Meta-Blog Post

This week, instead of our regular blog post we have been asked to do a sort of "meta-blog post" reviewing our blogging over the last semester.

Looking for trends in my work, I found that I have covered a wind range of topics in my posts, from football to neuroscience to alternative medicine. Five of my fifteen posts have been about neuroscience and/or psychology, which is not surprising as neuroscience is my favorite thing ever. Other than that, there is not a clear trend in terms of topics. There has been some consistency in the inspiration for my posts, however: the New York Times. Five out of fifteen posts were inspired by either an article or op-ed from the Times. This is not surprising, as I read the article in either print or online form every day. Four posts have been inspired by discussions we have had in class or by material we are reading in class.

These last ones have been some of my best. I am especially proud of my two-part post "The Evolution of Tituba." Part one can be found here, and part two here. These posts, inspired by some information I stumbled upon when confused by a scene in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a book we were reading in class, examine the choices Miller made in portraying Tituba. To understand the following, you should probably at least skim part one- don't worry, it's not too long. I found an academic article on JSTOR analyzing how Tituba changed from an American Indian to an African American, and used this a my text to ground the article in. I also made frequent reference to the Crucible and even did some additional research on the composition of the population of Barbados at the time of the Salem Witch Trials. I quoted from my JSTOR article and analyzed how Miller changes Miller made placed blame on Tituba, saying "But he did more than change the magic, he changed the culture that the witchcraft came from to match Tituba's, which very clearly shifts the blame for the witchcraft to Tituba." Here I connected the article analyzing the text, the text, and my own analysis of the two together to form an argument. The posts challenged the choices of a book we were reading in class and related to themes of the class about the construction of history. These posts were much stronger than some of my earlier posts.

My first blog post, which you definitely don't want to read, was rambling, long, and just plain boring. I didn't ground it in a text, and generally was irrelevant to themes of the class. My second was better, as I was critiquing an infographic that I found that contained some inaccurate numbers, and so was looking critically at media- one of the main focuses of the blog. But I just didn't do it very well. I spent a lot of time doing the math and focused mainly on my reaction, rather than a critical analysis. Rather than looking at motives I wrote "Although I expect bias and inaccuracy in statistics or analysis, and especially the internet, I was rather shocked to find such blatant numerical contradictions within one source, and I expect raw data to lie to me - because I figure that people would catch that almost immediately so no one would bother trying to lie." Instead of analyzing the source, the changes or what they mean I just wrote about my feelings. Which are not really important or interesting. Contrasting this to the Tituba posts, I can clearly see how I have grown as a writer/blogger.

I have clearly changed as I began to understand the blogging assignment and blogging itself better. I really enjoyed my Crucible posts, and hope to be able to critique another fictional work we read in a similar way at some point. Although I'm not sure they have been some of my best or most focused posts, I really enjoyed writing some of my more general and pseudo-philosophical posts, like my one on confirmation bias and on the reconstruction of our consciousness. To find a way to make these fun posts also really good posts, I should probably start looking at RadioLab, which Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor seem to like.

I also want to work on using  titles and images more effectively, because one thing that really struck me while looking through my blog is that my consistency in using these is pretty bad. I have some rather interesting titles, like "With a Dictator's Death Comes a Delicate Balance," "The Ultimate Form of Storytelling," and "When You Can't Even Trust Numbers." But then I also have titles like "Neuroaesthetics" and "Homecoming and Football" - and of course, I've named this post "Meta-Blog Post." Titles have always been something I struggle with, and the blog would be the perfect place to work on getting better at them. Next semester I hope to actually take advantage of this opportunity. My use of images has also been spotty. Sometimes I use a photo, which is good, but it has little to add to the story or is just very generic, like my brain photo in "The Ultimate Form of Storytelling." Sometimes I've used images well, like an image of an important person I'm discussing in my post, such as in "Strange Sort of Immunity." I want to improve on this as well, though improving on titles is more important to me.

Overall, I've liked the blogging assignment. I haven't always done my best work, but I have some that I am definitely proud of, and many that I have enjoyed writing.