TL;DR – In this inaugural post I explain why I subscribed to Humanities Commons and created this site.
I have had vague notions of creating an academic website since graduate school, but I reasoned that to justify the work I must have enough ‘content’ — published articles, professional responsibilities, and so on. In the interim a number of academic repositories emerged that satisfied my needs. I created an academia.edu account to make my research available to everyone. However, over the past few years academia.edu has paywalled most of its useful services, dividing (and monetizing) its membership. I also found its social networking options lacking. Colleagues might follow each other and bookmark essays, but I did not see much evidence of collaboration among its members. Maybe I did not make enough of an effort … I have never felt comfortable networking with other academics.
In any event, the MLA and allied organizations announced last year the expansion of its Humanities Commons network. Among the many new features (most notably the open access CORE repository) is the option to create a free WordPress website. Humanities Commons markets itself as an academic social network, which means that I face the same challenges re: fostering meaningful academic relationships. However, I feel relatively confident that the MLA’s Humanities Commons will not adopt the subscription/premium model that will ultimately doom academia.edu in the next few years.
These services are especially attractive to academics from/in the developing world. It frequently more difficult to network with Western academics due to lack of regular direct contact. Moreover, we face severe foreign currency restrictions in Trinidad and Tobago that often make it difficult to manage the payments required for domain registration, web hosting, and other services associated with building a website. Ironically, now that I can theoretically afford to pay for such services I am unable to do so. Humanities Commons offers me solutions to both problems, for which I am genuinely grateful.
Now the hard part: maintain the blog, update the website, and make my best effort to network.