'The border-ness of borders'

In lieu of something more useful as I'm trying to finish off Chapter Two (but eighth chapter out of ten) I offer you the following snippet.

Despite no affiliation to the Geography Department at King's College, London whatsoever, I seem to have recently ended up on their mailing list which includes exciting opportunities to attend all sorts of interesting conferences.

Earlier today I received one such missive inviting me to attend the EastBordNet Conference on 'Remaking Borders'.

I'm fairly, nay, very ignorant about borders so I was delighted to learn that "borders are never what they used to be". Which perhaps goes some way to explaining my ignorance.

I also learnt that "a question here is whether this incessant shifting of borders is a characteristic of borders as such (what could be called the ‘border-ness’ of borders)".

For sure.

Back to Chapter Two, then...wondering if I qualify to be an academic.

On the gulf between academia and journalism

So it's been a while since I've posted here. 2010 is deadline year and the ratio of PhD to blogging is increasing in the PhD direction each month, week and day.

Which is a shame because blogging is great and many good things have come out of this blog and my Frontline blog.

I often think, too, that far more people will read my blog posts than my PhD. In a way the blog might be more useful to people than the PhD especially as by the time the PhD is published, (if ever), the world will have moved on a-pace and its relevancy significantly reduced.

I wonder if I should have put more of my research out on the blog along the way.

(Although I place the utmost importance on making sure participants agree to publication which does make it more difficult and there are various other contractual issues in my case that might not affect other PhDs.)

Professor Tim Luckhurst, I see, has called for journalism academics* to connect more with journalists by writing short essays rather than writing long papers that they don't have time to read.

This seems fine for established academics, and generally I agree entirely, but I've been told that not being published in the right places, and in the right format won't get me a job in academia come the end of the PhD.

If I say in an interview: I've published a lot of additional research on a blog, I've been told that will probably count for nothing. I might even be laughed at. To be fair, a lot of my blogging wouldn't come anywhere near 'research' but you get the point.

Generally, I ignore these warnings in the hope that they are unfounded (and I'm not certain exactly what I want to do at the end of the PhD anyway).

But if Tim Luckhurst really wants to change the institutional culture of academia then I would suggest there is a hell of a lot of work to do.

It's interesting Luckhurst notes that Piet Bakker's blog is slightly more useful than his recent research paper, because if I really wanted to get on in academia (from what I've been told) I would have spent far less time blogging, twittering and generally engaging with journalists and far more time writing papers that journalists will probably never read.

*I suppose you could stick me in this category even though I'm in a War Studies Department and generally disciplinarially confused.

"Does the Internet move too fast for academia?" Yes - way too fast.

Neil Thurman from City University, London has recently published an article about the use of User Generated Content by the media. It's an interesting piece tracking editors' attitudes to UGC and the use of 'audience' forums.

The problem with it, as pointed out by Shane Richmond over on the Telegraph's Technology blog, is that it's already out of date.

One small example is the figure Neil uses for the number of blogs being tracked by Technorati. When Thurman collected the data in 2005, Technorati was following 9 million blogs. Today, the website claims it's tracking 112.5 million.

Many academic studies are subject to the inevitability of change after publication, but the problem with studying the Internet is the rate of change. Neil's piece tells us what was happening a couple of years ago instead of what is happening now.

Neil has replied on the blog explaining that the slightly historical nature of his paper isn't his fault; it's the incredibly slow rate of the academic publishing cycle which is to blame.

"...academics are leant on to publish in peer-reviewed journals (who demand exclusivity) in order that they and their departments are rewarded--for example with income from the Research Assessment Exercise. Even though the journal that published this paper has recently increased its pagination and frequency, more than 17 months elapsed between acceptance and publication (and more than a year between submission and acceptance)."

I'm afraid I'm too new to the game to know much about the nuances of academic publication, but this is something I'll have to seriously consider in the future. I fear that my hands may be tied in a similar fashion to Neil's.

If this is the case, that will mean I'll be giving you the impact of blogging on the BBC's coverage of war and terrorism in 2008-9, just in time for 2011 (at the earliest). By which time, I might be asking the wrong question never mind providing an out of date answer.

These lengthy publication schedules may be viable in other disciplines but in Internet technology and new media, papers need to be published quickly to maximise their usefulness.

I get some money from the government to help finance my work. It would be nice to think that the research I do would provide more than an interesting historical read and a footnote in the work of future academics.

But I fear that by the time most of it's published, my research will have little practical value to the media industry, and worse, to those who have given up their time to participate.

I'd like to publish my papers or chapters here on the blog, with embedded links. That would be a bit different. But I've no idea whether this is possible or feasible.

When is the academic world going to catch up?