Impact of Social Sciences – Twitter and blogs are not add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion that underpins it.

"Impact is an awkward thing in British Higher Education.  Most of the time it feels like just one more bludgeon used to batter hapless academics into submission.  It is frequently shorthand for an agenda handed down from on high, privileging near-market research and the agendas of government.  And yet no one spends a lifetime researching, teaching and writing about something if they don’t believe it is important – if they don’t believe that what they do contributes to a better world. We all want to have ‘impact’.  The question is how can we do so in a way that reflects our own values, rather than those of whatever government happens to be in power this week? This question is all the more important because our traditional assumptions about how our work affects a broader social discourse seem increasingly threadbare.  When the print run of most monographs number just a few hundred copies (most of which disappear in to American research libraries, never to be read or used), and when journal articles proliferate beyond number because they serve the needs of big publishing, rather than academic dialogue – we need to think harder about how we do the job of the humanities.  If we simply continue in an older vein – having small (vociferous) conversations amongst ourselves, in professional seminars and at conferences, through book reviews and in the specialist hard copy press – we will lose our place in the broader social dialog. If there is a ‘crisis’ in the humanities, it lies in how we have our public debates, rather than in their content ... It seems to me that the solution to this problem is all around us, and that in order to address it, we need to remember that the role of the academic humanist has always been a public one – however mediated through teaching and publication. By building blogging, Twitter, flickr, and shared libraries in Zotero, in to our research programmes – into the way we work anyway – we both get more research done, and build a community of engaged readers for the work itself.  We can do what we have always done, but do it better; as a public performance, in dialogue amongst ourselves, and with a wider public ..."