My Blogging Inspiration

Hello again,



Look at me, on my second blog post already! 


I mentioned previously that my inspiration for starting a blog came from more than just procrastination, and I wanted to take the time to explain that a bit further.

In my studies, I've had to look into the way that heritage professionals and the public use different online platforms to engage with heritage, and each other, and blogging is all a part of that. You could, as a result, say that my desire to start blogging came from a purely academic interest, in seeing what all the fuss was about, but that's not really true. 

For a long time, I've wanted to a part of this online community. Sharing my thoughts with people I would never usually have the opportunity to interact with. It's what I love so much about other social media sites (what can I say, I love a bit of Twitter), and I thought that it was about time I made the transition.

If you are interested in the use of blogging in archaeology, I highly recommend that you read a recent piece of research by Sara Perry: 'Changing the Way Archaeologists Work: blogging and the development of expertise'. Using her experiences of blogging in academic courses, she articulates brilliantly the creative draw of blogging, but also how it can act as an intellectual tool for archaeology, narrowing the gap between archaeological theory and practice. I have had the great opportunity of being taught by Sara, and she has certainly been the one of the main inspirations for me catching the blogging bug!

I personally believe that one of the most exciting things about blogging is that you never know what you are going to discover or what you might decide to talk about next. I love that I am able to tackle different topics but also bring my own personality into the writing and share my opinions with you all. I don't know the particular direction this blog will go, and that's the best thing about it. 

So I hope that you will visit again and find out what the next blog post will be! (No, seriously, I really don't know what to talk about next. Any ideas would be most welcome.)


Thanks for stopping by,


Jess



The article mentioned is this post can be found at: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue39/9/ and cited as: Perry, S. (2015). Changing the Way Archaeologists Work: blogging and the development of expertise, Internet Archaeology 39. http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.39.9