The Emergence of the Social Media Scholar

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Who is a social media scholar?

A social media scholar is a scholar for whom social media is a primary publishing platform for their scholarly work.

I've long struggled to understand my style of scholarship and this is the best way I've found to describe it.

I learn from conventional forms of scholarship and participate in them, to a degree, but this participation  is inadequate to motivate my quest for learning and sharing knowledge.

Having identified what I am and where I stand in relation to other forms of scholarship, the next step is to work out how to maximize this orientation.

[Nimi Wariboko]

Dear Toyin:

Thanks for this definition of your scholarship. It is great. Permit me, however, to problematize your definition a bit—not your self-identification. Social media scholar can also mean a person who studies social media, like African Studies scholar or Black History scholar. So, you may need to further sharpen your definition. 

Another point: if you say because you publish on/in social media platform and hence you are a social media scholar, does that mean that those who publish in scholarly journals are journals-scholars? ( I left the “s” in journals to analogize media, which is also in plural.)The question is: does the medium define the scholar and his/her work or the area of studies? Medium or content/discipline? Or both? 

What is style of scholarship? Is the style of your scholarship all about the medium of dissemination of knowledge or something else? 

Don’t get me wrong, I understand and applaud what your are doing or trying to get across to us in terms of self-definition of your style of dissemination of knowledge. I am only nudging you to refine your definition and have fun or intellectual high with it while doing it.  

Thanks for your post.

Nimi Wariboko 

Boston University

On Feb 13, 2022, at 8:27 AM, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Great thanks, Nimi.

Much appreciated.

Will chew on those ideas.

Thanks

Toyin

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[Toyin Falola]

“man does not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4).

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Great thanks Prof Falola.

It would be instructive if you could elaborate.

Toyin

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[Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM]

I do not think that there is need to define/designate scholars by the medium through which they diseminate/diseminated their scholarship.

In my opinion, scholars are scholars. There are no social media, Journals and scroll scholars.

The above also applies to all other endervours, like creative writing, in which ideas are diseminated through different media depending on the era.

-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO)

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Thanks for the appreciation, Nimi, particularly coming from you, an academic scholar whose career has been meticulously and successfully crafted according to the enablements of academia.

I've observed over the years that trying to publish as academics do paralyses me.The book publishing never gets done when I aspire to seek a publisher because I delay till eternity, even though I consider academic books as collectively the best kind of non-fiction books known to me.

As for journal publication, I admire the rigour of the process which produces work indispensable to scholarship but I don't think I have the temperament for it.

It requires a particular kind of patience and adaptability which I don't think I have. 

Would I not need to adopt such a process if I'm to operate as a publisher, particularly a publisher of scholarly texts, an idea I like? Of course. Is that not a contradiction? 

I also need the freedom to experiment with styles of writing. A favourite method of mine combines the photo essay and the expository and argumentative essay, adapting the visual style of such a magazine as National Geographic to scholarly writing. I am not likely to start looking for publishers who wish to publish that. Time, energy, patience.

I get the impression also that I'm creating my own cognitive ecosystem, publishing myself while being open to publishing  others who are interested in my publishing their work, using

conventional and newer publishing technques, as well as publishing texts I want to see in print again or I want to reach a broader audience, a vision for the future.

It would be great to have a complete English translation of all the works of the majestic thinker and writer Ahmadou Hampate Ba, a republishing of Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods, one of the best works of Yoruba cosmology and art, now out of print, I think, perhaps Beier's collected essays,he was a superb writer, an English translation of Maupoil's classic work on Dahomean divination, the collected works of stellar African art scholar Babatunde Lawal, the collected Facebook posts and responses to them, with an editor's introduction annotations, of art scholar and curator Olabisi Silva, as well as of social media text and image posts of Pius Adesanmi, among other initiatives. 

Will I be approaching a publisher with such ideas? I doubt it. Patience, energy, time.

These are ideas that animate me from time to time. I don't see myself looking for publishers to sell the ideas to. I doubt if I have the patience to do so, but I ask myself, why have I not done these publishing jobs before now if Im so committed to doing it myself? Perhaps my new self definition, a more self conscious self positioning will help.

With online publication platforms such as Amazon, publishing both electronic and print books, which Amazon does, is at the fingertips of everyone.What separates such initiaves is quality of writing, editing and final production.

Where realistic, as in my own work, in  also interested in reworking how scholarly books are presented to emphasize excitement, visual and ideational, rather than purely ideational, defined by text without images.

 

This is my way of responding to what I understand as working for me rather than trying to do things in ways that are conventional but which do not motivate me.

I'm proceeding by creating links to my writings under various subjects, as I am doing at my central website, Compcros and as I have done elesewhere with other projects, such as my work on Ogboni and Victor Ekpuk in relation to Nsibidi.

From there, I'll proceed to PDF files. From PDF files,  I'll proceed to electronic books. From electronic books, I'll proceed to print books. I could add video, even if at a basic level.

Thanks

Toyin

On Sun, Feb 13, 2022, 16:10 Nimi Wariboko <nimi...@msn.com> wrote:

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[Toyin Falola]

As high as 80 per cent of journal articles are never read. The average readership number for a journal essay is 10.

 

 

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, February 13, 2022 at 3:39 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Emergence of the Social Media Scholar

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Thanks, Chidi.

In this instance, the distinction is very, very significant.

You may observe that most academics, scholars employed by educational institutions, as I understand that term, do not use social media in publishing their scholarly work.

Why not?

They would be bypassing the ideally  rigorous  peer review  system that makes  academic texts in my view, collectively the best in the world for non-fiction, and will not be rewarded by the academic system which is tied to publication in a ademic journals and books, operating by principles of assessment that ideally ensure a particular standard of quality, and therefore contribute to sustaining academia as the primary bastion of carefully processed knowledge.

I depend heavily on academic books and journals for my work. They are collectively the best in non-fiction writing.

The academics texts that inspire me are part of my life's scriptures- Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World, Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language, the Cambridge Kant collection, all published by Cambridge UP, the Hindu Tantric series published by SUNY and Routledge. The superb books in African Studies by Indiana UP, such as Drewal's Yoruba Ritual and  Ogundiran's The  Yoruba : A New History. In my experience the name of such publishers on a book implies you are holding a first class book. 

I recall vividly wonderful articles I have read in various academic journals, articles I will never forget, some of which I can even quote from  by heart or as with some, recall the structure and image map of the entire essay, readily visualising the images, their location within the article and the text around them, having repeatedly read the essay-African Arts, Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today, Word and Image etc.

At the same time, however, I am not motivated by the idea of publishing with these platforms,  even though I know it will give me greater visibility and credibility if I am able to do so.

Why?

I don't know.I'm just not motivated. If I insist on toeing that line, the work will sit for years in my computer, as some projects have done, with no action taken.

There are times one needs to dialogue with one's spirit to understand where it wants to go. 

Thanks

Toyin

On Sun, Feb 13, 2022, 22:39 Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com> wrote:

I do not think that there is need to define/designate scholars by the medium through which they diseminate/diseminated their scholarship.

In my opinion, scholars are scholars. There are no social media, Journals and scroll scholars.

The above also applies to all other endervours, like creative writing, in which ideas are diseminated through different media depending on the era.

-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO)

On Sunday, February 13, 2022, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com> wrote:

Who is a social media scholar?

A social media scholar is a scholar for whom social media is a primary publishing platform for their scholarly work.

I've long struggled to understand my style of scholarship and this is the best way I've found to describe it.

I learn from conventional forms of scholarship and participate in them, to a degree, but this participation  is inadequate to motivate my quest for learning and sharing knowledge.

Having identified what I am and where I stand in relation to other forms of scholarship, the next step is to work out how to maximize this orientation.

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Edited

Thanks, Chidi.

In this instance, the distinction is very, very significant.

You may observe that most academics, scholars employed by educational institutions, as I understand that term, do not use social media in publishing their scholarly work.

Why not?

They would be bypassing the ideally  rigorous  peer review  system that contributes to making  academic texts, in my view, collectively the best in the world for non-fiction, and will not be rewarded by the academic system which is tied to publication in a ademic journals and books, operating by principles of assessment that ideally ensure a particular standard of quality, and therefore contribute to sustaining academia as the primary bastion of carefully processed knowledge.

I depend heavily on academic books and journals for my work. They are collectively the best in non-fiction writing.

The academics texts that inspire me are part of my life's scriptures- Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World, Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language, the Cambridge Kant collection, all published by Cambridge UP, the Hindu Tantric series published by SUNY and Routledge. The superb books in African Studies by Indiana UP, such as Drewal's Yoruba Ritual and  Ogundiran's The  Yoruba : A New History. In my experience the name of such publishers on a book implies you are holding a first class book. 

I recall vividly wonderful articles I have read in various academic journals, articles I will never forget, some of which I can even quote from  by heart or as with some, recall the structure and image map of the entire essay, readily visualising the images, their location within the article and the text around them, having repeatedly read the essay-African Arts, Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today, Word and Image etc.

At the same time, however, I am not motivated by the idea of publishing with these platforms,  even though I know it will give me greater visibility and credibility if I am able to do so.

Why?

I don't know.I'm just not motivated. If I insist on toeing that line, the work will sit for years in my computer, as some projects have done, with no action taken.

There are times one needs to dialogue with one's spirit to understand where it wants to go. 

Thanks

Toyin

[Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM]

Oluwatoyin,

If scholars can relax their hug on orthodoxy, they can work together to establish peer review situations on social media. 

All they need to do is to create e-publication platforms and groups on social media where scholars would submit their works and get published after being peer reviewed.

There are groups catering for diverse endervours on Facebook and LinkedIn(and may be on other social media)whose administrators subject posts from group members to serious scrutinies(reviews) before such post are uploaded (published)on such platforms. 

Scholars can do the same.

Thanks.

-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO).

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

You have a point, Chidi.

 Academia.edu has something similar, Academia Letters. Same with Cambridge Core.

Grigory Perelman was offered his Fields Medal, equivalent of a Nobel Prize in mathematics-which he turned down- on the basis of such an informal peer review process on a mathematics site where people post their work and others review after posting.The science community has arXiv, a non-peer reviewed site for scholarly articles. 

Perhaps I should be more flexible myself about where I try to publish.

Thanks

Toyin

Oluwatoyin,

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