#ScholarSunday Meta-thread (Ahead of Thread 250)

Tomorrow I drop my 250^th #ScholarSunday thread! That’s a whole lot of sharing of public scholarly goodness, so today I wanted to offer just a few reflections & requests when it comes to this weekly work I’ve been doing for the last five & a half years.

As I look back, there are a couple key continuities across all these threads. The most important are the two central goals: first, to highlight great public scholarship that might otherwise be hard to find and/or engage in all the noise of social media & the internet & our 21^st century moment.

& second, to express solidarity with all those doing the work. As someone who’s been trying to do public scholarly work for 15 years now, I know how haphazard, & often how isolated, it can feel. I hope these threads have helped create a sense of community instead, a reminder that we’re in this together.

Another continuity has been my attempt to capture the breadth of spaces, sites, media, & forms that public scholarship can take. Even though the threads have greatly expanded in size & scope, they’ve always featured that variety: from articles & essays to newsletters & blogs, from podcasts to book publications, from journalism to digital humanities resources, & more.

The biggest change over these 5.5 years has been in where & how I share the threads. For the first couple years they were solely on Twitter; then I created a Google Doc to archive them; then I moved to a Substack newsletter; & now they are located here, on the public scholarly website my wife & I have created.

I’m really proud of this site & hope that it will be the home for these threads for as long as I can keep doing them. But it’s also a new & evolving space, & more than ever it will be crucial for me to get the same support here that I’ve tried to offer my fellow public scholars across these 250 threads. So a few requests:

First & foremost, if you’re seeing this thread & haven’t subscribed yet, please do so. It’s free, you can choose which parts of our site you want to subscribe to (including but not limited to these threads), & it’s a crucial way to help this site sustain & grow.

Second, please contribute to the threads! You can use the contact email on this site, or you can email me directly at [email protected], or you can leave comments on this post or on any of the prior #ScholarSunday thread posts, among other ways to reach me.

Third, please please share this thread & all the #ScholarSunday threads far & wide. If you’ve ever been featured in them, if you’ve ever benefitted from the work I share, if you want to support all the work I put in & the solidarity I try to model, please help get the word out about them.

I really love these threads & all the places & spaces & people to which they’ve brought me, & hope to keep sharing them on our new site for a long time. That’ll be a lot easier with all these layers of support & community, from contributions to subscriptions to sharing far & wide. Thanks so much, & see you back here for the 250^th thread tomorrow!