Introduction/Preamble

Hi.
I hate blogs. I'm really not interested in what you ate for breakfast. But neither is this an anti-blog, parodying the self-involved styles of other bloggers. This blog is intended to be an interactive notebook.

Obviously the topic of this blog is me and my research; however, this blog is also not simply a self-congratulatory "ooo, look at what I've done" forum. I'm arrogant, but not that arrogant. For those of you who work in British HE, I'm sure you're all familiar with the fact that the RAE is transforming into the REF, and one of the pseudo-metrics that we are going to measured against is 'impact' - what 'impact' does our research have to the outside world. Its highly unlikely that any of us are going to find a cure for cancer, or salvage the world economic crisis, so what kind of public 'impact' can our film, TV, folklore, etc research have? As I understand it, part of the 'impact' taken into consideration is regarding to what extent our work/research is discussed in public fora beyond its initial publication. Ok. I think I understand that.

So this blog is an 'impact' notebook for my own work. I will post here a digest of where my individual research outputs (articles, books, etc) are discussed across the interwebs and in print. Some of you may want to follow this - I don't know why you would, but then again I don't know why people like Twilight either. Please feel free to discuss anything I put up here, and should you come across any reviews, discussions, citations of my work, please include it here.

Should a blog of this kind inspire any of my fellow academics and you want to do your own 'impact' blogs, let me know and I'll link up with your pages and forward any citations/reviews of your own work that I come across.

Of course, this could all go horribly wrong.

Mikel