Using the Web to Make Academic Work Useful

For several stretches of several academic school years, I have allowed my class-related work to become my blog content. Sometimes it’s more natural, such as the final essay for Creative Nonfiction, and sometimes it’s less natural, such as short critiques for Moral Philosophy. Most of my motivation for posting this work is pure laziness: it’s really hard to will myself to write a blog post after having worked through an essay. A smaller point, which is the crux of this post, is that it seems a shame that I should spend so much time on classwork that will ultimately be seen by only one grader.

Not all classwork is valuable beyond its own context. Mechanical math problems and proofs of known results are obvious examples of classwork for its own sake, so I hope you won’t be offended if I avoid posting addition and multiplication worksheets. A lot of other classwork, however, emphasizes critical thinking, synthesis, and creativity in research and projects.

I’ve tried to make most of my original and less embarrassing writing available on this site, either in blog posts or on my Writing page. Despite its pedagogical purpose, classwork can still be original and contribute to knowledge as a whole, especially given how sparse some of the content may be. For example, Google Analytics tells me that my essays and responses for Moral Philosophy are some of the most popular content from google searches on specific philosophers and philosophies. Posting this content is cheap and easy for me, and it may be extremely valuable to anyone else who ends up researching similar topics to those papers.

Even so, most of my work has been relatively simple, and I have often been frustrated by how difficult it can be to find similar resources for some actual published papers. Many researchers have released open frameworks for their work, but more often than not, the details aren’t available. Datasets, stimuli, program code, and all sorts of other work are poured over by researchers for months and sometimes years, yet are basically forgotten after being summarized and presented in a paper. I’m not a full-fledged researcher and don’t understand most of the logistics, red tape, and politics that probably drive most of the reasoning behind the process, but in the pursuit of knowledge, it only seems right to make as much known as possible.

Along those lines, I’ve taken that first step and released several of my projects on GitHub, where you can view much of the code for research I’ve done, along with some results and write-ups. As you might expect, the code is something of a mess, though should anyone want to use or understand it, I would be happy to clean it up. In all likelihood, the repositories will likely sit on the web, unseen and unimportant, but for how much I complain about not being able to find things, I can at least say that, “I tried.”

For many of my peers who have also worked on various projects, I recommend that you do the same. I’ve seen some really impressive work come out of class projects, and it would be a shame for that to be the end of it. And use it for current projects as well. Should you be doing any coding or research, you should be using a version control system anyways, so you might as well make it publicly available as well. In academia, we’re always all collaborating with everyone.