Academics seem to be getting busier: they are having more demands placed upon them; they are carrying out a wider variety of writing tasks; and boundaries between work and not-work are collapsing. This paper will explore the extent to which this is happening and the role of the digital world in such changes. Examples come from an ongoing study entitled The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation: Academics’ Writing Practices in the Contemporary University Workplace. Working across three disciplines (including History) in three universities in England, the study is using an innovative mixture of social science and humanities methods, online and offline. These include techno-biographic interviews of academics and auto-ethnographic investigations of the members of the research team’s own practices.

 

This paper will concentrate on over-arching themes concerning academics’ contemporary writing practices:

Affect: The strong likes and hates which academics express about their digital lives.

Coping: The increasing demands placed upon them and changes in writing practices.

Curation: How academics are contributing to the internet and claim the right to have some control over it.

Situating technologies: How technology is central but is located in broader social and cultural changes.

 

Finally, the paper will explore the extent to which these pressures and changes are particular to specific countries or whether they affect academics everywhere.

 

 

Professor David Barton is Professor of Language and Literacy in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and is Life President of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre. He is interested in all aspects of language online, including the interaction of words and images. He has been concerned with carrying out detailed studies of literacy practices in different domains of life and with rethinking the nature of literacy in contemporary society. Currently he is working on a project investigating how academics’ work lives are changing. His recent book publications include Researching Language in Social Media (Routledge 2014), Language Online: Investigating Digital Texts and Practices (Routledge 2013), and a second edition of Local Literacies (Routledge 2012).