Gordon Watts writes an interesting story of tenure review and the productivity of a long-lasting experiment in particle physics: "200 Run 2 Papers from DZERO." Let's just say that the journal cuts off access to a university because a single researcher is printing papers for his tenure review! And this:
As far as DZERO’s ability to mark passing time, there are 18 people that have helped this experiment and didn’t live to see the 200’th paper.
(via Not Even Wrong)
This is part 2 of my four-part series on blogging and tenure. In the last installment, I mentioned the kinds of motivations that might drive a tenure-track scientist to blog, and naturally your personal motivation will help drive your writing style. What I aim to do in this installment is to discuss some of the issues you should consider to maximize your blog’s impact. How should you position your content to reach a broader public? Should you worry about rankings? How do you explain to your colleagues that a blog is not a distraction from your research? Can you actually make it work for you? And should you worry about your unruly commenters?
Read some blogs. You’ll find they all have different styles, different scopes, and different voices. Some scientists write blogs mostly about politics or religion. Others write mainly for educators, or for the public, or for their students. Some write mainly for other professionals, others include lots of pictures of their cats.
There are probably a hundred different approaches to blogging that might add to your scientific career, and you just have to find the voice that will work for you. In this series, I’m not advocating for any particular blogging style. Instead, I’m outlining strategies to help turn your own particular style into an asset for your research and your tenure dossier.
I didn’t start blogging with a theory of how it would turn out. Still, after four years I’ve ended up with one, salted with information from several sources. As a scientist, you want to show that you have thought this thing through. If you end up with hundreds or thousands of visits a day, it probably doesn’t matter. But if the results don’t speak for themselves, you may need to justify the time you’ve spent, if not to your committee, then at least to yourself.
A few hundred people read the high-ranked journals in your field, only a small handful of whom will actually look at one of your scientific articles. If one of your papers gets lucky, its results will be aired in the media. But you didn’t write that paper for public understanding, you wrote it for the exacting standards of a small community of specialists in your field. Your scientific impact and reputation ultimately depend on your standing within this small community of specialists. You can advance within the community, becoming a leader of your field, a member of the National Academy, collector of multi-million dollar grants and winner of scientific accolades, without ever developing a reputation with the broader public. If you do good science, your work may need no further justification.
You might make a broader impact than this, by working in other ways that increase the public accessibility of your work. You might give media interviews, public lectures, or write more accessible treatments of your research or your field. You might even blog. By serving the public and your own colleagues, you raise the game. Science depends on criticism, on many eyes examining hypotheses and finding observations that test them. Science bootstraps itself, it can only advance when people near the top of the mountain send a hand down to lift others up. That means teaching your methods to others, and helping a broader public understand why the mountain is worth climbing.
Your community helps to establish your standing with the broader public. Your work with the broader public helps to establish the standing of your community.
Blogging also involves a small community and a broader public. In this case, your community may not include your scientific colleagues, but other writers with interests like yours. Limit your blogging to your scientific field and your community will be tiny. Blog about a broader range of things, and your community may be large, but you will have a harder time establishing your standing. You may be the world’s expert in your field, but you probably don’t add much value to a discussion of religion in science. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t contribute to such conversations, only that your participation will do little to build your standing.
Many bloggers thrive on the community aspect of blogging. Following the latest news, commenting on others’ blogs, linking and blogrolling—all these help to increase your standing. You can become a leader in this community, linking widely to other blogs, commenting and driving conversations. You can take on topics that engage more readers and provoke commentary from other bloggers and commenters. Heck, you might even find work by being an alpha blogger.
But as in science, you can leverage your standing within the blogging community to make a broader impact. The broad public who may want information about your field does not principally consist of blog-readers. They will find you by word of mouth, by reading articles that cite your work, and above all by way of search engines. Your links from other blogs—your standing in the blogosphere—place your site higher in search results, making it more likely that the public will find you.
Science is ultimately a social activity that progresses toward greater understanding. Blogging is also a social activity, which can serve the ends of science, if you apply your expertise. What is more, by incorporating the content management paradigm into your workflow, you can maintain a blog with very minimal work.
My blog was not my first attempt to create a website about paleoanthropology. I began as a graduate student, as I mentioned last week. I knew that there was a potential readership for information about paleoanthropology, with several well-established newsgroups, a few informative websites, and journals just beginning to put their tables of contents online. I consulted for a new exhibit at a science museum, got to see their planning and budget process, and figured I could do just as well building a website myself, with a little bit of effort. I designed websites as a summer job, and had the skills to put organization and style to content.
What I mainly learned is how hard it is to write a useful science website that is not a blog. This was in the mid-90’s, before there were more than a handful of “weblogs.” So it didn’t occur to me that a long series of daily entries might actually build themselves up into something useful. Instead, I looked at the opportunity as if it were the beginning of a dissertation. And as you probably know, nothing says “Lack of Value” like the phrase “Unfinished Dissertation.”
The project just wasn’t integrated into my other priorities: finishing my degree and moving on in my career. My undergraduate students found my site, and a few other people. I added content here and there. As a student myself, I figured that the only market for my ideas was among students, trying to learn the same material. But in the end, there were more important things to do.
When I moved on to a postdoc, I started again. I took some of the old material, updated the look, designed a cool navigation system for the catalog of information that was to come, and started adding text. Again, it wasn’t tightly connected to my research. Making it useful for the courses I taught required work adding content. It looked nice (a lot nicer than my current site), it had a lot of potential and a memorable address. But it was too unwieldy to add new content.
When I started as an assistant professor, I began a website for one of my seminar classes. Students could download each others’ papers, make comments on them, and keep a collaborative record of their notes. I added material to supplement the readings and deepen the conversation outside of class sessions. It was a very special purpose site, and it worked within the context of the class. But when the class was over, the site was no longer useful. Its value was mainly to the students, not to any broader public.
I had a lot of experience failing at public communication. Each failure taught me something important. Extra work may seem worth doing, but it can’t be a chore. It has to be fun. People are not generally interested in your classes, and your students are not generally interested in your work. Just following and writing about the literature can be a valuable service. Other people have already written general introductions to your field; don’t re-invent the wheel.
Most important: You have to blog for yourself, not your readers. Organization is for your readers. It helps them find things. But despite their flaws, blogs have something much more useful for the writer: content management. With a blog, it is very easy to add and present new content. There is little coding (often none, but I like coding), and features like “categories” and “tags” make it simple to cluster related content.
What that means is that you can build an index of content over several years. Consider my Neandertal DNA files. I’ve done nothing but answer questions and react to new articles for four years. Or search my content for FoxP2. These files keep growing and growing, becoming a deep source of information about some paleoanthropological topics. Certainly not all—nobody is the expert on everything—but as I note below, the important thing is not to do every topic, but to do your topics well.
Integrating your blog into your workflow can go much deeper than simply recording your reactions and notes. Right now I write my blog with LaTeX, the same system I use for my research papers and bibliography management. My blog includes references, which are plugged into my reference database. This reference database and my blog posts show up alongside PDFs of papers and my other written notes when I search for information on my own computer. I use several tools for archiving and searching, including the valuable DevonTHINK, which allows contextual search and content matching. I even maintain a “shadow blog,” filled with notes that will never be published on my public site. The content management paradigm is incredibly efficient once you begin indexing and writing.
Your scientific research is already a mashup. You no doubt use online tools, like del.icio.us or Connotea, desktop tools like Google Desktop Search or Spotlight, bibliographic tools, statistical tools, and word processing systems. A content management system can help tie these things together, and a blog can be a natural way to blend the material in new ways.
Over time, these capabilities have gotten better and better. When I started blogging, I approached it as a separate writing task, using distinct tools from my research writing. The value was still there—the most important software is the content itself. But now my system is truly integrated with the other work that I do.
Most of all, remember the sculptor’s advice: Begin with a block of marble, and then remove everything that is not your subject. Until you write, you have nothing. You must write many more words than you need, because only by editing and cutting can you produce something that will be worthwhile to anyone else. Blogging may seem to your colleagues like a lot of words you don’t strictly need. But writing those words provides a way to organize and use your work, as you prepare to cut down to the essence you will use in your research. That future work can include the long-term projects that you will turn to after tenure, and will provide the cornerstone for a long, successful career.
As a scientist, you probably hope your research articles will be useful over several years. Yet as a blogger, your content disappears off your front page after a few measly weeks. This seems like a contradiction. Many people will be skeptical about your blogging, thinking that your work will have no lasting impact.
You can increase that impact by raising the profile of your archived work. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen discusses similar ideas in his online article, “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings.” Nielsen has a reputation of sucking the fun out of web authoring, since he advocates common usability standards at the expense of style and flash. But in this article, he addresses himself to writers trying to demonstrate expertise in a specific content niche—exactly the problem faced by many science bloggers.
Blog postings will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s work. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easy to write. But they don’t build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you’re searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant.
In the article, Nielsen makes and illustrates a simple argument. Anybody can write a short blog post with little depth, but such a small increment of information provides almost no value. Writing many such posts cannot set your work apart, and you will be very low ranked in search engines for such content. In effect, by writing such posts, you limit yourself to readers that you already have.
[I]n-depth content that takes much longer to create is beyond the abilities of the lesser experts. A thousand monkeys writing for 1,000 hours doesn’t add up to Shakespeare. They’ll actually create a thousand low-to-medium-quality postings that aren’t integrated and that don’t give readers a comprehensive understanding of the topic—even if those readers suffer through all 1,000 blogs.
(I have two reasons for pointing you to Nielsen. One, this is good advice for a specialized writer. Two, in your tenure dossier, you will include a description of your blog and your rationale for blogging. You could do worse than cite prominent usability experts. )
Last month (July, 2008), my second most-visited post was an archived entry from the beginning of June. The third was from April, and the fourth was my “acceleration” entry from December, 2007. These old posts were off the front page, and were getting most of their visits from search engines, along with the odd link from other sites. Each day, I receive several hundred visits looking for such older content. I appreciate my regular readers, but I have reached many times more people by writing quality articles that get a slow but continuous flow of visits over years.
How do you keep such content useful?
I’m still implementing these ideas myself. Until the recent server switch, my blog actually had much less organization than either of the earlier sites I had built. It was much harder to find content within my blog older than a month (more on that topic later), whereas my earlier sites had clear sitemaps and menus to bring all content to the readers within two clicks.
Most blogs in the world are still not well organized. Those lists of monthly archives going down the side of the screen are atrocious—they’re not even like graveyards for old ideas, because they don’t have any headstones telling you where the bodies are!
As you start a blog, and start linking and getting links, you’ll become aware of various ranking systems. Most of these, including the biggest, Technorati, are citation indexes. They keep track of who linked to whom.
Some people become more or less obsessed with increasing their ranking, thinking that a higher ranking will bring more readers, or more prestige. You may want to improve your rank—get more links—because they will bring you more readers. You may notice that blogs that talk about politics, or follow current events closely, get a lot of links and rise in the rankings. You may notice that blogs in a consortium—like the ScienceBlogs—all have high ranks, because they all interlink.
Your Technorati rank does not matter to your tenure committee. If, like me, you’re an “Adorable Little Rodent” in N. Z. Bear’s ecosystem, you should probably keep that under your hat. The people evaluating your record may care how many people cited your research papers, but your inbound links are meaningless to them.
This raises a question: What are ranking systems for?
Let’s take Technorati, as the most prominent example. Last month (July, 2008), my blog received a bit over 120,000 visits. Seven (7) of those were referred by Technorati. That doesn’t mean that Technorati has no impact—it still is the most effective citation index for blogs. Several of my inbound links in the last month were Technorati-inspired trackbacks (someone saw on Technorati that I had linked them, and linked back to me). In a couple of cases, those links led to valuable e-mail exchanges, and I often find new blogs when Technorati registers a link to mine.
In contrast, roughly one in six visits to my site were referred by Google. People found my content and read (or didn’t read) what they wanted. Some of them stay and become regular readers—maybe 10 or so per day. The rest use the information and learn a bit more about paleoanthropology, genetics, or evolution. A very wide variety of searches bring them to my content, with the largest fraction being direct searches for my name. These folks heard about me in a class, or read about my work in some other source, and are looking for more information. For other searches, my site is one of the top search results because of links from other sites.
These are potential sources of readers for your blog, and links help draw them to you. It took over a year of writing for my blog to become the number 1 search hit for “John Hawks”. For you, it may take less: I had to compete with the “John Hawks Pub,” which wouldn’t even give me a free beer when I went in. (See if they get a link from me!) It won’t matter whether your blog is ranked in the top 100 or the top 100,000 on Technorati, but it does matter whether you are on the first page of search results from Google.
Fortunately, that’s a lot easier. There are thousands of people trying to game the ranking systems to leapfrog to higher ranks (widespread interlinking schemes, spam blogs, and the like). There probably aren’t any other people writing about your academic specialty trying to Googlebomb themselves to fame. You need some links to establish your place in search results on Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, and getting a few will be enough to start moving you up the search results.
For some people, the most rewarding part about a blog is the immediate feedback from comments. Others dislike the comment section, whether it’s the constant battle against spam, or the trolls, or the pressure to respond to comments.
Personally, I can let a question sit in my inbox for a long time (as some of you know!), but I wouldn’t tolerate it sitting unanswered on my site. That’s my most important reason for not having a comments section: I think about posts, and I think about replies, and comments don’t generally give much time for thinking. The sites I like the best take a hybrid approach: They include questions or comments from readers, but do not have a “comments section” for each post. That kind of full-moderation, indirect feedback still can provide the sense of interaction and community, but without the repetition, trolling, and off-topic digressions that often emerge in comments sections. That’s only my preference, though—you may feel differently.
Will your commenters hurt your tenure case? I don’t think it really matters whether you have comments or not, assuming that you keep out the spam and discourage bad behavior. Probably the most important thing, as I’ll describe in the next installment, is that you mind your university’s use guidelines. As long as you follow the rules, your readers and evaluators are almost certainly smart enough to understand that your commenters are not you.
A healthy, lively comment ecosystem will add to the value of your blog. Your regular commenters help to give your site an identity by giving it a sense of community. Pointing to the community element can help to sell your site to your committee. University mission statements often include ideas like “building learning communities,” or “providing to underserved communities” (more on this in part 4 of the series). A healthy comments section is evidence that you are indeed serving a community.
An anemic comment ecosystem, mostly a monoculture invaded by the occasional weed, will subtract value from your blog. Imagine that someone visited one of your classes. Would you want to show a class where the students just wouldn’t participate? Or where one student always stood up after the lecture and announced that your ideas were garbage? You don’t want to say you’re serving an active community, while your blog comments appear to give concrete evidence that you’re not.
As you approach your tenure review, you have to think carefully about how to sell your blog to a committee. Then take action: Shut down your comments for a while, or put them on full moderation, encourage your e-mailers to submit comments, or make a concerted effort to draw comments from students or people in your field. As you plan ahead, you can think of the best way to accentuate the positives, and a small force applied early may save a lot of explaining later.
Needless to say, some of my story will not apply to you. If you haven’t ever blogged, but have seen lots of difficulty starting up course websites or other internet resources, you can see that I followed much the same path. The right software and a focused approach can go a long way to turn those bad experiences into a website that steadily builds content and traffic.
If you are already a blogger, think about and write down the synergies between your blog and your work. Do you follow the literature? Use common bibliographic information? Find new sources through your comments or trackbacks? Do you get e-mails from other specialists in your field about your blog posts? Do you get inquiries from the press? If you find yourself doing a lot of contacts with other people, you should keep a log (more on that next time). At the least, you should be keeping a list of reasons why your blog makes a research impact.
The point is not to sell your blog as something it’s not; the point is to show the synergies between your research and outreach activities. You should do the same thing for participation in academic conferences, television or radio appearances, and public lectures, but these kinds of outreach are widely acknowledged and understood. As you blog, you are pursuing an outreach activity that is only beginning to make an impact in academic circles, and so you need to document in a bit more detail.
You should also start thinking about your blogging statement. You have a statement of teaching philosophy, and unless your blog is exclusively a teaching resource, you should have a separate statement about it. If my ideas above are helpful, feel free to crib them (or cite them).
Next time, I’ll discuss a number of technical measures that you should consider. For example, what should you do with your blog if you have to move? How much should you worry about your university’s IT use guidelines? And is there any way to get credit from your department for blogging?
This is the first of a four-part series on blogging and tenure. Each installment covers a different portion of the tenure process, from starting and establishing the tone of your blog, up to documenting your blog for your tenure dossier. I don't guarantee anything, and I certainly don't have all the answers, but I worked hard to develop some strategies in my tenure chase, and you may find some of them helpful.
Last month, the University of Wisconsin officially granted me tenure. So, I can say without any doubt (if other examples had not been sufficient), it is absolutely possible to write a daily, high-profile blog and still be recognized by your colleagues as a scholar. In fact, it is possible to blog, do good research, and earn tenure at a Research I university.
That seems like progress, compared to the situation four years ago when I began blogging. A few high-profile tenure denials in late 2005, including physicist Sean Carroll and political scientist Daniel Drezner, made it seem like a blog might be the kiss of death for a research reputation. Inside Higher Education ran a story on the subject, as did Slate, with the melodramatic title, "Attack of the Career-killing Blogs". Since I was interviewed in that article, I suppose I should have been a little nervous (I wrote about it here).
Happily things have changed. With the rise of science blogging, people have become much more aware of the ways that a blog can contribute to a career in science. If you establish a readership, the chances are your colleagues will find out about your blog themselves, instead of looking at you in befuddlement. Blogs are not research, but in some fields they have become an important part of the process of networking and critical commentary. A well-written blog is far from a liability to a scientific career, and may be a real boon.
However, the transition to a blogging professoriate has barely begun. A large fraction of today's science bloggers are graduate students. Some have finished their degrees within the past few years, moved on to postdocs and to assistant professorships. Starting on the tenure track exposes young researchers to some unexpected minefields, and there are special challenges when a blog is involved.
Other young researchers may be reading and using blogs intensively and wondering whether it would be worthwhile to start writing. I was in the same situation some four years ago, so I know the feeling.
I'm writing these posts to share my experience. I spent a lot of time evaluating and preparing my blog for the tenure process. From the beginning, I knew that blogging would be only a minor aspect of my tenure review, because the focus of tenure evaluation at UW is research activity. My main goal was to highlight the ways that my blog has enhanced my research and public service presence, and to show that blogging does not detract from my research agenda. I succeeded in those goals, using a number of strategies along the way that may be useful for other people approaching their tenure reviews. Some of these strategies are common sense; others may surprise you.
I realize that I have embarked on a different project than many science bloggers. Most of my words have to do with my field of study. Many blogs include a broader mix of commentary, including political and social subjects. Since I'm an avid reader of many different kinds of blogs, I can comment to some extent on the ways that different subjects and tones may be incorporated into a professional career.
The full story is divided into four parts. In the final installment, which may be most useful to current bloggers, I will describe the specific strategies that I applied to quantify my blog's role as a service to the field and to the public. Over the next two weeks, I'll be discussing strategies to build a blog's reputation and readership in the years leading up to tenure review, and some ways to integrate research with blogging.
Today, I weigh the pluses and minuses of starting a blog on the tenure track, including the key question of anonymity. This will be especially relevant if you are newly on the tenure track and considering starting a blog. You may also find some of it useful if you have a blog already and are considering shedding a pseudonym and making a blog part of your academic life.
The first thing you should do on the tenure track is get a mentor. A mentor is a person who was in your shoes fifteen years ago. Much longer than that, and they not have faced the same challenges that are typical for young professors today. Much less, and they will not have sat through many tenure cases, so they may not know what kinds of trouble can arise. The idea of a mentor is that you can get informal advice: Not only about your record, but also about your new colleagues and how your department and college have reviewed tenure cases in the last few years.
Many colleges now have tenure guidelines that spell out a formal role for a mentor, and that's a very good thing. It is especially helpful if the mentor is not a member of the evaluation committee. In a court of law, you want your legal counsel to be somebody different from the judge. Even if the judgment should go against you, you want to know that you can trust your counsel. Likewise, your mentor will be most useful if you know that you can bring her concerns or ideas without having them part of the formal discussions of your review.
If your department or college do not assign you a mentor, you should find your own. Invite your senior colleagues to lunch. Your career isn't likely to be at the top of their agenda, but you may be able to find out some pertinent facts. How many articles have they published lately? What do they think of the direction of your research? How do they think you should balance your research with developing new courses? Have they ever heard of people using blogs or podcasts in their classes?
Even if you have a formal mentor, you should not stop with the formalities. If anyone has recently been denied tenure in your department, find out why. Is there a chance for you to find out recent tenure cases in other departments, and if so, how many publications did they have? Encourage your mentor and other senior colleagues to sit in one of your class sessions and write a short letter for your file.
In other words, start covering your bases in the first year. It's your job, and your tenure case, and nobody cares about it halfway as much as you do.
Remember, the moment that you are hired, nobody expects you to know much about your new department. They especially don't expect you to know about any politics that may exist. You might feel better off not knowing -- after all, it can be uncomfortable to ask questions about why people don't seem to like each other. But it won't get any easier to find out the facts: After you've been there a year or two, they'll already figure that you know anyway. Use the time that you don't know anything to your advantage!
You may be wondering, "What does a mentor have to do with blogging?"
Whenever it comes to blogging and tenure, you have to consider that one of them is much easier to live without than the other. Being denied tenure is hardly the end of the world -- in fact, some people report that it is the best thing that could have happened to them. But there are even more people who will tell you that quitting their blogs was the best thing they ever did!
I will assume that since you've taken a job as an assistant professor, your goal is not to be the world's most prolific academic blogger. Because, let's face it, blogging isn't going to pay your bills.
So all the stuff about getting a mentor is very important. If you've done a good job, and ask your mentor whether you should start a blog, she will tell you one thing: Hell, no!
This absolutely is the best advice. There is no way that you should start a blog, especially in the first couple of years on the tenure track. You should devote all your time to research and grant writing, at least until you know how much work it will really take to get your CV up to the point where you want it for your tenure evaluation. After a couple of good annual reviews, you can start thinking about other things to occupy your time.
OK, I don't really believe that. But before you read any further, you really ought to listen to your mentor and other members of your department. Because I don't have any clue what standards your committee will use to evaluate you, and they do.
Plus, I have an ulterior motive: I'd really like to have more interesting blogs to read and link, and I'd like you to start one if you haven't already. Whereas, I really don't have any investment in whether you get tenure. So I'm not impartial.
If I took my own advice, I would never have started myself. The truth is, I kept my blog a secret. I didn't tell anybody about it -- not even my friends. If it failed, I didn't want anybody to know that I'd spent the time on it. Especially not colleagues in my own department, who would be evaluating me.
Instead, some of them found out about from their friends who had discovered the blog. Word of mouth. In my case, that was the best way to go: By the time anyone knew what I was doing, it was already a success.
I should mention that this is basically the same approach I take to much of my research. Nobody really needs to know what I'm doing, until I've done it. It works for me. It may not work so well for you.
Whether blogging is worth your investment of time is a question only you can answer. Really, it depends on your motivations. People blog for lots of reasons.
For some, it's a hobby, and they mainly write about interests that are different from their academic field. A biologist might maintain a movie blog, for example. If blogging is going to scratch that itch, it's really no different than any other hobby. By all means do it, but keep in mind that it is a hobby. If your professional goal is tenure, you still have to excel at your work.
But if you're like many academics, you think the most interesting thing you could write about is your field. After all, you are the expert!
Now, you face more complicated terrain. When you write a blog about your field of study, your students and colleagues are part of your audience. At least some of them will know you, and you need to consider your reputation.
This is both a benefit and drawback of writing a blog in your area of expertise. You can quickly develop a reputation for fairness, good commentary, and enjoyable writing. On the other hand, you can just as quickly develop a reputation as a crank, a partisan for a niche theory, a bully, or worst of all, a bore. Everyone expects a journal article to be boring. But if you write boring material on a blog, people will just assume you're a boring person. Not so good.
So we return to the question, should you start writing at all? To my mind there are several justifications that are more than adequate:
1. Your education cost a lot of time for yourself and a lot of money, either for yourself or somebody else. Your work may have been funded by governments, universities, or private foundations. Your education may have been funded by your parents. They have asked you for nothing but good work. But you can repay them with more than this: you can explain why your work is valuable, making it clear to everyone why their money and your time have been well spent. A blog is not the only way to do this, but it has advantages. It is free, and public, and enables commentary.
2. Ultimately, advancing in the world of science will take writing skill, and for this you need practice. Nobody expects a blog to be perfect, or even very well-polished. But people do expect you to update it regularly. This makes it a perfect way to practice better writing. The only way to build your skill is repetition, and whether your blog has a thousand readers or only ten, they will give you a motivation to work at it.
3. Journalists read blogs. If you write well about your research, it gives you the opportunity to share that work with a much broader audience. Giving it a higher profile will enhance the chances of grants, publications, and conference invitations over the long term.
Personally, I think that maturity as a scientist comes with the ability to explain your work to your parents. As a graduate student, I felt the great interest and importance in my work, but was not yet equipped to articulate it very well. I've gained that ability over time, and have become a much better advocate of human evolution.
Against these, you should also consider the problems:
1. You may make enemies. Even if you never write anything critical about anyone's work, you may develop a reputation as a loudmouth or a yes-man. Nobody likes that. Remember, they're reviewing your manuscripts and grants.
2. Even if you only write a limited amount -- only one or two posts a week -- your colleagues may consider that wasted time you could be spending on your research. Depending on your field, you may have colleagues who only manage a few hundred words of writing per week. When you are cranking out a blog that has many times that amount, they will wonder whether you are making the best use of your time.
3. You might find out that nobody cares. This has been the fate of many institutional blogs: Writing weekly posts on the goings-on at some institution, they discover that this is information that nobody actually wants. For some people, this may actually be empowering -- after all, if nobody cares, nobody will criticize! But it's the timeless dilemma of the child who gets no attention: you may start to seek any kind of attention, even negative attention. Blogging can start a vicious cycle as well as a virtuous one.
4. Mission creep. You start out writing a few posts about your work, and comment negatively on creationism. And then you spend your time online reading stupid posts from intelligent design blogs, just so that you can refute them. Soon your mind starts to decay, and then you can't do your actual research anymore.
Are there really more minuses than pluses? It's a little like Tolstoy said: All happy bloggers blog alike, while unhappy bloggers are each unhappy in their own way.
One solution is to share the costs by joining or starting a group blog. This can be a fantastic opportunity, especially if you enjoy collaborative writing environments. Group blogs have some of the most active comment sections, and because of their mixture of different topics, they bring a broad range of readers. If you join an existing group blog, your coauthors may be able to give you feedback about your writing, and connect you with others who have similar interests.
From the standpoint of the tenure track, a group blog has another clear advantage: You need only contribute occasionally. If you take a vacation or need time away from writing, the group blog does not stop; other writers will keep the readers coming. Contributing to a group writing project is an easy sell to an evaluation committee -- although the blog is an informal writing project, it looks kind of similar to the process of organizing a symposium, or putting together an edited volume, both of which your colleagues will likely understand. Indeed, depending on the blog's topic and scope, you may be able to use it as a nexus for research collaborations or meetings.
But group blogs are not without their drawbacks. You can always develop your own distinctive style, but it is easier to stand apart when you control the entire site and all its content. On a group blog, your writing will appear next to articles by other people, who may not share your sensibilities or sense of risk. They may have different politics, different pet causes, and they may busily be making enemies of their own. Will you be able to float above the fray on a combative group blog, or will you be tarred by association?
These may or may not be worries -- it depends on your own writing style, interests, and the people with whom you are writing.
One thing is for sure: A group blog will bring your writing more visibility and readers for less work than starting an individual blog. The challenges are finding the right people to work with, and establishing your own distinct voice within the group.
If you feel the itch to write about your field, but don't want your colleagues to know about it, you have another option: Just don't sign your name to your blog. Some bloggers feel that a pseudonym gives the freedom to be candid, without worrying about the consequences for their careers. In their view, being faceless lets them speak truth to power -- even the lowliest undergraduate may prove the equal of a Nobel Prize winner. Others blog pseudonymously out of fear -- after all, even a Nobel Prize winner may prove the equal of a lowly undergraduate.
Before I write much more, I should reveal my strong opinion: Blogging anonymously is a mistake. If you must resort to anonymous writing, you really would be better off spending the time on your research.
But first, let's consider the reasons why you might want a pseudonym. First, the rewards and incentives of blogging depend on your rank in the academic pecking order. Students and postdocs may have to answer daily their local version of a higher power. For assistant professors, there will be a Judgment Day, but little fear of immediate dismissal. Both getting hired and getting tenure require you to publish quality research, but tenure may also require you to teach well and be a service to your community. So your activity and your name may have different impacts at different times in your career.
There is a philosophical argument in favor of anonymity. In science, it shouldn't matter who proposes an idea: the idea should succeed or fail on its own merits. It's not the messenger, it's the message. Actually, the same argument about anonymity also applies to research. It shouldn't matter who has performed a piece of scientific research; the results should be judged on their merits. But would you submit an article to a peer-reviewed journal anonymously?
You might think, "Well, obviously not." The mantra toward tenure is "Publish or perish." Yet there are fields where a serious researcher might prefer to submit her research anonymously. Research into the genetic basis of human behaviors often crosses into this territory. Any kind of work that challenges politicized doctrines carries a risk for its authors -- the risk that future work will be unfunded, or that a lab's students will not be hired, or that a young assistant professor will be denied tenure.
Blogging is the same way. You may want to write about topics that are politically sensitive, or that may rub people the wrong way. Expressing an opinion contrary to those of your colleagues may endanger your relationship with them, or your future tenure evaluation. If a blog is not connected with your identity, then it can't be used against you. And there are other appealing qualities of anonymity -- for one thing, if you worry less about making enemies, you might have more fun tweaking people. Truth to power!
I read lots of pseudonymous bloggers, including some of my favorites, and you may find that it works for you. It may be just the thing -- letting you blow off steam or push the conversation in politically incorrect directions without fear of reprisals. For those cases, some of my advice may not be very helpful -- you won't be mentioning your blog in your tenure file.
So why do I feel so strongly that your blog should carry your name?
An important aim for an assistant professor is to establish yourself as an expert in your field. If you want to be the world's expert on a subject, your online writing can associate that subject with you whenever anyone searches for it. A blog gives you the opportunity for immediate reactions to news: meaning that your colleagues can learn about new results by reading what you wrote about them. This can be a powerful way to build a reputation.
A well-written blog will lead to other writing opportunities. Having a high Technorati rank will make no difference at all to your tenure file, but a few op-eds in newspapers or magazines may help to impress your committee or dean, and add to your campus profile. Interviews with journalists that run in the national print media, or local radio interviews also make a difference -- and there are few things better than having your students bring in an article because they saw you quoted in it. These opportunities may come about because someone read your blog, but it is your status as an expert in your field that moves the opportunities forward.
And the blog is a public resource. By writing about your field, as an expert, you are informing the public. Your college may recognize that kind of public service directly, or you may get only indirect recognition. Still, your status as an expert makes the information more valuable to the public, and is service in the truest sense. You may not feel that your opinion is more or less valuable because of your authority, but the public does not have your training to evaluate arguments in your field. To them, you are a valuable guide. Like it or not, anonymity reduces that value.
Some of the tips that I will be emphasizing in the next two installments are meant to accentuate the benefits of blogging. But if your readers don't know who you are, you give up the chance to make your blog work for your career. You may reject that motive for writing, for any of the reasons I pointed out above. Your career does not need to define you, and it doesn't need to absorb all your time. But if so, remember to listen to your mentor.
The tricky thing is when you have begun writing under a pseudonym as a student, you have built a long reputation online as a pseudonymous identity, and now you want to make that reputation work for your career. There's no simple answer to this situation. It may be best to just make a clean break, starting fresh. Or it may be possible to just announce your identity and blog under your real name from now on.
You may be worried that you have written silly things, or rude things, that you would not want associated with your real name. If so, consider the possibility that you are exaggerating the impact of your words. A lot of people have made heated comments on Usenet, newsgroups, or other public forums that today are in reach of Google. I've met many folks who are professors now, but 15 years ago were students writing passionately (and sometimes very rudely) on newsgroups. My advice? Wear your past as a badge of honor. Your college has already hired you, and it's what you do over the next few years that will matter to your tenure.
Generally speaking, nobody is going to troll through pages of search results to find the most incriminating thing you've ever written. But then, that depends on what it is....
Still, people expect students to have done silly things. If you have developed a strong pseudonymous identity, and would like your real name to have a similar reputation, there is probably no reason not to simply merge the two. If you're still worried, then you can consider dumping the pseudonym and starting again, with version 2.0. Even if somebody notices the disappearance of the old person and the near-simultaneous appearance of your blog with a strikingly similar tone, at least you have plausible deniability!
In any event, blogging on the tenure track is different from blogging as a postdoc or student. The stakes are higher, as are your growing connections to more senior colleagues in your department and around the world. It may be a time to consider a new voice for an old blog, a new collaboration with another established blogger, or a different online presence entirely. You are no longer a cog in someone else's wheel. You need to build an online identity that shows off your strengths as an independent researcher.
There is another consideration bearing on whether you should write under a pseudonym. Your tenure file will include anywhere from five to ten reviews from outside colleagues, mostly full professors at peer schools. You won't know who these people are, and you will probably have little role in suggesting names for this list. But they will all be senior colleagues who (hopefully) are familiar with your work. If you're lucky, they will already be your friends because you've met and interacted with them at conferences, maybe shared a drink. If you're unlucky -- suppose your committee doesn't know any better -- the list will include some of your bitter critics.
Now, consider. If even one of these people knows that you are a blogger, they may include it in their letter. She may be trying to help you -- hey, she probably really likes your blog, and is impressed at all the hard work you've put into it. She writes about how much you are engaged with the public, and how valuable your blog is to other professionals in the field. How did she find out that you were the author? Maybe you told her in one of those slow times at the conference bar. Maybe her students have been reading your blog for years and worked it out. Maybe your graduate advisor has been spreading the word. Who knows? Remember, eventually they unmasked the Washingtonienne.
The point is, it may be possible to lead a double life as an academic seeking tenure, and probably nobody really cares. But if you absolutely need your blog to be a secret, then you'll have to make it a KGB-grade secret. Otherwise, you'll be wondering when the word will finally slip to your department colleagues, and you'll be constantly watching what you say anyway. And if you're not really going to burn anybody under your false name, you might as well be getting the benefit out of using your real name!
I'll be continuing the story next week. Some of this is relatively generic, but much of it stems from my own experiences, conversations with other bloggers, and some deep thinking about the best way for young scientists to build an online presence.
In the next installment, I discuss the balance between controversial, political, and safe topics, and the way they may play out in the tenure hunt. Plus, the all-important question: Should your blog allow comments?
