One thing I've been contemplating lately is creating a professional research website. What do I mean? Here's part of my motivation: I've had a near constant web presence since about 1994. It's my public face to the world.
My current webpages at my graduate university consist of dozens of connected pages, including the posting of several papers I've written, along with my CV, comments on research, and personal pages. One page of mine, an annotated bibliography from my first-term as a doctoral student, gets about 5-10 hits per week from various search engines, drawing individuals with widely divergent interests toward a single reference covering over 100 articles and books. I think it's a useful resource, and would like to add to it, and set up several more.
Recently, I've renewed a commitment to raising the awareness of my area of study, as well as a desire to pump up my public profile. So... creating a website dedicated to my area of study seems like a good idea. And, it would allow me a way to maintain my web presence under my real name. My university account expires one year after I graduated, which was last June. My Visiting Scholar status grants me an email address (and access to letterhead and the library and such), but no webspace, so far as I know. I just emailed the chair and my sponsor to ask. But even so, there may be a benefit in establishing a web presence for the area of study, as a point of contact for the various researchers and the curious. From what I can tell, it would cost me about $100/year, plus all the time I commit to it.
Any thoughts anyone?
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2 comments:
No time for a lot of comment, but I just wanted to point you to Brett's http://airminded.org/ as an example of a high-quality research site: there is a blog component, but the resources sections are phenomenal and very original.
Great, thanks. That looks like an excellent model. I've been tossing around quite a few ideas. Many of them are perhaps too ambitious, or simply would require too much misdirected effort.
The point of the project would be to give me an outlet for my ideas, and a way to gain greater prominence for the field. I think Brett's approach with some modifications is workable. I really like the "categories" feature, which seems to be standard on typepad blogs.
I previously downloaded a copy of Wordpress but haven't really worked with it yet. This is looking good. Thanks for the link.
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