a good place to start

Good news (for me and my family at least): last week I've submitted my PhD thesis, "Measuring the Comprehension of Abstract Data Visualisations". Yay. For more than four years I was writing a huge text that practically no one will ever read (the small but select company of my highly esteemed examiners and supervisors (and myself) excluded). So now, after careful consideration, what I really want to do is to try and write much smaller texts, in the hope that more people will read these.

The world of academic communication is changing ("...I feel it in the water, I feel it in the air..." ahem. sorry). Peer-reviewed academic journals, with careful cross-referencing, relatively short articles of set format, responses and comments etc., are published profusely and not really read. I mean, I can't speak for everyone, but for myself - I don't read journals every month to inform myself of the latest developments in my area of research. No. What I do is, I read the blogs and the feeds and the forums, and if there is a link to a particularly interesting (juicy/relevant/etc.) bit of research, I go and read the article.

So, while peer-reviewed journals were the start and inspiration for things like HTML, mailing lists and blogs, now the new media has overtaken and, quite frankly, has killed the grampa. The unchecked proliferation of peer-reviewed journals together with the decline in the quality of reviews did not help either. Last week, my best advice to an MSc student about how to get noticed in her field was not to publish in journals, but to post in forums and to get a killer vid of her project up on youtube. I hope she will - it's a seriously cool project.

I might as well follow my own advice, right? I like what I'm doing, it's by and large cool stuff, and I want to share these things. So, while I will, of course, be writing and publishing in the regular venues for research output (does no bad for the CV, at the very least), I will also try and keep up this blog for (kinda weekly) shorter reports on the stuff I do professionally - research, teaching, collaborations, all that - in a format of: a picture; 200-300 words of text; and maybe a link. Just the fun bits.

Stay tuned.