May, 2021 Research Update

Amici!  It is now June!

May was a month of happenings and not happenings.  On the not happening front, various articles in stages of editing or review discussed last month remain stuck there, so I don't have any exciting new written things to tout, save for ACOUP itself.

On the happening front, I was able to attend an actual in person conference again.  I am not, myself, a huge fan of academic conferences - I am awkward in groups and thus bad at the kind of social networking conferences are for.  Nevertheless a year and a half or so of cancelled conferences or 'zoom conferences' makes the heart grow fonder and so I was excited to be at the Society for Military History annual meeting in person.

It is also a bit odd because my scholarly profile has changed a lot since my last time at an academic conference; I went in joking that my academic affiliation should read "As Seen On Twitter!" (for those unfamiliar, conference badges list your name and right below it your academic affiliation; this can produce a lot of snobbery towards scholars with not-so-very-prestigious academic affiliations or worse yet an affiliation of 'independent scholar.'  Unfortunately, academia is still a very status-conscious, snobby place a lot of the time).  But I got to meet quite a few people I had only ever met before on twitter, including the Angry Staff Officer.  The joke turned out to be a bit off - I think more people recognized me from my recent Foreign Policy article on warriors than from Twitter, although I did get a little of both.

I also delivered a paper on the impact of the Roman adoption of mail armor, which I've attached here if you want to read it.  Our panel consisted of myself and Paul Johstono in person, and Dominic Machado and Michael Taylor remotely via zoom (most panels were hybrid like this) with Kelly DeVries chairing and Lee Brice commenting.  Michael live-tweeted the panel here and also since they had all remote papers delivered via pre-recorded video, he uploaded his own paper presentation on "Professionalism in the Roman Republican Army" to YouTube and you can see that at the link.

In addition to presenting papers, I have of course also been writing.  Work on the chapter on the food supply of the Roman army is in full swing now and consumes most of my time.  Of course on the blog we have been discussing Europa Universalis IV for the past month, along with our first guest post by Robin S. Reich which y'all seemed to really like.  

May was actually the best month for page-views on ACOUP so far with just short of 300,000 page views driven mostly by the "This.  Isn't.  Sparta" series going viral on twitter.  One thing I find very interesting actually running the blog is how the balance of where traffic comes from doesn't fit a lot of the assumptions people have.  A lot of friends and colleagues tend to assume big bylines or mentions in traditional publications must come with a flood of traffic (they don't) and that the biggest way to get eyeballs is probably twitter.  But this is actually the first month in a long time where Twitter was the major source of views.  The fact is, Twitter is actually a fairly small social media platform by raw numbers and the structure of the platform splits that audience up a thousand different ways.

Of course what makes Twitter influential isn't its user-count (which is fairly small) but the disproportionate presence of journalists, writers and academics among those users.  That makes it really useful for professional networking, but only rarely useful for getting lots of views.  Not that it matters much for me either way; I rely effectively entirely on word-of-mouth for my 'advertising' and that seems to have worked just fine.

And that has been the month.  Looking forward, the upcoming projects for the blog are going to be a discussion of ethnicity in the Roman Empire ("The Queen's Latin") and a look at the historical assumptions of Paradox's Victoria II, probably in that order - although the need to prioritize the food supply chapter and an upcoming anniversary trip for my better half and I to finally get out of the house together may mean more than the usual complement of firesides, or possibly a 'gap week.'  And it is definitely that and not the fact that Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is out now and Elder Scrolls Online: Blackwood is coming out as I write this.  Absolutely not those other things.

(Notes on the attached files: I've attached my SMH paper and the associated Powerpoint.  Note that a conference presentation is necessarily somewhat stripped down - the article version of this argument is 15,000 words long instead of 2,250 and has 128 footnotes instead of 20.  Likewise, the 'selected' bibliography is indeed selected, the article cites 110 different works (not including primary sources).  The footnotes you'll see in the SMH paper are mostly for me (the audience wouldn't see them, of course, and we don't read out our footnotes) and so aren't as complete as a published paper would have to be.  But it does give a fairly good overview of what my argument is, even if it is stripped down.)

And that was May!  On to June and hopefully actually finishing some of my writing projects rather than just starting more!