Get Your Own Place (on the Web) part I: Medievalists Need the Web

This is the first (and, regrettably, shortest) of a three-part series posts that deals with the importance of designing, constructing, and maintaining a web presence as an academic, and specifically as a medievalist.  As a graduate student, I might be putting the cart before the horse with this, at least a little bit, but I can at least say with some authority as a student that the scholars who are going to make the greatest impact on the lives of the graduate students of the next ten years are going to be the ones who can speak about their work in a forum familiar to that audience: the Web.

The Middle Ages as a concept is enjoying a great deal of popularity at the moment. Shows like Vikings, Merlin, Game of Thrones, and the upcoming Galavant are common in TV lineups and, regardless of their attention to accuracy and detail (or lack thereof), the public seems to be hungry for more.  Meanwhile, the latest Hollywood blockbusters and even B movies about "knights" at Renaissance Faires continue to do well at the box office and in DVD/Blu-Ray sales.  Fantasy novels are so popular as to have their own section in most bookstores, and there is no denying the medieval influence on just about every video game that allows its players to swing a sword.

It used to be clear that the force attracting students to the study of the Middle Ages was mostly literature, be it Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  Films were also important, as the movie versions of each of these titles can attest.  Now, however, there is more than just a single way of interfacing with any study, be it history, literature, science, social science, or mathematics; as a result, fields of study need to branch out in order to meet new students on their own terms.  To do otherwise is to risk continued obscurity and, by extension, irrelevancy.

More importantly, by making ourselves visible on a more public space, like the Web, we engage in a conversation that has every bit as much long-term impact as those going on within the publications of our field: we are able to shape the way the public views our discipline. One only needs to look at the number of Twitter accounts dedicated to sharing interesting (and often bizarre) artwork from medieval manuscripts (and then looking at their respective number of followers) to know that there is something appealing about the medieval, but one also need only have a conversation with the right colleague to understand that the public image of the Middle Ages is often at odds with our view and concept of the period.  

Thus, this is my appeal to my fellow medievalists: learn to use the web to our collective advantage.  More than any other literary discipline, the web has a way to transform the public's understanding of what we do. If there is something inherently attractive about old books, then the numerous digitized manuscript collections that are popping up like strip malls across the web will feed into that attraction.  Virtual tours (and games!) of monasteries and 3D models of medieval artifacts may not give the visceral experience of being there first-hand, but they certainly give that first taste, which can be a strong motivator to learn more.  Animated interactive maps make it far easier for us to understand the spacial relationships between areas

We study the Middle Ages because we understand that they matter. That kind of knowledge is like a super power, though, because it also comes with the responsibility to share what we learn. If you don't already have a site, head to Weebly or Google Sites now and create one.  You don't have to hand-code anything or know what a <div> is to share what you know and what you love learning about; isn't that the point of this whole enterprise, anyway?