and www.historypunk.com.au. In Australia, you need to have an ABN to purchase a .com.au domain name but can register for a sole trader ABN for free online in a couple of minutes. I also own www.johawkins.com.au  but don't use it right now (www.johawkins.com had already been purchased by someone else).

A word of caution. If there is any chance  - any chance at all - that you will use these domain names in the future, do not let them lapse. Make sure you renew them each year. The web is full of pirates who will buy a recently lapsed domain name and try to sell it back to you at a hefty profit.

Step 4. Choose a content platform.

Traditional blogs

Wordpress and Blogger are both open source blogging platforms that are easy to use and come with plenty of design options. Most academics who blog use one of these platforms. Think carefully about which blogging platform you choose as it is complicated to change it later. I created my blog using ‘Blogger’ but, in hindsight, I think Wordpress has a larger range of design options. It is too much work to change it so it is staying like it is!

Social blogs

You've probably heard of Tumblr. This content platform is based on the insight that people don't just want to create new content - they want to share existing content. Tumblr makes it easy to do just that. You can choose to write an original blog post - or 're-blog' a post from another Tumblr blog on your own platform. The design has been optimised for those who share lots of images and multimedia. Due its visual nature and the ease of creating and sharing content I think Tumbr is a particularly good platform for blogs aimed at bridging academic and public audiences. Popular Tumblr blogs include scientist Joe Hanson's It’s Ok to Be Smart, the interdisciplinary Explore blog and Today’s Document  - a fascinating blog updated daily by the US national archives

Don’t have time to blog?

If you don’t have time to author a blog you have a few options. You could choose to create a static website to bring your research to life - a strategy employed to great effect by historian Peter Stanley and UWA digital humanist Brett Hirsch.  However, static sites are updated less frequently and thus likely to receive less traffic - especially if you are not building upon an already established reputation. Blogging is powerful because Google will rank your site  higher in search results if (1) they see you update it regularly, (2) people visit it often and, (3) they notice other sites linking to it.

Another option is to direct traffic to your Linked In or Academia.edu account. Just remember, while these sites are strongly optimised for search rankings, you don’t ‘own’ these platforms. You are essentially creating a community on someone else’s site  - one which they can change or monetise as they see fit. The same goes for directing traffic to the staff profile on your university website. If you leave this workplace, you can't take this with you.

"Hang on, how do I redirect my blog to the domain name/s I have purchased?"

Website hosting describes the service of storing the text, images and design of your blog. When you create a website using Wordpress or Blogger they automatically host it for you. For example, when I first created this site using Blogger it was hosted under the name www.historypunksociety.blogspot.com. It didn't really matter what I called the site on Blogger as I knew I wanted to redirect the site to my own URL - www.historypunk.com. You just need to contact a third party provider to arrange this. My site is hosted by Crazy Domains for under $20 per year. I simply called them and they talked me through the process - it took about 20 minutes.

Step 5. Design your site.

Don’t get too hung up on design at the start. Keep it simple. It is not practical for me to build a bespoke site so I use (free) templates provided by my blogging platform. My blog uses the ‘Simple’ template from Blogger which I customised it using fonts and colours.  Nothing fancy! Just clean, classic design.

Step 6: Write your first post.

The fun begins! A few tips for creating powerful content:

The title

• Make the title of each blog post work hard
• The headline should be descriptive and catchy. Check out some great advice here on how to write eye-catching blog headlines.
• Include topic keywords where possible as they will assist SEO

Body copy

• Avoid jargon. Embrace plain English.
• You need to catch a reader's attention so a journalistic style works well. Get to the point quickly. State your findings early, rather than stripping away layers of meaning and concluding with the findings.
• Use headings and subheadings to make your posts easy to scan.
• Use multimedia and images where possible to bring content to life.
• Remember that people have different ways of learning and decision-making so experiment with different communication styles.
• Check out Problogger for lots of useful advice to help you write engaging blog content.

My thesis in three minutes (using Qwiki)

As a self-confessed digital storytelling geek, I’m always interested in new formats and technologies. Inspired by the digital humanities manta “more hack, less yack” it occurred to me that I should take a more hands on approach. This week I thought I’d try out Qwiki – a new platform that combines online interactivity with video and allows people to create dynamic visual web content in minutes.

For me, the most interesting thing about Qwiki is its built-in production values.  It allows you to create slick, professional looking video without the need for complex editing software. Online video shouldn’t be too polished. Keeping it real and being authentic is important – you don’t need to pretend to be a professional broadcaster. Yet, production is probably a major barrier to those considering video content and I like the potential of this product to democratise visual storytelling.


I’m writing my PhD proposal at the moment so it made sense to base a project around this. I wrote the script in around an hour, did one take of video (using the built in webcam on my laptop) and created my Qwiki in about 20 minutes.

Play the Qwiki: My thesis in three minutes.

If you are creating online content, video is a great addition to the mix. It’s a powerful way to bring content to life and engage people for whom visual communications is a preferred communication method. The golden rule? Don’t use video to replicate – use it to animate. It is a complimentary format rather than a replacement for written content. Before you commence, ask yourself why this particular story should be told visually.

At just over 3 minutes, my Qwiki actually feels much too long. I think this format would work better at half this length. If I used it again, I would keep it really simple. I think a short, stand-alone Qwiki could work well within the context of a longer blog post to express part of the story visually. I was a little frustrated about the lack of flexibility but I realise that the simplicity of this product is also its strength.  I would also take advantage of the ability of this medium to integrate other forms of online content to enrich the story; including Google maps, tweets and links.