I recently completed my doctorate in sociology. I successfully defended my dissertation, “Scrapworthy Lives: A Cognitive Sociological Analysis of a Modern Narrative Form” on August 18, 2010. This blog is based on my dissertation. I have decided to publish my dissertation as a blog for a couple of reasons.
First, in the field of sociology there has been a push towards public sociology. Sociology as a field has not done a very good job at making its research accessible to non-sociologists. Public sociology is an attempt to make sociological research accessible to all. Traditional publication methods in sociology mean that research could take months and more often than not, years to be published in academic journals. These publications are full of jargon and cost more than most people (sociologists included) want to pay for information. A blog on the other hand, is immediate and free. The downside of this is that I do have to make a living and in order to give my words away for free, you will see advertising on this site. I also have some merchandise with my logo for sale at Skreened. A blog enables me to share my results with a wide audience and develop more content related to dissertation research that will also be relevant to my readers.
Second, there are a large number of blogs already out there about scrapbooking. I have been following roughly 50 of these blogs since this past spring. A couple of patterns have emerged. One, most of the authors of these blogs publish very irregularly. Very few publish daily or several days a week. I plan to publish content Monday through Friday. Two, giveaways are quite common. I can not fault other bloggers for publishing a large number of posts that are either soliciting entries for a giveaway or are the follow-up with the winner’s screen name being announced because they do have to make a living and I can not say that there will never be giveaways on this blog. I want to focus of Scrapworthy Lives, however, to be on the content, not the giveaways. Three, most scrapbooking bloggers publish layouts that they have created or from their readers. These pages include photographs of their children, other family members, friends, and so on. I am conflicted as to whether or not I will do something like this on Scrapworthy Lives. The focus of this blog is not on scrapbook layout ideas or techniques, though in the future some of these topics may be considered. Back to my original point, there are already a large number of scrapbooking blogs out there. Scrapworthy Lives is different in that my focus is on the sociology of scrapbooking (who, what, when, where, how, etc.). My goal is to bring my readers content about things they may not have considered before regarding scrapbooking in a format that is accessible to a wide audience (scrapbookers and nonscrapbookers).
Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
