That’s All Folks—Summing Up and Reflecting on our Blogging Stint

Over the past six years, we published a total of 128 posts here, plus 59 in our sister Arabic Science and Philosophy blog. It was clear from the beginning that we needed, as part of our publication and outreach activities, some “light” counterpart to formal institutional publications. In view of the variety of options, multiplying at pace and always morphing into new media, we settled on a combination of media accounts (X/Twitter, Facebook) and these two blogs. The experience has been rewarding and educational on several fronts. Here are a few stats and reflections.

The top three posts by number of views are:

• The exotic “Canopus: Gentle Celestial Key” in the Arabic blog (346 views).
• The amusing “Beware the Edge of the Earth!” (294 views).
• And the disturbing “Mental Illness and Suicidal Tendencies in Early Modern Oceanic Voyages” (256 views).

Now, the top-ranking post owes its position most likely not to its amazing philosophical contents, but to a mention of Harry Potter in the text! Like this one, we have other examples that made us confirm clearly, often amusingly too, the wonder-greedy and showbiz-focused nature of the internet.

As academics, we need to learn how to capitalise on the use of sound-bytes and the myriad pervasive tags and hashtags, to play on the nature of the ephemeral tools at hand for our perennial intentions. There is often a fine line between using, exploiting and making fun of the circumstances. For example, we could have written posts about a tailor swift in his work on board a ship, or about elections, chocolate, sex, and it is certain that any of these terms would trump our serious and well-researched keywords, but we would never stoop that low, no!

It was also made clear that to a certain extent we needed to understand the “digital mind”, the elements of HTML and XML code, and the TEI Guidelines, especially if we wanted to join in the international drive towards really digital humanities. We made our efforts, and in the end, apart from their light-hearted tone, the blog posts often contain snippets of original research that eventually made it into our academic publications. As such, while the RUTTER Project comes to a close this Sunday 31 August, they will remain, we hope, a source of valuable information for our colleagues and any interested readers (of English) worldwide.

Thanks for reading! [J. Acevedo]

Image by Luís Ribeiro.