How To Do Academic Blogging

What is it about?

Academic blogging is a digital platform for “doing” knowledge translation in the humanities. Knowledge translation is the process of communicating research outcomes outside academia so the public can benefit. Drawing on a developing literature about academic blogging as well as a survey we conducted with readers, authors, and editors of academic blogs, this article shows how doing knowledge translation with academic blogs can support the three core domains of a university’s mission: research, teaching, and public outreach. With your research, you can use academic blogs to facilitate networking and collaborations; with your teaching, you can use academic blogs as tools to introduce students to a new topic; with public outreach, doing academic blogging enables you to connect with diverse readerships.

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Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Why is it important?

While science communication is widely recognized as a medium for communicating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics knowledge with the public, formal mechanisms for knowledge facilitation in the humanities are not as well established. Academic blogging is core to the social value and impact of the humanities, representing an important open access entry point into humanistic scholarly debates. As this "How-To" article demonstrates, academic blogging provides a digital platform that contributes to knowledge translation for and about the humanities, from foundational concepts to new research and the more hidden aspects of academic practice.