I got published!
Well... I mean I wasn't the primary author, but my name's in right there below one the chapter headings.
When I finished uni, I didn't want to so much as glance at my dissertation ever again. But now that it's been a few years, I kind of miss the environment that tertiary education offered. The novelty of being constantly bombarded with new ideas and the feeling that all the knowledge I was learning had potential. I guess when I started working in a well-established industry (electrical grid infrastructure), I was disappointed to find that all the necessary knowledge and expertise I need for my day to day work has all already been researched, tested, simplified, and codified. I find, distil, and reference a wide pre-existing body of sedentary theory and standards. I'm not required to discover or derive anything new. Which I suppose is true for nearly all jobs on the planet.
So - missing a good theoretical problem to chew on (and to prove to myself that I haven't forgotten everything I learned), I read back through my old dissertation and thought about ways to improve it. It was completely my intention to revisit it and find ways to make the model more accurate with respect to the measured data I collected. But I guess not much point now, because it's published - 90% verbatim I'd say - in Sustainable Technologies for the Energy Transition.
It's a nice feeling to know that the hours I spent on it weren't just for a mark on a piece of paper, but that my effort has been cemented in academic literature, destined to live on to be read by whoever can afford the £175 price tag (or £150 if you're a cheap-skate and are satisfied with the eBook version).
But of course it's not the first thing I've published.
This blog you're reading is published for all the world to see. I've got publicly accessible images, code, writing, and all sorts scattered across various sites and platforms. You don't need a publishing house to get something meaningful out there.
I'd say that I'm more proud of all the smaller projects/works I've done and self-published than I am of this book chapter, even though they're not ensconced in a glossy hardback and don't carry the gravitas of a well-established academic publishing house behind them. And that's simply because I did them out of my own interest and enjoyment.
Sometimes I think it's necessary to remember to create things and share them for the pure sake of it, not as a means to any sort of monetary end. Take greatenglishchurches.co.uk for example. Lionel there has spent countless hours, effort, and expense creating a self-published labour of love. No editors, no fee structures, no profits. I'm sure his site has helped many more church-enthusiasts 1 than the typical textbook in that field ever will.
In my opinion, the world only continues to turn because of nerds on Stack Overflow and Engineering forums, solving real problems faced by real people. Nearly all commercially published material is either marketing or, necessarily, overly broad in scope. Get your super-niche stuff out there - the unmarketable stuff that a publishing house wouldn't even consider glancing at! Self-publish your own content on your own terms!
Don't get me wrong, I'm chuffed that someone thought the work I did was worthy fodder for this 488 page doorstop-stroke-textbook. It's a good feeling.
Is there a term for those?↩