A year ago today I went live with the blog, putting up a post titled, “What is wrong with Anthropology,” written in response to Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s calling out of the field:
This blog is in some ways my response to these discussions. I agree with the discussions linked above that anthropologists need to be proactive in engaging with the public on issues related to our field. As a biological anthropologist, these issues are many and varied. My own work focuses on evolutionary events spanning the last several million years. Although this is a subject that is at times, quite literally, buried in the past, it has repercussions for how we understand what it means to be human, how we confront change in the world around us and within us, and how we deal with the complex set of interactions that shape how we approach the world each day.
Over the past twelve months I have posted a number of other commentaries on why I blog, but a year into it, I find it worth reflecting on the experience.
First, I have found the experience and process of carrying on a professional/academic blog extremely rewarding. I can pretty much divide the tasks and rewards of blogging into three areas:
I read – The pressure of keeping the blog up has provided an organizational structure that has better enabled me to keep up with the current literature. This is aided tremendously by being connected to a cohort of people via twitter, RSS feeds, Facebook and e-mail helping to keep me informed about new and interesting publications across a variety of fields and subfields of interest to me and my work. I have always read, but the blog helps provide a positive external pressure to do so, and do so efficiently and effectively.
I write – Writing is a skill that requires practice. For the most part, the more you write, the better you write. The blog gets me writing. Some of it is silly, much of it is informal (or at least less formal than a published article), but it is all organizing, integrating and communicating thinking…in other words, writing. I have made 178 posts over the past year, at various times falling off the map for weeks at a time as other work (and life) piled up. The commitment of time and energy is real, not virtual.
I communicate – One of the most enjoyable aspects of blogging has been that it has connected me to a much larger group of people than I would otherwise regularly interact. I am in a small Anthropology Department at a small Liberal Arts College. I am the lone biological anthropologist. I am one of two people on campus who does paleo-related research. The blog has made me part of a virtual faculty that has helped facilitate the kinds of discussions and thinking that I did as a graduate student as part of a large, four-field Anthropology Department within an even larger, research University. This makes me both better at what I do and happier doing it.
A few other assorted thoughts…
The popularity of my blog is extremely modest by internet standards, and yet the site has logged more than 22,000 visits in the past twelve months. While modest, that number represents a dramatically larger audience than sees my peer-reviewed journal publications.
Those 22,000 visitors have come from 124 different countries. Roughly 2/3 of my audience has been from the United States, the U.K. and Canada represent another 10%, and the remaining quarter is distributed fairly widely across the globe. The biggest absence in my global footprint is in Africa, particularly Central and West Africa.
The most popular search topics that have led to my blog are issues related to the usefulness of Anthropology (and my defense of the field), evolutionary paleodiet questions (apparently there are a lot of paleo-dieters these days) and race and IQ. The single most popular post I have made related to that terrible video produced by the EU of women in science, that was picked up by Wired’s coverage of the story.
Here’s to hoping for an even better next 12 months…
