ah, but what have you done for me lately? a response to the #saa14 #blogarch carnival

...in which your correspondent participates, not for the first time (those were the good ole' days, eh Colleen?) , in the digital round robin that is a blogging carnival, with the hopes of someday seeing it at the SAAs.

Follow along with the carnival through the #blogarch tag or Doug's blog here.

November's question:
Why blogging? – Why did you, or if it was a group- the group, start a blog?

I'm guessing that like many of my blogging compatriots, I started my personal blog for a combination of reasons, starting with interest in a new bright and shiny thing (blogging! whatever next-- hoverboards? Hey, it was a different time), and running the gamut of self-publicising social media instincts, including the desire to join a conversation of peers, the chance to talk loosely and informally about things I was interested in, and the chance to share my devastating wit with the world at large.*  The world is a lonely place at the end of a PhD or in the dreaded gap between degree and employment, and I enjoyed the company.


Gertrude Bell, behatted.
I could say quite a bit more about my *other* blog, TrowelBlazers.com. The TrowelBlazers project came about organically, but was consciously designed and organised by our group, with planned posts and a duty roster - a very different scenario from the haphazard, laissez faire attitude I maintain with my personal blog. I think in the end this reflects the very different uses both are put to. Where TrowelBlazers is a wonderful, glorious, time-suck of discovery and funny pictures of women in outrageous outfits that we actively want to bring to a larger audience, my personal blog has very much become a repository or archive of small projects that would otherwise be left by the wayside. My personal blog has become a bit of a memento mori for the various shiny things I get distracted from my actual job (dental anthropologist / bioarchaeologist) playing with. I think this answers the second part of the carnival question: ' Why are you still blogging?'. Quite frankly, if I don't write down how I made an augmented reality app with bouncy Neanderthal skulls, I'm never going to remember.
* who uniformly failed to notice.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Augmented Reality for All: Make-your-own in 30 minutes

we be #blogarch December: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Books (not my own) - Times Higher Interview