Social Media for Researchers

Social media and research management; or

the potential of social networking sites for data collection; or

the potential of social technologies for sharing/dissemination

Dr Richard Hall

rhall1@dmu.ac.uk // @hallymk1

Are there other things you would wish to cover?

What do you understand by social media or the social web?

Which technologies do you use in your research? What for? Are they social?

• Carpenter et al. (2010). Researchers of Tomorrow: Annual Report: 2009‐2010.

• Kroll and Forsman (2010). A Slice of Research Life: Information Support for Research in the United States

• Procter et al. (2010). If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0. Research Information Network, London.

• James et al. (2009). The lives and technologies of early career researchers

• Harley et al. (2010). Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines. UC Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education.

[with thanks to @mweller]

Headlines

Frequent or intensive use is rare

Researchers as ‘risk averse’ and ‘behind the curve in using digital technology’

Culture against using social media for either soft or hard publishing

BUT almost all researchers have created a strong network of friends and colleagues

Social media supports spontaneity and serendipity

Social as resilient practice:

1. modular engagement;

2. inside diverse networks;

3. tied to feedback loops.

Issues of trust, power, rules

Tools and stuff: http://www.rin.ac.uk/node/1009

and there is always wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media#Examples

I like really simple overviews: http://www.commoncraft.com/videos#technology

On how organisations use social media: http://bit.ly/yynf81

Case 1: JJ and 2012 – testing ideas and building networks

Blogging on Posterous for critique and comment and testing ideas: http://jennifermjones.posterous.com/

Amplifying networks using Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/jennifermjones

Flickr as an image bank: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenniferjones

Bookmarking/sharing via Delicious: http://www.delicious.com/caffeinebomb

Aggregation using WordPress: http://jennifermjones.net/

Visualising data taken from the social web, based on connections/connectivity: http://bit.ly/mbXVZ2

Visualising data from publications: http://bit.ly/kxlhPH

Open data: http://bit.ly/gbzB3z and

UK Government: http://data.gov.uk/

Case 2: open, data-driven research

Critiques on public policy: http://policyex.dmu.ac.uk/

Hashtags in Twitter: managing trends: http://hashtags.org/phdchat

Communities of Practice:

Galaxy Zoo http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

RunCoCo: http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/

Case 3: open, collaborative research

A note on Twitter

'Highly Tweeted Articles Were 11 Times More Likely to Be Highly Cited‘: http://bit.ly/woj8ob

• Connection

• Connectivity

• Serendipity

• Voice

Echo chambers, reliability, validity and trust

On research in public

Ravensbourne, 2008Inclusive networks. Hall, 2009; after Ravensbourne, 2008

Via @mweller

Via @pdp6

It’s your research.

What issues do you foresee?

Where might you start?

Does size matter?

You are connected at a range of scales.

How will you utilise that for research management, data collection and networking?

How will you think about reliability, validity, trust, power and ethics?

Social Media for Researchers by Dr Richard Hall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.