Charlotte Frost Interviewed on Adventures in Career Development

This was fun. Tristram Hooley kindly interviewed me for his blog Adventures in Career Development. He wanted to know about how social media pervades my approach to career development in academia. It was a great opportunity to reflect on the last few years and make links between what once drove me to blog about knitting and now drives me to blog about academic publishing: learning!

I discussed the concepts behind and the practical ways I run both Arts Future Book and PhD2Published. I think what also comes across is how I’ve tried to build projects holistically, thinking about how they could provide and present ways of learning and meet a range of needs along the way. For example, as I’ve often noted, PhD2Published is both a blog of information but also a platform you can take control of and use to develop your own publishing strategy.

Already my esteemed Twitter colleague @3pipenet has agreed on Twitter with my claim that blogs are not about keeping a diary but about learning and he left a wonderful comment on the interview page saying:

Thank you for this great interview AiCD! We’re very lucky to have Charlotte interpreting the impact of the web and social media for the humanities in particular – which still contains a sizeable proportion of academics who are hesitant to either engage or interact with students and (dare I say) the public online. We look forward to the day when standard position descriptions for an academic position will state "will be required to maintain an active presence online via weblog and social media platform, promoting collaboration with peers, and interacting with student body and general public."

Keep up the great work Charlotte!
H Niyazi
Three Pipe Problem

I’m excited that the interview has had this response already – not least because I’ll be talking about all of this in person at the British Library tomorrow. And it makes me keener than ever to show how the right tools, carefully chosen and well-maintained, can support a variety of routes into and around contemporary research practices.