Slides for a presentation to Nottingham Law School on blogging. Co-writers: Michael Eburn, Paul Maharg

1. Michael Eburn
Paul Maharg
paulmaharg.com/slides
‘Writing out loud’: blogging and the
rhetoric of web thinking/writing

2. preview
1. Digital media
2. Blogs and Wordpress
3. Example 1: Paul Maharg’s blog
4. Example 2: Michael Eburn’s blog
5. Bibliometrics > altmetrics
6. Some (personal) conclusions

3. what is blogging?
Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to
athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less
formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
Andrew Sullivan @
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/why-i-blog/307060/

4. why should we care about this?
What scandalized the serious scholar Erasmus (as it fascinated
Dürer) was the fact that, not much more than half a century
after the first appearance of the printed book, demand had
turned it into a product beyond the control of the scholars and
specialists. The book had taken over as the transmitter of
European written culture, before scholars and educators had
had time to come to terms with its power and influence.
(Jardine, 1996, p. 228)

5. why should we care about this?
What scandalized the serious scholar Erasmus (as it fascinated
Dürer) was the fact that, not much more than half a century
after the first appearance of the printed book, demand had
turned it into a product beyond the control of the scholars and
specialists. The book digital revolution will take over as the
transmitter of European written culture, before scholars and
educators have time to come to terms with its power and
influence.
(Jardine, 1996, p. 228)

6. 1. Digital media

7. digital media
Pros Cons
Wide dissemination, remains at a more or
less fixed place for readers to return &
download, etc
Can be time-consuming & addictive; are
you getting to the people you want to
read your stuff?
Gathering, sorting, archiving of digital
information very useful
Apps disappear or go corporate
Builds academic profile through altmetrics Can encourage narcissism & grandiosity if
used as vanity projects
Facilitates the Open – open access, open
education, OE resources
Privacy can be an issue (cf Facebook)
Supports knowledge as a public good Do we want that? Should knowledge
always be public?
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8. deeper issues
1. What’s digital?
Specific devices, networks, assemblages? Technical, educational, research
affordances, modes of text and search, specific skills, competences, practices,
environments?
2. How does digital alter social?
Eg distributed communities, socio-material understandings, means of production
& modes of use
3. How does digital (+ social) alter literacies?
Eg artefacts and practices, formal and informal contexts of research, visual
artefacts, digital curation.
4. How does digital encourage metricization of our working lives, and what can we
do about it?
1

9. transforming features of digital…
– Replicability
– Mutability
– Connectivity
– Instantaneity (& the ‘nearly now’)
– Portability
– Identity (Jones 2013, 162-65)
All of which are key features of blogs.
1

10. and now impact comes over the horizon
In REF2014, it meant evidencing a narrative that was:
Instrumental
• Influencing the development of policy practice or service provision
• Shaping behaviour
• Altering legislation
Conceptual
• Contributing to our understanding of the above
• Reframing debates
1

11. Capacity-building
• Technical/professional skills development
Cultural change
• Increased willingness to engage in knowledge exchange activities – by
individuals, and/or institutions
• Changed mindsets
Enduring connectivity
• Establishment of enduring academic / non-academic relationships –
indicator of potential future achievements or impacts
1

12. 2. Blogs and Wordpress

13. 2

14. publishing platforms: blogging2

15. 3. Example 1: Paul Maharg’s blog

16. 3

17. why do I blog?
http://paulmaharg.com
17.3.2005 > present. Originally Typepad,
now Wordpress. Used for:
• Dissemination of ideas & research
• Construction yard for sections of papers & articles
• Sky-writing (Steven Harnard)
• Identity formation
• Reflections, insights
• Statement about use of digital for serious exploration
• Connecting on Blawg
3

18. some stats3

19. some
stats3

20. publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter
http://slideshare.net/paulmaharg
Used for:
• Dissemination of slidedecks
• Set alerts for others’ presentations
• Re Twitter, use third-party apps & aggregators, eg
TweetDeck to manage the dataflow
3

21. publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter3

22. including pre- / post-conference chat3

23. some slideshare stats3

24. 3

25. Blog + slides + digital collections
• See http://bit.ly/1jUx36K

26. 4. Example 2: Michael Eburn’s blog

27. Australian Emergency Law
• Why blog?
• Choice of platform.
• Who's reading it and how often?
• My [ie Michael’s] practice.
• Reflections.

28. Why blog?
• To learn how.
• To claim the territory.
• University outreach.

31. Choice of platform
• Wordpress allowed:
– easy setup;
– sharing with and ;;
– export to
(but that’s stopped working);
– a statistics page;
– allows readers to comment (subject to approval).

32. Who's reading it and how often? March 2013
• What?
– 147 posts.
– 353 comments.
• Who?
– 301 followers on
– 140 on
– 204 connections on
– 645

33. Who's reading it and how often? October 2015
• What?
– 477 posts.
– 1274 comments.
• Who?
– 1067 followers on
– 909 on
– 328 on twitter
– 638 followers on
+ 330
+ 921
+ 766
+ 769
+ 328
+ 434
+ 2297

34. Where have they come from in 2015?

41. In the week 2-8 October
• I made 10 posts.
• My blog ‘reached’ 23 683 people via Facebook.
• 2424 of them ‘engaged’ by clicking ‘like’, making a
comment or sharing the post.
• Add the followers on WordPress and LinkedIn and it
was received by not less than 25 061 people – in one
week!

42. My Practice
• Blog regularly, at least once a
fortnight.
• The blog is a site for discussion so I:
– Invite questions (and ask for permission
to blog the answer);
– Respond to comments;
– Edit the obvious errors;
– Maintain nettiquette; but allow robust
discussion.

43. My Practice
• Link to sources.
• Adhere to academic and legal honesty.

44. Reflections
• The readership is larger than I ever imagined;
• The feedback is (so far) all positive;
• Of all the writing I do, I think this has the widest
reach and highest impact (but no DEST points);
• It's become my notebook.

45. It has opened huge doors
• I’m invited to travel around Australia and the world
because of the blog.
• For example, next week I’m off to Western Australia
and the Gold Coast to speak to
– The Navy;
– WALGA and LGIS; and
– National meeting of SES volunteers associations.

46. It has impact…
• I’ve been consulted by Governments and emergency
services on law and policy;
• The blog’s been cited (but I can’t point to a metric on
that).
• Senior officers use it and rely on the blog!

47. Comments –
• “Everyone reads it”;
• “You have a cult following”;
• “Michael Eburn may not know many people in this
room, but we all feel we know him”; and
• “You’re not Michael Eburn are you?”

48. 5. Bibliometrics > altmetrics

49. altmetrics…?
See altmetrics.org:
‘the creation and study of new metrics based on the
Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship’
5

50. existing impact: how we are judged
Existing filters:
• Peer-review
• Citation counting
eg h-index
• Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
5

51. existing impact: how we are judged
• … of a journal: A measure of the average number of citations
to articles published in science & social science journals in a 3-
year period (Eugene Garfield, ISI). Calculated annually for the
journals indexed in Thomson Reuters Journal Citation
Reports.
• Calculation: number of times articles were cited in indexed
journals divided by number of items published in journals.
• Pressure on authors to enter high-ranked journals
• Pressure on journals to stay high-ranked
5

52. existing impact: how we are judged…
BUT…
• JIF is easily gamed:
http://bit.ly/1uYDPgE
• And gives inaccurate views of
journal quality:
http://bit.ly/1Ddo8Be
5

53. … hence altmetrics
‘With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review. Instead of waiting months for two
opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations and
bookmarks in a week. In the short term, this is likely to supplement traditional peer-
review, perhaps augmenting rapid review in journals like PLoS ONE, BMC Research
Notes or BMJ Open. In the future, greater participation and better systems for
identifying expert contributors may allow peer review to be performed entirely from
altmetrics.
Unlike the JIF, altmetrics reflect the impact of the article itself, not its venue. Unlike
citation metrics, altmetrics will track impact outside the academy, impact of
influential but uncited work, and impact from sources that aren’t peer-reviewed.
Some have suggested altmetrics would be too easy to game; we argue the opposite.’
altmetrics: a manifesto -- http://bit.ly/1tldeJA
5

54. what might altmetrics look like?
Altmetrics: a manifesto – http://bit.ly/1tldeJA
5

55. ANU page – ‘Increasing your research impact’
http://libguides.anu.edu.au/content.php?pid=499217&sid=4105636
5

56. …so crowdsourcing via the Open movement, in
data & scholarship, might be the answer?
Eg
• Datacite
• DASH (Harvard)
• Caselaw
• Ravel Law
Further reading:
http://bit.ly/1LgPtbo
• ANU Digital Collections
5

57. and there are tools to measure institutions5

58. learning more about biblio>alt
Quantifying and Analysing Scholarly Communications on the Web, June ‘15
http://ascw.know-center.tugraz.at/
5

59. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/hefcemetrics-review/
5

60. The Metric Tide argues for metrics with …
• Robustness: basing metrics on the best possible data in terms of accuracy
and scope;
• Humility: recognising that quantitative evaluation should support – but
not supplant – qualitative, expert assessment;
• Transparency: keeping data collection and analytical processes open and
transparent, so that those being evaluated can test and verify the results;
• Diversity: accounting for variation by field, and using a variety of
indicators to support diversity across the research system;
• Reflexivity: recognising systemic and potential effects of indicators and
updating them in response.
www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/metrics
5

61. 6. Some conclusions

62. what can bloggers do?
• Acknowledge the ceaseless emergence of technology, and engage with it
as widely as our time & energy allows
• Base our practices on community and collaboration: share what we know,
learn from each other via blogs
• Be Open in teaching and research: support the Open movement
• Read & engage with the research eg on Impact Blog
• Blog: use new media to shape our research and our narratives of social
engagement and impact – before someone else shapes it for us.
6

63. some useful references
BIALL Legal Information Literacy Statement, http://www.biall.org.uk/data/files/BIALL_Legal_Information_Literacy_Statement_July_2012.pdf
Cheston, C.C., Flickinger, T.E., Chisholm, M.S. (2013). Social media use in medical education: A systematic review, Academic Medicine. 88, 6,
893-901.
Holmes, K. (2014). Going beyond bibliometric and altmetric counts to understand impact. http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/articles/2014-
05/going-beyond-bibliometric-and-altmetric-counts-understand-impact#sthash.4stanFFN.dpuf
Jardine, L. (1996). Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. Macmillan, London.
Jones, C. (2013). The digital university: a concept in need of definition. In R. Goodfellow, M.R.Lea, eds, Literacy in the Digital University.
Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship and Technology. SRHE, Routledge, London, 162-172.
Jordan, K. (2014). Academics and their online networks: Exploring the role of academic social networking sites. Available at:
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4937/4159
Konkiel, S. (2014) Playing with altmetrics. http://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/altmetrics-services/#more-3175
Maliniak, D., Powers, R., Walter, B.F. (2013). The gender citation gap in International Relations. International Organization, 67, 4, 889-922.
http://bit.ly/1yYFxym
SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy (2011). The Core Model.http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf
Veletsianos, G. (2013). Open practices and identity: Evidence from researchers and educators’ social media participation. British Journal of
Education Technology, 44, 4, 639-51.
Yang, Kiduk and Meho, Lokman I. Citation Analysis: A Comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science., 2006 . In 69th Annual
Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST), Austin (US), 3-8 November 2006. [Conference paper],
http://eprints.rclis.org/8605/

64. Email:paul.maharg@anu.edu.au
Web: paulmaharg.com
Slides: paulmaharg.com/slides