Your online academic presence

Jonathan Peelle

Northeastern University

  • What is the right time to build a personal website, and how do you do it?
  • Is social media ever useful professionally?
  • How can you network as effectively as possible in a way that feels comfortable?

Caveats

  • Everyone has opinions
  • Find what works for you

What goals do you have for your online presence?

  • Job search
  • Research visibility
  • Teaching visibility
  • Public engagement
  • Finding community
  • Learning from others
  • Participant recruitment

What audiences do you have for your online presence?

  • Students
  • Colleagues
  • Collaborators
  • Funders
  • The public
  • Other professional audiences

Start here

As an academic you should have:

  1. A personal website with a stable URL
  2. A completed LinkedIn profile
  3. A Google Scholar profile (as soon as you have 1 publication)

Whether it’s worth going beyond these depends on your personal goals.

Your current online presence

  • Try typing your name into Google. If you are not the first result, you have work to do.
  • Both web search and LLMs make use of available documents on the web. It’s not magic. If you don’t like what you see about yourself, work to change it.

Considerations

  • If you have a common name, use your middle initial—or write out your full middle name—consistently (not just on papers, but on your website, CV, social media, etc.).
  • If you don’t have a middle name, you may want to adopt one.
  • The more places your name appears in relation to what you want to be known for, the better. One website is better than zero; 20 is better than one.

LinkedIn

  • Complete your profile, targeting the audiences you want to reach
    • If you are looking for a job in industry you may want to highlight project management experience or coding.
  • Keep your information current!
  • Build some kind of network
  • Consider posting to promote your work, colleagues’ work, etc.

Website requirements

  • Have information your audience cares about
  • Under your control
  • Stable URL (independent of institution)
  • Easy to update

Website options

  • Squarespace
    • Intuitive editing
    • Generally looks good
    • Costs money
  • GitHub Pages
    • Intuitive editing…if you are comfortable with markdown type languages and git workflow
    • Can look good
    • Free
  • Other: Quarto, Rmarkdown, etc.

Themes for GitHub pages

Academicpages: edit yaml and md text files

# Basic Site Settings
locale             : "en-US"
site_theme         : "mint"
title              : "Your online academic presence"
title_separator    : "-"
name               : &name "Jonathan Peelle"
description        : &description "Professor Peelle's Portfolio"   
url                : https://jpeelle.github.io 
                                                      

author:
  avatar           : "profile.png"
  name             : "Jonathan Peelle"
  pronouns         : "he/him"  
  bio              : "Smart and handsome professor"
  location         : "Boston, MA"
  employer         : "Northeastern University"
  uri              : "http://jonathanpeelle.net"

Hosting vs. domain

  • A website host is where your content lives
  • A domain is what you would type in the address bar (e.g., jonathanpeelle.net). You can change which host the domain points to in the future.
  • Regardless of where you host your website, having a domain is nice (and often only about $20/year)

Website content

  • Think about your goals and likely audiences
  • Be inspired by people you look up to in your desired profession
  • At minimum:
    • A short bio or introduction
    • A CV
    • A list of publications
    • Contact information

Other social media

  • Different platforms have different audiences and can serve different purposes
    • Bluesky
    • Mastodon
    • Instagram
    • etc.

Like most of life, what you get out of a thing relates to how much time and effort you put in.

Questions?

Other resources