During the 10th seminar of Researching Africa in the 21st century, students learned about the different methods of communicating and publishing research online. Personally, the seminar inspired me in several ways. First, it stimulated me to think about and scrutinize the traditional ways of publishing academic research. I agree that publishing in print radically limits the reach of these publications, since it tends to overwhelmingly attract academic scholars, but fails to appeal to a more general audience. Publishing online has the benefit that any individual across the globe can access studies and articles. In addition, online publications can more easily make use of multimedia and visual aids which increases the appeal as well as it facilitates the presentation of data and arguments.
Second, the session also inspired me to use some of the online tools (hackastory) for future research and papers in order to increase its attractiveness and readability. Moreover, it will be also useful for my internship activities. During my internship one of my duties will include to increase the online content of my organization. Thus the hackastory online tools will provide me with useful methods and instruments to produce attractive web content.
In short, I believe that online publications and its tools are both useful not only in order to decrease the environmental impact of printed publications, but also to increase the reach of one’s own research and its appeal.