The Blog

Hello everyone,

This month's blog post is going to be a little different than normal. 

I am the editor of the Association of Celtic Students blog. I joined the Association of Celtic Students at our 2020 conference, where I came on board as one of the co-editors of the blog, which myself and and Freya, currently the Association's Secretary, relaunched back in February 2021. I have been the sole editor since 2022, and now, with the end of my time as a Celtic Student fast approaching, I am going to be stepping down from my position so a new editor can come on board at our AGM at the end of the month.

I thought I would take this opportunity to introduce myself to all of you who have been reading, say goodbye, and talk about the blog.

My name is Emmet Taylor. I'm a final year PhD student at University College Cork, where I work in the Department of Early and Medieval Irish, finishing up my thesis on heroes in medieval Irish literature. I have been soliciting articles, editing them, and generally keeping the blog running at a post a month (with occasional posts coming a day late). Running the blog has been a wonderful experience, made even better when I get to hear students of all levels and senior scholars mention to me how they enjoy the content we put up here. Obviously, things have been rather eclectic during my tenure with the blog. We had a series of posts discussing the resources available for people to learn modern Celtic languages (Brezhoneg, Cymraeg, Gaeilge, Gàidhlig, Gaelg, and Kernewek), introductory guides for students (Digital Humanities, Conference Abstracts, Research, Learning with Dyslexia, Motivation, and Academic Posters), and have started a series introducing readers to medieval Irish literature (Ulster Cycle, and Mythological Cycle). We have also had posts on a range of specific topics. For instance, we discussed the relationship between Celtic Studies and Public Outreach, discussions of Halloween traditions in Brittany, and celebrated fifty years of Tocher.

I love all of these posts, and like a parent with their children, I don't have (or will never admit to) favorites. But! I don't need to pick favorites when I have access to the analytic data, so I can just show you all of your favorites and thereby bypass any guilt I have on the topic.

Here are the highest viewed posts in the history of the blog. You can see a nice range of topics, including posts about past conferences, some of our series on learning Celtic languages, and then absolutely destroying the competition is our post about LGBTQ terms in Celtic Languages.

Now, that certainly is curious! It is so much more popular than any other post that something must be going on.

 

Unlike a lot of our posts, it is frequently being viewed, even years after its original publication, and as the most popular search term that refers anyone to the blog is a direct link to that post, what I suspect the reason for this post's popularity is that it has reached out beyond the community of Celtic Students.

That post (at least when it was created) was the only place on the internet that provided a broad selection of terms across various modern Celtic languages, which has resulted in it being one of the top Google search results on topics such as 'Queer Celtic Languages', and 'LGBTQ Cornish language'.

But, beyond this most popular post of ours, who are you? All the people reading this? Well, we can actually take a look at that as well.

 

We can see that the majority of people reading the blog are from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, which is probably not very far off from what we would expect. As we might expect, the blog gets views from other parts of the world where Celtic Studies is offered, such as Russia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand. Some unexpected visitors also crop up. Japan has twice as many views as New Zealand, while Vietnam is the is the 9th most common source for visiting the blog.

And then, most people who come to the blog find it through Google (which accounts for 3141 of our views), with Facebook and Twitter (the t.co entry) are close runners up, which is all thanks to our exceptional social media manager, Nina!

But, all of that to say. Now that my tenure managing the blog is coming to a close, we are looking for someone to take my place! It is a fun position on the committee, and you get to develop really helpful skills for broader academic life. Editing and reviewing work, learning basic HTML, establishing connections across the field, and many more.

If you're interested in the position, you can throw your hat in the ring at our AGM at 3:45 on April 1st, which is both online and in-person at our 2023 conference. If you think you might be interested, but want to ask some questions, you can reach out to me at CelticStudents.Edition@gmail.com.

I hope you have enjoyed the blog, and I hope it continues to flourish.

Goodbye for now,

- Emmet Taylor