So I think I'm getting to a place where I seem to want to spend my video-making time (which is basically also my writing time) in a couple of different activities. The thing that's often most pressing for me, from day to day, is keeping ahead of my courses. It frequently occurs to me that a lot of the stuff I have my students read, especially in a course like Decolonization, might be interesting to the public. Part of the difficulty with that is that some of that content is at a high undergraduate or even a low graduate level of complexity. That usually means the articles or chapters I'm having the students read are written by academics for other academics, employing specialized vocabulary and referring to other scholarly writing that the general viewer might not be aware of. This makes some degree of translation necessary.
This is not "Dumbing Down". in the sense that people normally think. I don't believe that most of the insights of history, if they're meaningful and relevant, need to be dumbed down for the general public. These ideas need to be communicated effectively, using plain language rather than jargon and code-words that are only meaningful to the initiated. Most historians are NOT taught how to do this (or even that it's of value) in grad school.
There's also the unfortunate circumstance that some history just isn't that interesting to any but the most dedicated enthusiasts who want to nerd out on a particular topic or period or region. Some of the things on which academic historians expend a lot of energy are really not that world-shaking. In the past, people have sustained careers on staking out and defending "turf" that may have little to do with any real-world, present consequences stemming from the information. Sometimes, the information is an important building block that leads to important insights later. Sometimes it isn't. It's hard to tell, ahead of time, so it's usually a good idea to let people pursue these trails of inquiry and see what comes of them.
But back to my point. Even if they're nerding out over a fairly narrow topic, historians ought to be able to explain that topic in plain language. I have a hard time with the idea that there are very many topics in the world that cannot be described in such a way that regular people can't understand, if you're really trying. There's a whole series of "5 Levels" videos on YouTube, where experts (like astrophysicists, biologists, musicians, and hackers) explain a complex idea to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. I think these are great videos: they're instructive and inspiring.
But back to what's really my point! I've been thinking about all the stuff I've been doing and wanting to do with videos. They go in some different directions, and will probably appeal to different audiences. I've already been trying to incorporate some History content into this channel that I really sort-of built on note-taking and app review videos. People have expressed interest, who had already come here to see my zettelkasten videos, for example, in the type of work to which I'm applying these tools and techniques. This is great! I love that. I'd also like to attract an audience of people who come for the content itself. Who are interested in the Columbian Exchange or the People's History or the Gilded Age or the secular radicals of the 19th century.
In the past, I've tried running separate websites or blogs devoted to individual topics. For several years I had a website called Bradlaugh.com that covered my research into the London radical who lived from 1833-91 and founded the National Secular Society. I had another website called HistoryPunk.com that dealt with mainly revisionism and social justice content. I still have a site called Environmentalhistory.us, which continues to get pageviews although I haven't updated it in years. This fragmentation was somewhat doable when I was a grad student. Not so much today. And it doesn't seem to make sense to me, having a bunch of websites or channels where people are waiting long periods for new content.
As I was driving around yesterday, I listened to the whole Joe Rogan interview with Sanjay Gupta. I had already seen a bunch of videos about the CNN takedown section, but the rest of the three-hour podcast was equally interesting. Two intelligent guys talking, often disagreeing, but giving each other the space to make their arguments. So unlike what you see on the news. Along the way, Rogan made the point that he had been very lucky in his career, to build a public persona where he could basically be himself. I thought this was a good goal to shoot for. Then I thought about his podcast output. I don't listen to them all. Even at 1.5 x or faster, it's still a huge time investment. So I'm selective. But I still CHECK all the titles to see what I might be interesting, and I'm happy he's churning out so much content.
So I thought I might try to emulate those two things. Have a single channel where I post whatever I'm working on, and hope that people will pick the things that specifically interest them but look at the other titles and maybe occasionally dip into topics to see what I'm doing. With the understanding that I'm doing all these things as me, so there will be some type of continuity of tone and attitude and perspective across all of it.
So, where to do this? YouTube? Rumble? Vimeo? My own website? Podcast apps? Text and graphics blogs? I think, probably "all of the above". I've been less than religious about making sure that I cross-post my videos to other media, but I suspect that the audiences probably don't overlap completely. So I should make the effort. What are the big buckets I might dump content into? Certainly note-taking and writing tools and techniques. History content adapted from what I'm using with my students. Posts about the research and writing I'm doing on my various projects. Maybe reflections on open learning. Maybe some reflections on the connections between history and contemporary events and issues. And I'd like to continue series such as the People's History videos. I think I'll make "playlists" in each medium for these topics, and add to all of them on a more or less regular basis as my workload permits. Then, I think, people could stay subscribed to the main channel and also save the playlist they like best.
I think I'll call the whole collection "Making History", since that seems to be the biggest top-level description of what I spend my time doing.