A post by Amy Kind.

As hard as it may be to believe, this coming weekend is the fifth birthday of The Junkyard.  We ran our first post on April 3, 2017.  When Eric Peterson first approached me to ask what I thought of the idea of our collaborating on a blog devoted to imagination, I was a bit skeptical.  Were there enough of us imagination folk out there to make it work?  Would such a blog really be sustainable?  It turns out that the answer to both questions has proved to be a resounding yes, and I’m very glad I overcame my initial skepticism to take on this labor of love.

In the five years that we’ve been in existence, we have had contributions from 150 different scholars.  While the vast majority of them are in philosophy, we have also had posts from academics in cognitive science, psychology, sociology, law, political science, film studies, and religion.  Many of these scholars have contributed multiple posts.  Setting myself aside, the person who has contributed the most posts – with a grand total of six – is (drumroll please) Mike Stuart!  A number of folks have contributed five posts:  Margherita Arcangeli, Peter Langland-Hassan, Julia Langkau, and Luke Roelofs.  Thanks to all of them.  Thanks also go out to all the other denizens of The Junkyard who have been willing to write for us – it’s only because of all the great content that our Junkyarders provide that we have been able to do this week in and week out.

Overall, we have run 243 posts in the last five years.  These include seven book symposia and four conference reports.  We’ve also run a couple of weeklong special features: one reflecting on imagination at the close of the 2010s and one anticipating the 2020 election.

On our first birthday, I reported that there had been about 9K unique visitors to our blog in its first year, and our second birthday I reported that we had over 18K unique visitors to the blog during its first two years.  Now, after five years, I’m extremely pleased and proud to report that the blog has had over 64K unique visitors to date, with more than 19K unique visitors in the last year alone.  From March 2021 to March 2022 we had over 37K page views, an increase of 15% over the previous year.

Two posts from the last year that have generated a lot of traffic include The Dehumanizing Imagination by David Livingstone Smith and The Debate over Deep Learning Needs More Imagination by Cameron Buckner.  In terms of posts that have gotten the most traffic over the life of blog, the top five include:  Artists with Aphantasia: Extended Imagining? by Matthew MacKisack; Knowledge Through the Scientific Imagination by Fiora Salis; Why Do Philosophers Love Thought Experiments So Much? by Ethan Landes; Seeing a Shade of Green that I Couldn’t Imagine Before by Neil Sinhababu; and Embodied Imagination: Why We Can’t Just Walk in Someone Else’s Shoes by Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and María Jimena Clavel Vázquez.

We have a terrific set of posts lined up between now and the end of June, including from a number of new contributors, and then we’ll take our usual summer hiatus.  In the coming weeks, I’ll be starting to work to line up content for the fall.  If any of our readers are interested in contributing something, please either email me directly or let us know by filling out our submission form.  And if any of you have suggestions for other kinds of content you’d like to see at The Junkyard in the future, I’d love to hear from you.  Feel free to comment here or to get in touch with us by email.

Here's to the next five years!