PhD Alert: Condition Red

Wow. I have let the blog slide a little bit, eh? No posts for two months. I would apologise, except for the fact that I write this blog in my freetime and well, I haven’t exactly had a lot of that lately. And, to be honest, when I have, I’ve been intentionally spending more time outside and less time inside tap tap tapping away on my laptop.

But, summer is approaching and I am settling into a writing up routine, which will hopefully leave with with a little bit time to get back to semi-regular blogposts about all things academic and archaeology. If I had better timing I would have reached this conclusion about a week ago, before this blog was referenced/featured/discussed in two different academic publications.

The first I highly recommend everyone go read. It’s an open access article in Internet Archaeology called, Bones, Bodies, and Blogs: Outreach and Engagement in Bioarchaeology, written by Killgrove and Meyers Emery. It’s part of a special issue of IA all about Critical Blogging in Archaeology. While the article above is focused specially on bioarchaeology blogs (or rather, the lack thereof) – it has a lot of relevent things to say for academic blogging in general. I spoke to Killgrove and Meyers Emery for this article and it was interesting in that it made me reflect about my reasons for blogging (which have changed over time). The entire issue of IA is interesting for more than just the subject covered though, because it’s really embraced alternative publishing models: open access, open peer review, comments, dedicated hashtag, archiving interactions, etc.

The second is the Spring 2015 newsletter for the Canadian Association for Physical Anthropology, which has included my blog in a section that features anthropology-related websites. Now because my blog has become a mish-mash of all of the academic aspects of my life, it’s been shared not only because I write about anthropology, but also for my posts on disability in archaeology. I have to say that I have been really surprised with the overwhelming response to these blogposts. While they may not get the huge number of hits my less serious GIF-filled rant-style posts get, they have encouraged a number of comments from, and discussions with, individuals that makes me consider whether they have a bigger ‘impact’ overall (more on this in a future blogpost).

Now, another one of the reasons for being blog-lite recently (other than #blamethephd) is that there haven’t been any particularly huge news stories that I’ve felt I can really contibute to on this blog in a meaningful way (and I haven’t got the time at the moment to ‘make the news’). I have been ‘micro-blogging’ over on Twitter (thanks to Richardson for bringing this term to my attention, as now I can pretend my tweets have more gravitas) about anything that grabs my attention – but come on folks, let’s get more bioarchaeology research in the news.

Speaking of which… Forbes has added some great new contributers on bioarchaeology (Killgrove) and paleontology* (Montanari), which I’m really excited about (although since they’re so good at covering the stories, it means less opportunities for me to write posts correcting misinformation in the media… but, I suppose in the long-run is actually a good thing, even if it means less blogposts here). Go check ’em out!

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m off to write about emic and etic approaches to palaeodemographic research into human responses to catastophes.

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* I know, I know. ‘We don’t do dinosaurs’. But come on!