Back again with the May keyword round-up from Academia.edu, this time with an emphasis on “Heroes & Zeroes” and celebrity athletes and narratives.

A reminder: Academia.edu offers scholars analytics data, as well as the opportunity to understand the ways in which their research is being discovered. Using this data, scholars may be able to better frame their research to interested parties. I’d certainly say there are interested parties in retiring athletes, transitions, and harnessing celebrity of sports figures.

Following a lonely period, my article “Arguably the Greatest: Sports fans and communities at work on Wikipedia” (2009) was given a page-dwelling compadre. I expanded my identity as an academic who explores the conflict-to-consensus process at play on Wikipedia to one who also explores athlete narratives as they intertwine with celebrity – all achieved by posting another article.

This article “HEROES AND ZEROES: Extending Celebrity Athlete Narratives Beyond Retirement” was developed in 2007 and published in the now-defunct journal Football Studies in 2008.  This was a part of my early work in exploring the strands of media(ted) storylines and bundles of cultural values – through which athlete public identities are developed by interconnected sets of meaning . You will notice my early thinking on narrative and the importance of unpacking the ways we tell stories – what and how we say what we mean in media discourse.

In the article, I also proposed a fifth type of professional athlete identity based on contemporary cultural contexts. Here an athlete moves from what Critcher (1979) (1) frames as “traditional/located to transitional/mobile to incorporated/embourgeoised, then to superstars/dislocated.” I argue that the emergence of celebrity grounds the athlete once more in a new realm. I explain: “Though displaced from their former social statuses and lives, this re-rooting in an imagined popular space of celebrity makes these formerly remote stars accessible once more following the cementing of their narrative. Thus the individual is subsumed by a new concept of the brand or celebrity entity – rather than a person, the celebrity is notable for his or her cultural pattern of values.” It was a fascinating exploration and essentially informed what was the first dissertation I wrote prior to embarking on the final version of my doctoral research. If you’re interested, you can read more at my Academia.edu page.

Back to the keywords! My analytics report shows that ten searches were performed through Google and brought visitors to my Academia.edu page. One of these searches was performed on Bing, with the bulk through Google. Visitors searched from the US, UK, Australia, Germany, and Indonesia. The search terms were as follows:

1. athlete as cultural hero                                         (No ranking provided)
2. how sporting celebrities cope with retirement     (Google search rank: 1)
3. retired celebrity women                                        (Google search rank: 1)
4. culture value of pro athlete endorsement             (Google search rank: 3)
5. narrative about mia hamm                                    (Google search rank: 1)
6. the rise of the celebrity athlete in the 1980s –      (Google search rank: 5)
7. One David Beckham? Celebrity, Masculinity, and the Soccerati /Cashmore, Ellis; Parker, Andrew (2003) In: in: Sociology of sport journal                                     (No ranking provided)

Searches of note: Four searches concerned celebrity and athletes – this is interesting as the notion of celebrity athletes seems to have become both less popular but also redundant. In other words, there is nearly an expectation of celebrity for emerging (let alone retiring) athletes. Retirement transitions were in the crosshairs of 2 searches. Several searches also related to the narrative (also “narrative” sic) and cultural messages conveyed by the athlete. Finally, visitors were seeking information on women athletes.

This month, no searches were directly seeking my scholarship. The addition of this slightly older article demonstrated an intriguing change in the incoming traffic for my page; I only had eight unique visitors to my profile and documents—and 7 document views—in May. Let’s see if June brings in more summer searching.

(1) Critcher, C. (1979). Football Since The War. In J. Clarke, C. Critcher, & R. Johnson (Eds.).
Working-class Culture: Studies in history and theory (pp. 161-184).London: Hutchinson of London.