From Blog to Book

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Blogging as a digital means of research communication seems so simple: with free, easy-to-use platforms we’re all just a few clicks away from setting one up. But having set a blog up, the difficult work begins. Who are you talking to? What are you trying to achieve? How will you generate your content? How will the people you want to talk to find it? How are you going to keep it going alongside your research and teaching commitments? Will it make any difference to anything? And will you ever be able to transform any of this work into a scholarly publication that ‘counts’?

This session will be an interactive conversation between Julie Blake, Cambridge Digital Humanities Methods Fellow and Connie Ruzich, University Professor of English at Robert Morris University, Pittsburgh, USA. Connie’s Behind Their Lines blog started in 2014 during a Fulbright Scholarship at Exeter University to research First World War poetry in the context of the Centenary Commemorations. She became interested in the lost and neglected poetry of the First World War and began blogging about her ‘finds’. Five years later, she has had almost 400,000 visits to her blog, she maintains a lively dialogue with public and academic audiences including via Twitter and she is in the final stages of completing a monograph about this material with Bloomsbury Academic.

We’ll discuss the highs and lows of Connie’s research blogging experience, the surprises, the pitfalls and the lessons learned by hard won experience. We’ll try to answer all the questions listed above, and participants will be invited to join in with their own questions.

PhD Students and Staff

Number of sessions: 1