When you think about all the outputs you produce in your work, and how few of them are actually brought to people’s attention through traditional publishing routes like books or journals, it seems a shame that these ‘offcuts’ or grey literature should reach such a limited audience, although they may well be of interest to others beyond the immediate context. Presentation slides, handouts, reports, teaching resources… these are items, often digital but usually digitisable, which are natural by-products of your work, but rarely reach a wider audience or recognition. Other aspects can be easily digitised, such as an audio or video recording of a talk. Although not formally peer-reviewed, or not even formally ‘research’, they may well still be interesting or useful to others, and may help to raise your profile. But where can you make these things available, in a context that will make sense to others?
Integrating sharing platforms such as Slideshare (slides), Scribd (documents), Youtube (video), Soundcloud (audio), Flickr (images) or Storify (social media interactions) with your blog allows you to upload your content to a platform, and then embed it in your blog, with some commentary around it to contextualise it. You might use it on a professional profile blog to let peers and potential employers know what you’ve been up to, the audience of a talk (or those who couldn’t attend), the general public to enhance your public engagement, or to share resources such as teaching handouts with other teachers or your students. It also livens up your blog post, from simple text!
Let’s take a slide presentation as an example. I gave a talk on social media for researchers to a small group of Phd Students in Sociology at the University of Cambridge, as part of their induction. It was a lot of work to put together, and I figured that there was a wider audience who would be interested either in using it to refer back to, or to learn from if they weren’t there, or other researcher developers who were also teaching PhD students how to use social media and didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. So I uploaded it onto my slideshare account, and embedded it in the DH23Things blog, and here:
I uploaded it before I actually gave the talk, partly so that I could tell the participants that they could find the slides online (saves me printing copies…) and so that they could have a version in which the weblinks embedded in the slides are actually live so they can find and explore them later- not something you can do in a handout. I also tweeted about it and linked to it beforehand to my Twitter followers who work in a similar field. It was rather nice to know that before I even gave the workshop, the slides had had nearly 40 views and I’d got some positive feedback!
Steps to embedding slides in your blog:
- Set up an account with Slideshare
- Upload a presentation to Slideshare
- In Slideshare, find the icons which allow you to share the presentation on various social media sites and click on the WordPress icon (or click ’embed to copy the code for other platforms)
- Copy the iframes code it creates for you
- In your WordPress post, click on the tab in the text editing window that says ‘text’ rather than ‘visual’ (this gives you the HTML code view rather than the wordprocessor view) and paste the code where you want the presentation to appear
- Switch back to the ‘visual’ mode, finish off your post and publish.
Other digital media platforms will work in a very similar way. You can also link to content that others have made available on these platforms, if you’d like to blog about them.
One other tip I’d add about sharing slides online in a blog- if content is created for one context, it may need a bit of altering if reused in another context. For example, a slide presentation that works really well in a live talk probably won’t make much sense shared online, without your commentary – if it did make sense on its own online, there would be so much information on the slides that you’d just be reading them out, which makes for a really bad presentation. I often have two slightly different versions, one with more text than the other, so that one can be used stand-alone online (no extra work, as I habitually write too much text on slides and have to edit them down!). And I will also add some commentary around it in my blog about it – almost like notes from the commentary I gave. If you’re uploading a document, video or audio, then this may be less of an issue.
You may be concerned about sharing grey literature in this way. However, much of what you might be posting will have been publically available in another format, whether that’s a lecture or talk you gave or a report you wrote, even if it wasn’t made available to quite such a potentially large audience. Obviously, common sense will guide you as to what material might be unethical to share, or what might detract from your publications in more formal, traditional formats, but sharing resources in this way is a good route to making your activities visible to others in between the wait for journal publications, and making yourself of use to, and noticed by, your colleagues. It’s also part of the exchange and reciprocity which makes the web work.
Helen Webster is a research associate in Digital Transferable Skills in the Digital Humanities Network in CRASSH, and is one of the editors of CamHumBlog
Questions? Leave them in the Comments!
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the position of CRASSH, The Digital Humanities Network or Cambridge University.
CamHumBlog 