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¡°Impact is an awkward thing in British Higher Education,¡± writes Tim Hitchcock, professor of digital history at the University of Sussex, on .

¡°Most of the time it feels like just one more bludgeon used to batter hapless academics into submission,¡± he adds. ¡°And yet no one spends a lifetime researching, teaching and writing about something if they don¡¯t believe it is important ¨C if they don¡¯t believe that what they do contributes to a better world. We all want to have ¡®impact¡¯.¡± The question, the blog states, is how to achieve impact ¡°in a way that reflects our own values¡±.

¡°This question is all the more important because our traditional assumptions about how our work affects a broader social discourse seem increasingly threadbare,¡± Professor Hitchcock continues.

¡°When the print run of most monographs number just a few hundred copies (most of which disappear in to American research libraries, never to be read or used), and when journal articles proliferate beyond [that] number because they serve the needs of big publishing, rather than academic dialogue, we need to think harder about how we do the job of the humanities.¡±

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If scholars continue to have ¡°small (vociferous) conversations amongst ourselves, in professional seminars and at conferences¡±, then they will soon ¡°lose [their] place in the broader social dialogue¡±, says the blog, which is also published on the .

¡°If there is a ¡®crisis¡¯ in the humanities, it lies in how we have our public debates, rather than in their content.¡± The solution, the blog says, is ¡°all around us¡±: sharing.

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¡°The best (and most successful) academics?are the ones who are so caught up in the importance of their work, so caught up with their simple passion for a subject, that they publicise it with every breath,¡± Professor Hitchcock says.

He praises the early career scholars who have dismissed concerns that exposing their research too early ¡°will either open them to ridicule, or allow someone else to ¡®steal¡¯ their ideas¡±.

¡°In my experience, the most successful early career humanists have already started building a form of public dialogue in to their academic practice.¡±

He gives examples, including Ben Schmidt, assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, whose charts his work on using modern techniques to answer questions about 19th-century America; and Helen Rogers, reader in 19th-century studies at Liverpool John Moores University, who shares excerpts from her forthcoming book, Conviction: Stories from a Nineteenth-century Prison, on .

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¡°The most impressive thing about these blogs (and the academic careers that generate them) is that there is no waste ¨C what starts as a blog, ends as an academic output, and an output with a ready-made audience, eager to cite it,¡± Professor Hitchcock says.

¡°Between them, Twitter and blogging just make good academic sense. And while you need to avoid all the kittens and trolls, clickbait and self-promoting gits, these forms of social media are rapidly evolving in to the places where the academic community is embodied.¡±

Send links to topical, insightful and quirky online comment by and about academics to chris.parr@tesglobal.com