Category Archives for Meta

Off-topic: I am not an academic blogger

I really enjoyed Lynn Murphy’s post for the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog about whether an academic who blogs is necessarily an academic blogger. Murphy is a linguist at the University of Sussex who blogs at Separated by a Common Language.

I see academic blogging categorised in two ways: (1) a way to disseminate (or think through) one’s research or (2) a way to engage students in the learning process. In other words, we’re encouraged to use blogs to do our jobs: to produce peer-reviewed research in a way that gets noticed and to teach the students who we are paid to teach.

I love both of those kinds of blogs -but mine is neither. [...] What I blog is educational, though. (For my sins, I also try to entertain.) Its readers are language enthusiasts, travellers and expats, English learners, editors, and an awful lot of people (10-15% of my traffic each week, it seems) who want to settle an argument about whether the exclamation is whoa or woah. Yes, some linguists read it too (it’s even been cited in a couple of academic papers), but the effect I have is in busting linguistic myths, offering translations or interpretations, and making disconcerting cross-cultural experiences more understandable through the delicate introduction of useful theoretical concepts. The comments and Twitter conversations are productive and cooperative–which is, to my mind, the greatest marker of a blog’s success.

I had struggled with the same question about academics and blogging, and had come up with the same answer: no, I am not an academic blogger. Even though I am an (aspiring) academic and this blog sometimes touches on my research, I don’t consider The Plaid Bag Connection to be an academic blog, and I make this clear in my about page.

Please excuse my Spanish

Before anyone asks me whether I’ve started blogging in Spanish only: ¡Discúlpenme! Regular programming will return shortly. After discovering a severe lack of information and/or severe misinformation about Chinese and Koreans in Argentina on the Spanish-speaking Internet, I decided to take matters into my own hands by translating what I had already written on those communities. If you speak Spanish and would be kind enough to point out my embarrassing mis-conjugations and awkward turns of phrase, please do leave a comment on those posts.

On a related note, I have started to organize the posts I’ve written about my projects (both academic and non-academic) into different pages. So far I have the Asians in Argentina project (both in English and en castellano), the Asian food bloggers project, and the Khmer Rouge oral history that I’m re-editing for YouTube. Soon there will be another page on my master’s thesis, and eventually a dissertation, too. Fingers crossed!

Photo: I was lucky enough to go on a tour of the San Diego section of the United States-Mexico border led by the US Border Patrol. This is a picture I took from inside a bomb shelter built during World War II to protect US citizens from a possible Japanese bomb threat. The view is of Tijuana, Mexico.