My university blogger posts
My official two-weeks as Umeå University blogger has come to end. I will still be able to post things there, and may take the opportunity to do so for things related to general academia rather than my specific research project. I wanted to take this opportunity to summarise what I posted there.
1. Two kinds of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity can be a team effort where different team members each contribute from their specific discipline or an individual effort where an individual (like an environmental historian) crosses boundaries within his/her own research.
2. Publication truths. I share 10 “truths” about publishing from my experience in an interdisciplinary position crossing between natural science and humanities.
3. Why are there not more research blogs? I speculate about three reasons why more researchers don’t have research blogs and try to answer those objections. I personally find a research blog useful for my own research development.
4. Working together. Natural scientists have a misconstrued idea of collaboration as only being evidenced in co-authorship. I write about the way collaboration tends to work differently in the humanities.
5. Out in the field. While my ecologist colleagues went out to the field to collect samples that will be turned into numerical data that will be then summarised in graphs and tables, I also went out in the field to collect documents & photographs from archives and experiences & interviews from site visits which will be interrogated to find out historical mentalities.
6. Research language / Forskningsspråk. I reflect on the tendency for Swedish historians to publish in Swedish, whereas Swedish ecologists publish in English. I advocate more thoughtful decisions about which language is appropriate for research dissemination.
This has been a good opportunity for me to thoughtfully reflect on what it means to be an environmental historian working in an ecology department. I’ve learned something and I hope my readers have as well. As always, you are welcome to comment here or on the UmU Forskarbloggen posts if you have something to share.
Now, I’m looking forward to getting back to my primary research!
