Will blog for tenure?

January 16, 2013
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James Schirmer (@betajames)
January 16, 2013 5:32 pm

Will blog for tenure? | @cgbrooke http://t.co/XHR6KKKd
SDL
January 18, 2013 6:38 pm

In roughly 20 months of tracking site traffic, my site has received close to 75,000 unique visits and over 100,000 pageviews, averaging 144 visits and 199 views daily since January of 2005. In short, maintaining a weblog has raised my profile, both within my discipline and beyond it, far more than any course I might teach or article I might publish. And in doing so, it raises the profile of Syracuse and of the Writing Program in a fashion that I believe to be positive.

If those numbers had been small–“averaging 0.6 views daily”– would you still have put your blog into your tenure file? I can’t help thinking your readership numbers were the most powerful part of the argument . . .

Collin
January 21, 2013 2:01 pm

Hard to say, since it’s hindsight. I haven’t really thought much about where that threshold would be–how many visits/views are “enough” to count?

My gut answer is that blogging isn’t just about posting, but about circulating as well, so those number reflect visits yes, but they also reflect a lot of time posting on others’ spaces, connecting with people, etc.

c

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Hey there. I'm Collin Gifford Brooke, and I'm currently an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Syracuse University. I'm a digital humanities person, back from before there was a digital humanities. I wrote a book called Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media, about how new media changes the ways we think about rhetoric and writing and which uses the five canons of rhetoric to think about new media. I'm interested in games, streams, networks, objects, genres, memes, and stuff. Oh, and words. Lots and lots of words.

I started blogging back in 2003, on a site called Collin vs Blog, where I banged out close to a thousand entries over the course of about 5 years. For a few different reasons, I stopped, and after a couple of different false starts, I relocated here, where I'm hoping to pick up some of my old site's momentum, start archiving myself better, and return to writing on a daily basis.