Apart from starting this blog near the start of 2012, I’ve also been writing quite a few different things. I’ve been trying to reflect a bit on what I’ve done this year as part of my attempt to plan ahead for the next few years. I recently posted about my plans and my slight planned change in direction. This year has given me a chance to work a few ideas through. I wanted to mix things up a bit this year.
So in between other things I wrote four short magazine type pieces. One was a piece on algorithms in the academy that was published in Times Higher. And I wrote three pieces for Berfrois. One was a piece on music genre, one was a piece on mobile music, and the third was a review if Peter Sloterdijk’s book Bubbles. In addition to this I’ve been working on my book, which is now called Popular Culture and New Media: the politics of circulation. I’ve already posted quite a bit about the book on here, and I’ll probably post a couple of more things as I work on developing the first draft I have on my desk. Alongside the book I ended up writing three journal articles. One has been accepted by Cultural Sociology and will be out around April time next year. That’s a piece about music genre. The other two articles are still under review. One was based on a small project I was involved with that looked at recording engineers. The second was a piece that followed up on some of my other writings on the power of algorithms. So, quite a range of things that explore my recent interests in different ways. Some of these I plan to follow up on.
I just have a couple of articles that have actually been published this year. A piece in Sociological Research Online that uses a piece of commercial analytics software and explores how it can be used for critical social science. And a short-ish debate article in Convergence. There are a couple of other articles that have been published online first but I think they are out early next year in the actual journals. I’ve got a couple of book chapters and another article in Theory, Culture & Society queued up for next year as well. I’m quite looking forward to seeing them come out.
That’s cleared the decks a bit and I’m not committed to write anything after my current book. But I’ve started to plan the next steps. I’ve got some interest in my ideas for an authored and an edited book on Walter Benjamin. So I think that will be the job immediately after I’ve managed to get my book in shape. I’ll have to see how that goes.
Thinking culture 
You have been busy 🙂
So, what’s your verdict about mixing up things a bit: does it help or does it distract? Are there synergies or are they different ‘beasts’ altogether?
Thanks Ana,
I found it really refreshing. Particularly doing the blog. They seem to have fed into each other quite a bit. The Berfrois piece let me explore an idea about Genre outside of the confines of a journal article, that then helped me to refine the ideas I wanted to put in the journal article on genre. And one of the articles that is under review used the research for one of the chapters of the book but took it in a different direction. So not sure I’d take all this on again, but they did seem to feed into each other I suppose.