Blog

Celebrating a Year of Blogging

By Amanda Wyatt Visconti on

Crossposted to Amanda's blog.

We are proud of our 2019 “Year of Blogging”’s success! We invite you to read our blogging challenge debrief of the year’s process and posts, below. We’ll be sharing our plans for taking our blogging To The Next Level in early 2020.

This page celebrates our successful 2019 challenge, a “Year of Blogging”. The challenge started off with Brandon Walsh and Amanda Visconti committing to write one post per month in 2019. Ammon Shepherd stepped things up early on with a series of four posts on DH archiving that were co-written with other SLab and UVA Library staff. We share some stats and highlights, followed by the year’s posts organized by topic.

We were able to reach our stretch goal of encouraging a broader revival of our blog, tied into a renewal of our website (migration from WordPress to Jekyll-generated static site, new content and info structure). Between January 1, 2019 and December 18, 2019, we wrote 64 essay posts—that is, posts that were intentional blogging and weren’t straight announcements of fellowships or workshops,. The “website launch announcement” post was counted because it explains the process and reasoning behind the website renewal work; announcing the call for our fellowship applications was not counted. Below, the board where we tracked posts via author and a 3-word summary of each post (note this photo is missing our last two posts, on DH job talks and creating an LED watch):

Large cardboard poster listing the authors of posts and a 3-word summary of the post content, for all essay blog posts published in 2019 on the Scholars' Lab blog

Stats!

Amanda wrote 14 posts and Brandon wrote 13, followed by Ammon with 10 posts, Kelli Shermeyer (5), Abhishek Gupta (4), and Ankita Chakrabarti (3). The following folks each wrote 2 posts: Connor Kenaston, Brandon Butler, Janet Dunkelbarger, Jordan Buysse, Lauren Van Nest, Lauren Work, and Zijia Zeng. The following folks each contributed one post: Chloe Downe Wells, Alison Booth, Arin Bennett, Drew MacQueen, Julia Haines, Mackenzie Brooks, Mathilda Shepard, Natasha Roth-Rowland, Neal Curtis, Sam Lemley, Leigh Miller, Jasper Braun, and Will Rourk.

More stats:

  • 26 people participated in authoring on our blog this year
  • 15 students authored a total of 29 posts
  • 7 Scholars’ Lab staff authored posts
  • 6 colleagues outside Scholars’ Lab (including 1 colleague outside UVA!) authored posts on our blog: Neal Curtis, Sam Lemley, Mackenzie Brooks, Lauren Work, Brandon Butler, Julia Haines
  • 7 posts were collaborations among multiple authors

External recognition

Five posts were highlighted by Digital Humanities Now! Two as “Editor’s Choice” posts…

…and one as a recommended “resource”:

Three posts were highlighted by DH+Lib as “recommended”:

Some other praise for Year of Blogging posts!:


@RAKarl tweet about Ammon’s post: “Am still figuring out how to make the script work most efficiently w/ the site I’m pulling from, but @mossiso [Ammon] has given us #twitterstorians an incredible resource”

Analysis

We dropped the text of all of 2019’s blog posts into Voyant Tools.

What is digital humanities without A Wordle? Incomplete! Wordle of most frequently occuring terms in 2019 blog posts on our blog

Seriously, though, we’re pleased to see our priorities reflected in the most frequently used words in this year’s blog posts. “Students” was the second most frequently appearing word (369 uses! plus 118 uses of “student” singular). “Pedagogy” appeared 123 times, “3D” 118 times, and “community” 118 times, reflecting some of our greatest strengths: student-centered pedagogy and training the next generation of experimental and digital humanities scholars, spatial technologies, and a public focus as a community lab. Table of most frequently occuring terms in 2019 blog posts on our blog

2019 posts by topic

Teaching/pedagogy

Coding tutorials

Reflections on learning to code

Makerspace

Spatial technologies

Meta-DH (lab & personal research practice as DH scholarship)

Archiving DH

Progress on textual research projects

Amanda Wyatt Visconti is Director in the Scholars’ Lab.
Cite this post: Amanda Wyatt Visconti. “Celebrating a Year of Blogging”. Published December 17, 2019. https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/year-of-blogging-2019-debrief/. Accessed on .