RSS for researchers

RSS rules. It’s one of the last remaining vestiges of the good internet, and its status as an open, extensible, decentralised standard feels increasingly anachronistic, perhaps even radical, on today’s web.¹On the negative side, its invention is sometimes identified as the moment at which “social media” lurched into existence, which we now know was a huge mistake. Over its lifetime RSS has proven surprisingly flexible and conducive to new uses — podcasting being the most famous example — but the standard itself has remained remarkably stable. The spec, currently on version 2.0, was last updated in 2009. It never got any of the “features” that have poisoned other standards like HTML as the line between browser vendor and IP rights holder has blurred.²Look over the list of authors on HTML’s euphemistically-named DRM module, Encrypted Media Extensions, and you will know who to thank for the fact that you can’t send a friend a screenshot of something you’re watching on Netflix. Idiotic efforts to “extend” RSS with features no one asked for like financialisation have been roundly, and rightly, rejected as stupid and antithetical to the format’s very purpose.

But RSS’s key strengths — openness and decentralisation — also give rise to its one real weakness: with no central registry or repository, it’s not always easy to locate and share useful feeds. All major browsers now hide feed indicators by default, so if publishers don’t prominently indicate the availability of an RSS feed themselves there is no simple way for a user to discover it. Publishers who put care and attention into RSS are, sadly, increasingly rare.

Luckily, some pockets of the internet are dominated by overwhelmingly powerful legacy institutions who wield their market dominance to resist modernising their ancient publishing platforms or improving the experience of their users in any way. In these places — academic publishing, for example — RSS remains ascendant. Worth it!

Academic RSS workflow

The point of this post is to share with you how I use RSS in my workflow as a media scholar and researcher. Despite being a heavy and long-time RSS user, it was only quite recently that I realised RSS could help me keep on top of developments in research and scholarship in my field. I cannot even tell you how much time it saves me every week.

These are the primary tasks I use RSS for:

1. Notifying me of newly published articles in journals relevant to my work
2. Alerting me to CFPs and upcoming conferences
3. Following individual scholars and writers whose work I enjoy reading

Most of the major academic publishers provide individual RSS feeds for each journal published under their banner.³Please direct your boos towards these publishers and aggregators that do not: JSTOR, Project MUSE, most university presses, and, surprisingly, the Scholarly Publishing Collective. SAGE journals, for instance, have a link in the sidebar of each journal’s home page:

Not every publisher makes their feeds so easy to find, and they can be quite spotty in terms of completeness of metadata. But at the very least they allow you to keep track of new journal articles and delete all those email alerts. This is essentially the perfect use-case for RSS, which is why I’m surprised it took me so long to start doing it.

Media / Communication / Cultural Studies RSS Starter Pack

Another reason RSS rules is that feeds can be packaged up and easily shared with others using OPML. I’ve exported my own list of feeds and will make them available here as a kind of starter pack for you to import into your own RSS reader:

Last updated: Thursday 2 January 2025.

These are the feeds relevant to my own personal research interests, so it’s unlikely you will find each and every one of them useful. But if you are interested in the cultural and creative industries, media studies, labour, the internet, social media, libraries and archives, anti-fascist politics, or comedy, there should be plenty of useful feeds in this pack and you can delete the rest.

(I hope this goes without saying, but I don’t necessarily endorse the views of every author and publication in this list. In fact, there are some I follow purely out of a deep, burning hatred. Try to guess which!)

I’ll probably update this post periodically as I add new feeds and delete inactive ones. Please feel free to reach out and suggest publications and writers I should be following.

Footnotes

• 1
  On the negative side, its invention is sometimes identified as the moment at which “social media” lurched into existence, which we now know was a huge mistake.
• 2
  Look over the list of authors on HTML’s euphemistically-named DRM module, Encrypted Media Extensions, and you will know who to thank for the fact that you can’t send a friend a screenshot of something you’re watching on Netflix.
• 3
  Please direct your boos towards these publishers and aggregators that do not: JSTOR, Project MUSE, most university presses, and, surprisingly, the Scholarly Publishing Collective.