It speaks either to my level of engagement with a plethora of things (aka “life” or to a general disposition towards laziness that the review of last year’s activities on this blog, which I have done intermittedly, was postponed until now, almost four months into the not-so-new-anymore year. Anyway, before something else comes along, let’s get this review started!
Last year, I logged nine blog posts, which is even more than the six I wrote in 2022, the seven I wrote the year before that, and even slightly outdoing the eight entries 2020 and 2019 saw. For everything older that that, you can refer to the article I linked above that covers the first four years of this blog’s existence.
Thus, it seems that around eight entries per year are regular fare. A trend for breaks between posts becomes visible over time: Usually January is missing because between Christmas, New Year’s Eve and the ensuing general hangover there is not much to report. The same goes for 2023: There’s nothing for the first month of the year. Then again, summer months are a hindrance for blog activity: The weather tends to be so fine that I prefer to be outdoors instead of writing posts. Plus, I usually take some vacation in summer, and the result is academic silence. Thus, it’s no surprise that also in 2023 July is without an entry. For last year, also September is missing because that month saw me busy relocating to Portugal for some time, and although this could have been a newsworthy item, I simply was too busy to sit down writing.
Apart from frequence, it’s also interesting (at least for me and in retrospective) to take at the look of topics, I covered in these blog posts. Therefore, for the first time I took a look at the categorisations of the blog posts for 2023. Six were on publications, one on my particiaption at a conference, one on my then-new whereabouts (Portugal, as mentioned), and one on what I would call “other academic topics”, precisely: My generation of an ORCID-record. All of that is not surprising for a blog of a researcher highlighting his work.
As with ORCID, taking a look at the themes and topics I wrote about is something I should have done already, maybe even taking into consideration other criteria such as word length of posts over time. This would tremendously benefit an empirical, evidence-based analysis of my engagement with this blog. Oh wow, my vocabulary is definitively that of an empirically orientied social scientist already!
I will take up this idea of a thorough investigation of my own blog posts for the next entry, which is planned for April. This seems to be a good occasion as this month marks the tenth anniversary of my blog. Aha, with that I already have another entry on my mind, marking a great future for the blog in 2024!
