The importance of Web sites for academics

I’ll be following the comments to this discussion because I’d like to find out why those academics that don’t have web pages don’t have them. Are there still colleges that don’t provide faculty with space to put up web pages? Is it lack of tech support? Lack of information? What is it?

From my experience it’s something like this. First, many faculty wildly overestimate the technical difficulty of putting up web pages and the time involved in maintaining a modest website. Secondly, there’s little institutional encouragement or technical support: it isn’t a normal expectation that faculty will put up web pages; faculty don’t routinely get ftp software or html editors; techs aren’t around to help faculty or just tell them that it isn’t a big deal to put up a web page. Thirdly, the university spends its IT budget on buying and promoting COMMERCIAL products that are overpriced, clonky, and gimmicky–like WebCT and, most recently at my place, clickers. In addition to eating up scarce resources this turns off faculty because using lots of this stuff takes a substantial investment of time and doesn’t produce results that are worth it.

I’d like to strongly encourage ALL academics to maintain websites that includes their papers and articles. In the nonprofit field, the number of times I have been unable to access relevant research is incalcuable.

When designing programs, writing reports and articles, and evaluating our work, it is critical to have access to research — and yet most of us are barred from all of the journals. Our organizations can’t possibly afford subscriptions, and if we don’t have any institutional affiliation we have no way of gaining access.

For my own part, I e-mail professors directly to request a copy of relevant research, and almost always get a positive response. But I can’t do that in every case — there is just not enough time in the day.

http://www.w3schools.com/

Alison, the way we used to do this back in the mid-90s (and I don’t see why this still wouldn’t work in at least some cases although it gets trickier with more languages used now) is to view the page source of a simple Web site you like and copy parts of the corresponding code.

These days there’s much more crap in the code often related to the use of the tools that Baber describes above.

You might have to stick with viewing the page source and stealing everything from [body] to [/body].

Now I will write something awful:

Microsoft Word will create web-pages for you. Use very plain fonts and don’t do anything complicated, but use “save as web-page” and you might be able to avoid learning anything at all about HTML. This may make IT people want to punch you.

M$Word–ouch. Dreamweaver is under $200 with an academic discount. It’s really worth it.

The source code for most web pages out there looks like [expletive deleted] so copying and monkeying is not for someone starting out.

Re. plagiarism of unpublished-but-circulated work – I have heard of it happening, yes, direct from a ‘victim’; and once the ‘offender’ has their version in official circulation, proving that they copied you [to a degree sufficient to make anyone who matters take notice] can be very difficult…

As for plagiarism, I fear Eszter is right. I have once been explicitely plagiarised (word for word, 8 full sentences) of an unpublished paper that was on my homepage; it now makes half a paragraph in an article published in an internationally refereed economics journal. If it was not because it was by a PhD student and because I would be worried to overreact, I would have blogged about this. After moaning to some friends, I let it go — yet I confess I was furious for days (the person who plagiarised, whom I happened to know, apologised when confronted with the ‘evidence’ and said it was ‘a slip’).
And the much more difficult to trace plagiarism, is, of course, those that are not word-for-word plagiarism, but simply stealing an idea, giving it a twist, writing it up, and sending it to journal. And much of that kind of plagiarism may also not be intentional at all, but simply sloppiness. Academic life is for many so competitive, that many do it in order to increase their changes at getting published. And frankly, reference to unpublished work in articles one submits are often seen as not very good, so the ‘norms’ in the publishing business are also creating incentives to plagiarise. So I agree: if you are not utterly famous, don’t put your original unpublished work on your homepage.

As for why people don’t have a homepage: I got my homepage as a birthday present, by someone who wanted to lure me to the Netherlands (hence it’s ingridrobeyns.nl and not ingridrobeyns.be or ingridrobeyns.org or some other site). I think I would, at the time, have felt embarrassed to buy myself a homepage, thinking it as an arrogant thing to do. But in the meantime I have discovered that it is a tool for networking, also with people from the nonprofit and the global South who, as pointed out above, have difficult access to published work. And my homepage has also played a significant role in my trajectory on the labour market, in a very positive sense. Finally, it helps if you are going to meet up with someone, say in a cafe or at a confernece, whom you’ve never seen before: a picture makes it much easier to locate a person, and it’s so much easier to say “there’s a picture of me on my homepage” than to send a picture as an attachment.

Maybe the issue is implied in the post and some of the comments: Should a homepage (and perhaps a blog) be on your present employer’s site or your own site?

Back in 2005, I wanted to start a blog (instead of writing e-mails to 4 or 5 people, in case you wonder) and as my then employer didn’t offer anything supporting blogs, getting my own domain was the obvious choice – a domain and a small web-hotel come cheap these days.

As it is, I found having a homepage which is independent of employer useful – especially as I’m moving from one place to another.

Technical advice? As a coding n00b, even I managed to install and run WordPress which can also be used as a general cms. Mac users (… ducks …) might want to check out an application like RapidWeaver.

(In case anybody wonder why I didn’t go for the obvious jacobchristensen.dk – well, that one was taken, but I do hold jacobchristensen.eu in reserve)

Ditto on the ease. I like Netscape Composer (free!) which makes nice simple pages. All you really need is one page with links to papers you put up. Nothing fancy.

Is there a way to date-stamp material you put up? I had a couple paragraphs of a working paper turn up translated & unattributed on a reference website (and apparently on a CD-ROM these bastards were selling) and while I didn’t care too much about the material as such it occurred to me that, yeah, one day it might look like I got it from them not the other way around.

OTOH having stuff up and accessible to search engines means that people come across your stuff who otherwise wouldn’t.

C€#p – forgot the link to the Slate article … here it is:

http://www.slate.com/id/2153313

(Anybody at CT is free to edit this into the previous comment)

Further advice for academics:

* have your own, portable email address and don’t rely on your insitution providing continuity after you leave (we do, but central Uni IT doesn’t)
* get your own domain name (you can still forward your email to gmail and use the web interface there, but you get long-term independence)
* if your institution has bat-shit stupid intellectual property assignments (as we do here at Sydney Uni), make sure you first publish your content somewhere else (on your own web site, possibly) under your own copyright. Then you can safely stick it into your institution’s online course system labelled “reused with permission from “. (If you work at a real university that doesn’t insist they own all work done by their staff, this may not be so much of a problem.)

Please do not use Word to create web pages. I work in IT support

Heh.

Post 17 above mentioned homepages with blogs. I’m a PhD philosophy student, entering my 2nd year; is maintaining a blog a good idea for a PhD student, in addition to having a homepage? Or is it perhaps a bad idea? And if so, why?

“Good looking web pages? Why?”

Because anything less these days smacks of incompetence or indifference. That’s not the impression you want to give, especially in this context.

I’m not saying that the context is something like a IT person’s website. Not at all. In fact, something too pretty, too complex and layout-intensive will be the wrong impression for an academic to make. But the sort of site that one saw by academics in 1998 (which was half the people I knew ten years ago) just looks outdated and indifferent in today’s context. Yeah, KISS is a good principle, especially in this context where it’s an especially prized academic virtue (in some quarters, at least), but there’s nevertheless a distinction between simple and elegant and simplistic and amateurish. I feel that anything hand-coded in the basic HTML a novice can learn will result in the latter, not the former.

That’s not necessarily true, of course. Someone who knows better could write a carefully targeted design guide that a novice could follow that would produce an elegant hand-coded page for the average academic. It’s worth Googling for something like that.

I’m not convinced about the merits of a web CV produced from a Microsoft Word document designed to look good when printed. The results could be better than a page made with a simple HTML editor, but they could also be a lot worse.

So I’d follow Keith’s other advice – find someone else’s web CV that looks nice and works well and just copy it. (The layout, that is, not the actual content!) I think I read somewhere that 95% of CVs in job applications are based on just three Microsoft Office templates.

While I was on the job market last year (in political science), I had a website with my cv & links to pubs. I had statcounter on the page so I could track hits, and what surprised me was that, judging by the domain names of site visitors, I had viewers from only one of the universities at which I had interviews (and no viewers from the other places to which I applied, but that’s not so surprising). Based on that experience, I’m skeptical of the idea that hiring committees look at these things.

Any advice on how to get one’s page to show up on Google searches? I submitted it to the Google scroll months ago but it’s still not up.

When I was applying to prospective grad schools, I emailed supervisors from my portable, personalized-domain email address (which was, like Ingrid’s, a christmas gift). All the emails were very short and didn’t mention the website which is attached to that domain name. All the responses were along the lines of “based on the work experience listed on your website, I would like to meet with you”.

So I call that success. Also, when I arrived for a visit, the existing grad students wanted to chat about some of my stranger jobs and hobbies, which was a nice ice-breaker.

If you want something like the Patchen Markell

Look:

New acquisitions and current favorites (5.14.2007)

His page is so wonderful to use that the frivolous fun part of it hasn’t been updated in a year.

“Don’t be intimidated by design snobs like Keith Ellis.”

That’s probably the first time I’ve been called a “design snob”.

The web is a lot better designed and thus a lot more readable than in the past. Thus, when we encounter sites designed like it was still 1998, they look out of place.

Take a look at a site of mine, a very old (the first, in fact) site on the Monty Hall Problem. This should resoundingly refute the “design snob” accusation.

The site badly needs a redesign for the same reasons as I’ve been giving: it looks archaic. It needs to be split up into several pages, it needs more white-space and navigational aids, among other things.

Unfortunately, I’m very much not a design snob and my HTML hand-coding skills pre-date complex sites with complex style-sheets. Which is what is needed these days.

That’s not to say that an academic site with limited scope—say, a CV and a few other things—can’t be simple enough to write by hand. But it should conform to current design standards, using a black-on-white color scheme, lots of white space, and is well-organized and easy to navigate.

I haven’t re-written my MHP site because for it to be what it needs to be, it needs to be something completely different than what it is. Not to mention that my entire approach to explaining the problem has changed in the last ten years. But the site still works well as-is, so until I have the time to re-evaluate my pedagogical approach in the context of a web site design, write a Java applet to simulate the problem, create (or have someone else create) much better looking graphics…it’s going to stay as-is. But I certainly wouldn’t want this dinosaur presenting my professional face. Fortunately, I have no professional face. I don’t work. So it’s not a priority.

But what’s being discussed here is someone’s professional face. As much thought should be given to the website design as would be given to one’s CV or research presentation.

Sites that are too flashy, like Patchen Markell’s, or the even more lovely the Spanish Department at Berkeley are, I think problematic for academics–it distracts from the content (and for job-seeking new grads, makes it look like you have too much time on your hands).

Its best if your site looks like it isn’t designed at all: unfortunately this effect requires some knowledge to achieve. The elements of typographic style applied to the web is a good place to start.This site for example, is legible, sober and professional looking.

Another reason to have a web presence is to monitor who looks at the page and be variously intrigued, surprised, pleased, or disturbed. Recently my web page got repeated, frequent, visits from an IP that could only be the parents of a woman with whom I went on one date. Chalk one up for “disturbed.”

Since someone mentioned the Firefox Web Developer addon, I figured I’d throw in another Firefox addon: FireBug.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

It does many of the same thing as the Web Developer addon, although its a little more about debugging than editing. However, the “Inspect” feature is an amazing tool when used to inspect other people’s websites and learn how they accomplish things, and for debugging display problems on your own sites.

There are several ways to export LaTeX to HTML; latex2html, or tth. I prefer the latter for math, don’t know how it is for fancy layout. (Don’t like fancy layout. Markell site required many extra mouse/kbd actions to see all of it. Pfui.)

/oldskool