About the Radio Silence

I haven’t blogged for a while. I owe you an apology and an explanation, so here goes…

Why I’m not blogging

I’ve been reflecting a lot over the last few years on why I don’t really blog anymore. I think part of it is that when I was still actively maintaining the blog, I was creating teaching content but wasn’t really teaching much in comparison. Now, with the increased amount of teaching I do, it has kind of replaced my blogging, which is sad. But I also didn’t initially know what to do about it – or maybe it just wasn’t the right time. I keep thinking about the many concepts I teach each semester that would make great blog posts and about how I should put them out there. Given that I have all those teaching materials, it would be easy to distill some of it into a blog post, yet I find that I simply don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to get back into blogging. However, over the last few years (since being a PostDoc – it’s already been almost three years at this point!), I’ve often felt like I’m drowning in to-dos. I felt like I had a really hard time dealing with everything I was already doing and felt like I couldn’t sit down on the weekend and blog, which is somehow a private pastime but also, due to the topics I blog about, inherently work-related. I just needed a break from work, and that’s how the LaTeX Ninja kind of died over the years. I have made sure to post a little bit every once in a while and I think some of my old posts may still be helpful. But I really do still want to get back into blogging.

Academic Self-Help on Epigrammetry

I have actually managed to get back into posting occasionally on the other blog I share with my friend, who used to be known as the LaTeX Noob on here: the Epigrammetry blog. There, I have been writing a little bit about academia how-tos, academic self-help, my journey trying to become a better academic writer and also some things I’ve learned about academia, such as what to consider when writing applications.

At some point, I wondered if Ninja and Epigrammetry should be the same blog, but I think it’s good that they’re separate because they cover different topics. The LaTeX Ninja is more digital humanities/LaTeX (although I’m not actually doing much LaTeX stuff at the moment, so I feel like a bad blog owner). The other blog is more about academic self-help and, right now, academic writing because that’s something I’m currently trying to get better at.

DH learning resources beyond this blog

Another reason I haven’t blogged much is that over the last year and a half, I’ve been creating learning resources (such as the video schools that I also wrote blog posts about). So, I have been doing things, and I thought maybe I could get back into blogging more through advertising these things. With the video schools, it’s been a journey of trying to edit the thumbnails so they look more YouTube-friendly to make people click on the videos (the original thumbnails really weren’t very attractive). Initially, I was so overwhelmed that I just uploaded the videos, which in retrospect was a mistake. I should have been more careful with the uploads and come up with good thumbnails first. Now, I’ve been trying to fix that for publication on the DARIAH Campus platform.

Getting back into a posting schedule?

These are a few things I’ve been doing and why you haven’t seen much of me here on the LaTeX Ninja. It’s giving me hope that I’ve been able to get back into blogging on Epigrammetry, so maybe that strategy will work for the Ninja as well.

The strategy that has worked for me now is very different from what I used to do during my PhD thesis phase, where I blogged every week or at least every second weekend and prepared things to be scheduled to keep a very regular posting schedule. That kept me motivated but looking back, probably was also a big source of procrastination.

Now, I blog when I feel like it, often speaking into the ChatGPT app to turn my ramblings into coherent sentences, which I then fix into a blog post. It’s still some work, especially since I don’t want AI to write the blog post because it loses my voice and that’s something (I assume) my readers like about me. What’s the point of blogging if my voice gets lost in the process? But this approach has at least helped me get a number of blog posts out in writing bursts when I was motivated for a brief period of time and then not look at it for a few months or weeks until motivation comes back again. This has proven much more sustainable. Maybe the key really is to embrace the seasonality of the academic year. I hope I can transfer this strategy to the Ninja as well.

Because I haven’t posted in a long time, now it feels like there’s a hurdle for me to get over to start blogging again… I’ll keep you posted and hope you will hear much more from me again soon.

Thanks for all the fish – and that you’re still reading this!

Best,

the Ninja