Academic / Online: All the links that don't work in print

Hello, readers! On March 4, I visited the College of Arts at the University of Guelph, and gave a talk on the topic of "Academic/Online" in their Digital Humanities series. Many thanks to Kathy Hanneson for inviting me!

During that talk I referenced a lot of web sites, and showed them, too, but I thought having a page with all the links might be useful. This is that page..

In the talk, I argued that to be “academic/online” is to push advances across two different fronts.

1. You need to develop and cultivate a persona that you send into the Internet to act on your behalf in all your scholarly travels. It has to represent you accurately and effectively. And also, we can hope, efficiently. So we’ll talk about that, about being an academic online, in the noun sense (“I am an academic, who has a presence online”). 
2. Moving beyond the individual, we will also consider what it means to move the academic online, in the adjective sense (“Let’s get my academic research out there, on the intertubes!”). Academic/online in this sense can encompass everything from whole libraries moving online, to workshops or conferences maintaining a hashtag backchannel or putting abstracts online, to new forms of hybrid publication blending the heft of peer review with the utility of online distribution. 

The introductory and concluding portions of the talk did the analytic work: considering the bigger picture implications of these shifts in practice and what they mean for the future of academic work in both idealistic and pragmatic ways. This material is not included here--here it's just links to all the great examples of academic/online that I discussed.

An Academic Online

My own personal footprint as an individual academic / online:

• My Twitter, @digiwonk
• My group blog, Hook & Eye
• My graduate class blog, New Media Genres
• My delicious bookmarks, @digiwonk
• My Zotero group database for Deciphering Digital Life Writing
• My solo blog, that you're reading right now
• My Academia.edu profile, that I should use more, per Jessica Vitak's recent interview.

Here's two blog posts by Rohan Maitzen, that I mentioned, which defend blogging as a curiosity-driven intellectual practice and link this to real world practices of dabbling and discovering, or not:

• Blogging and Intellectual Curiosity
• Intellectual Curiosity: True Confessions Edition

Here's a ProfHacker post by Ryan Cordell I didn't mention, but I should have, on becoming an academic/online--this post links out to many great resources online:

• Creating and Maintaining a Professional Presence Online: A Roundup and Reflection

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The Academic Online

Academic Projects Online

I opened with the example of the multi-pronged project online that is the Quilt Alliance and all its various permutations in different communities and contexts. Here's a sampler, if you will pardon the pun:

• Quilt Alliance home page
• Great Lakes Quilt Centre at the Michigan State University Museum
• Quilt Alliance on Facebook
• Quilt Alliance on Twitter

These are the academic-based research projects I referenced in the talk:

• Active History
• INKE: Implementing New Knowledge Environments
• Emerging Modernisms: A Digital Modernism Collective
• EMIC: Editing Modernism in Canada

Academic Publishing Online

Here are some links related to online journals that look more like journals, and less like online :-)

• Canadian Journal of Disability Studies
• Public Knowledge Project / Open Journal Systems

Here are some new kinds and ways of periodical publishing on the web:

• PressForward: "Scholarship and Publication, the Web Way"
• Digital Humanities Now 
• Journal of Digital Humanities

How about books? These are going online in new ways, too.

• The Social Media Reader, somehow locked at Project Muse
• The Social Media Reader, perfectly legal PDF on the web
• Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom, note Creative Commons license and Princeton imprimatur
• Short Guide to Digital Humanities as a web-friendly book excerpt of
• Digital Humanities, available for free from MIT P, but with the standard no-copy disclaimer?
• Digital Literary Studies: An Evolving Anthology at MLA Commons