Fan Discourse and Teaching Charles Dickens

By Lindsay Lawrence In Fall 2012, I proposed and taught a 4000-level major authors class on Charles Dickens at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Using the wealth of online materials that have become available in the last five years, particularly the Dickens Journals Online in this class, we explored Dickens’s legacy as a serial novelist, journalist, and literary magazine editor. The class also focused on Dickens’s cultural impact and his shrewd reading of the publication industry, including serialization. Inherently, this

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The Historian’s Toolkit: Social Media and Social Networking

Naomi Lloyd-Jones In January, I wrote a piece for this journal on how to be a #socialmediahistorian. Reflecting on an event organised by the Institute of Historical Research and the Social Media Knowledge Exchange, I concluded that the academic community is now less an ‘old boy’s network’, and is instead fast becoming a social network. So when it came to brainstorming potential keynote speakers for the then upcoming University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and King’s College London Workshop on

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How to be a #socialmediahistorian: plug in and plog on

By Naomi Lloyd-Jones (King’s College London) The proliferation of that previously innocuous little symbol, the dear sweet hashtag, raises a big question for today’s historians. How do we build our networks and communicate with others in our profession, while simultaneously disseminating our research to a wider audience, in a world increasingly dominated by the use of social media? Seeking to answer this conundrum opens up a veritable Pandora’s Box and forces us to think about how far we are willing

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A Year on Social Media Part 2: Blogging

Not only have I started to use Twitter this year, but I’ve also started blogging. I enjoy blogging. Like Twitter, it has made me more connected to the academic world beyond institutional borders. This point was recently reinforced to me when I attended BAVS this year and on three separate occasions I had people stop me to talk about recent blog posts I had written. Having said the above, I am aware of my limitations. I don’t think I could

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Teaching with Blogs: “The English 19th century Novel”

Dr Charlotte Mathieson (University of Warwick) Context The English Nineteenth-Century Novel is an honours-level undergraduate module in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, on which I teach 3 classes of 15 students in weekly 1.5 hour lecture-seminars. I set up a teaching blog for this module at the start of the 2011-12 academic year, having previously experimented with using a teaching blog for a first-year literary theory module. There are many ways in

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