Academic Blogging, and Other Types of Resources

It’s probably no surprise by now that I am a staunch supporter of digital social media outlets that allow for engaged, critical interaction with academic research. I won’t go into all the arguments for this here because Anne Helen Petersen already has. But, more importantly, I find that an example is worth a thousand words. So I’ve decided to share a new blog from Mabel Rosenheck,  a PhD in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University, called “This Is Your Museum Speaking“. Her dissertation deals with local media museums, public memory, and media history (topics I’m sure many people in MHSoC will be interested in), and her blog is intended to reflect her ongoing work on this dissertation. Interested peers can then read, comment on, or share her work, resulting in increased, immediate interaction amongst scholars. Rosenheck’s blog is just one of the newer examples, but there are hundred others out there, including various ongoing book projects.

All of this preamble is just to say that we hope Grad/Aperture will be part of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema’s incursion into this body of aca-blogging, both by promoting our own grad students’ works and by granting students access to a variety of online resources. A discussion among the website team this past week on the nature of our ‘Resources’ category led to the conclusion that everything and anything on the website could ostensibly be considered a resource. It’s because of that discussion that I’ve cheekily categorized this post – and only this post – as ‘Resources’, to point people to the fact that our overall project at Grad/Aperture is resource creation and access.

So now the more important issue is whether you’ve actually seen all the resources we have on the website. Sure, you’ve read the blog; maybe you’ve checked out the calendar. Yet those are only two types of all the resources we have. Here at Grad/Aperture, a resource could be any of the following:

  • a Call for Papers/Abstracts/Submissions, which represents avenues to present your research and gain access to other scholars’ work.
  • a Shout-Out, because the most readily available scholarly work is that which your MHSoC peers are producing.
  • a Film Festival report, where you can find out about interesting city-wide events, and other student’s professional experiences.
  • our Friends of MHSoC page, which features clubs, student societies, and local institutions that will aid in your scholarly and extracurricular pursuits.
  • our Concordia University links, where you will find the pages to all the forms and processes needed at the university.
  • the Working and Research Groups page, which includes contact information on a variety of research groups at Concordia, especially those with MHSoC grad students or faculty.
  • the Resources tab, which includes a whole archive of teaching, funding, and researching publications and tips.
  • the GradLibrary catalog, constantly being updated to include all the books and journals we have in our GradLounge.
  • our YouTube channel, where we collect all types of shorts and features readily available on the video sharing site.

…and this is only the beginning. We’re constantly on the look out for more resources to share, and we always welcome tips from others on what could be included. I would like to make special mention of the Film and Media Blogroll, which contains many more examples of the types of aca-blogs that I was advocating for earlier. Whether your interests are in star studies, film aesthetics, fandom studies, queer cinema, criticism, or Chris Marker, you will find something to like in there. Who knows, the perfect resource for your next research project might just be in a blog somewhere.