The fleeting thoughts of a humanities grad student
I have had this website for the last six years, and in that period, it has changed quite a bit: When I first started it, I used it as sort of a blog where I wrote about things ranging from engineering to history. I had named it the “seventhgalaxy”, as a reference to the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy1.
Some years later, I got somewhat involved in a Twitter community where people shared ideas mainly through essay-style blog posts. That’s when I got more serious about writing, about wanting to write, and started publishing only “essays” on my website. I also changed the name from seventhgalaxy to Giray’s Sandal, because I wanted my name to be associated with the things I wrote. This marked the end of its anonymity.
Soon afterwards, I stopped engaging with that community, and eventually stopped writing online almost completely. In the last year on this website I published only five posts.
However, there is something new happening in my life, and this new thing makes it that I have to think about this website again!
This year, I started a master’s study in literature. This means that my name, now, is on the radar for any prospective employees, or colleagues, professors, and students. If they get interested in finding out more about me, and google my name, this website is probably the first thing they’ll find.
This means that I have to either shut it down, or clean it up, make it look more professional.
Personal websites usually contain only links and a small bio. I was thinking about doing the same thing to mine, cleaning up the landing page, adding a biography and some links to my academic profiles or description of my work. And let it stay dormant that way. Maybe keep the blog posts on a separate tab titled “blogs”, the way most personal websites do.
But then I thought, what if I turned it into an academic blog, and started writing again?
What would I write about?
Being a grad student, I get so many ideas, so many that I never have time to pursue them all. I read a lot, write a lot, and discuss ideas with friends from my cohort. I guess none of us have time to fully develop all the cool topics we end up on. More trails of thought than you can ever hope to pursue.
An academic’s ‘fleeting thoughts’ might be major discoveries for someone else. By someone else, I am including myself too. Many things I find out about these days I feel I’d never learn about if it weren’t for the professors, the books at the library, the readings etc. that I have access to.
An academic’s blog is such a 2000’s thing. I once did the editing of a scholarly book titled Digital Sociology. This book had a chapter on blogging, and especially academics blogging. It showed how they used their blogs as a way of ‘democratizing’ higher learning in the early days of the internet. As they could make knowledge available online for free and present it in a way that it would connect with people from outside the academy. Besides that, the book also touched upon how a blog was a great place for an academic to publish their ‘half-baked’ thoughts, thoughts that don’t usually get to see the light of day.
The idea is this: An article takes a lot of work. It takes months or more to write, and has to survive a peer-review process before it ends up in a journal. Not all ideas end up in journals. This is a good thing, because they are not usually worthy. But some don’t get there because you simply don’t have the time. And they might still be useful for brain-storming, or they might help some other academic with a specific point of their research.
So a blog is a less formal place where such half-baked thoughts can be shared without relying on someone else or on the academic system. If you want to share thoughts online in general, or just document them, you don’t really have many other options as an academic. Maybe only Twitter.
So here it is. Weekly, or maybe monthly blog posts about the small ideas I had during those periods. I’ll try to write them in English, but maybe I’ll switch to Turkish at some point. My main goal is to archive my ideas and make them easier to share. And hopefully, someone visiting my website might get a fun read out of them!
P.S.: I studied electrical engineering in my undergrad. It is still very surprising to me to see that my first post here, the reason I created the website, was this post about the derivation of the “short circuit transconductance” of an amplifier circuit. This was an equation I couldn’t find anywhere online, and I wanted to make it available so that people wouldn’t have to go through their textbooks each time they needed it.
P.S.II: I think academics keeping blogs are much more rare these days. The hopeful cyborgs of the early 2000s are long gone. But I do have one PhD historian friend who keeps a blog, though he rarely updates it. Also, I see that some writers still do keep blogs. I think I saw Nnedi Okorafor’s blog a while back.
Footnotes:
- The Seventh Galaxy of Ingenuity and Light, the galaxy where they made the Googleplex Starthinker. Though this wasn’t something the novel actually built upon further and was more of a passing remark, the idea of different galaxies being known for different things was so mysterious and alluring to me, that I kept it as an inspiring title. ↩︎
girayarat.com 