Social media: introduction to useful tools for academics
1. Social media: introduction to useful tools
for academics
Friday 13th February 2015
Tanya Williamson, Assistant Librarian
2. Overview
1. About social media
2. Discussion: The potential benefits
3. Introduction to useful social media tools
4. Practical: Exploration of tools
5. Feedback to group
6. Discussion: The potential pitfalls
7. Engagement and impact
4. • Connect and share with others
• Reduce isolation of solo researchers
• Keep up to date
• Improve traffic to your other web content
• Continue to use if/when you leave this Institution
• Break down hierarchies
• From broadcasting to engagement
What are the potential benefits?
5. Blogging: Now an established medium
Communication
(All social media are about communication!)
• Many platforms to
choose from e.g.
institutional,
academic, publishers,
personal e.g. using
Wordpress, Blogger
• Record your
thoughts, findings,
experiences, insights
• Link to full
publications/reports
• Hub linking to your
other social media
content
6. One which stands out is Twitter
Communication
(All social media are about communication!)
• Follow interesting accounts
@lancasterunilib
• Keep up to date
• Search tweets and save
searches
• Aggregate tweets or take
part in ‘tweetchats’ using
hashtags #acwri
• Make lists of accounts
• Share, converse, ask, link
to other web content
7. ‘This isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even
information science. If you tell people
about what you’re doing, more people
are going to have a look, and see it, than
if you stick it in an institutional repository
and leave it be.’
Melissa Terras, Digital Humanities Scholar
http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/blogging-and-tweeting-about-research-papers-worth-it
8. Has anyone heard of YouTube?!
Video sharing
• Subscribe to and create
channels
• Upload and share videos
• Very popular information
source for ANY topic
• Search for and share useful
videos
• Share your own knowledge
and comments
9. Aimed at academics and researchers:
Academia.edu ResearchGate Piirus
Profiles and networks
• Find others with similar interests
• Share outputs, expertise, posts, questions and answers
• Build social networks based on affiliation, discipline,
methodology
• Increase opportunity for collaboration
• Analytics
10. Aimed at all professionals: LinkedIn
Profiles and networks
• Make connections:
university, industry,
business, practitioners…
• Living CV
• Skills and endorsements
• Beware of importing
your email address
book!
Institutional profile
Individual profile
11. SlideShare
Presentation sharing
• Easily upload your
presentation to share with
others
• Search for other interesting
presentations
• Use alongside other social
media tools
Creating, storing and sharing presentations
Prezi, Emaze, Haiku Deck
12. Gather, store, share and cite your reading. Both require additional
download of software.
Mendeley Zotero
Reading and referencing
13. Figshare
Data and code sharing
• Easily upload your
datasets, figures, images
etc
• Each will be assigned a DOI
and will be easy to share
and cite
• Search for data (including
negative data) and figures
Github Collaborate and share code
14. Eventbrite Lanyrd
Events
• Find and create events in your area or on a topic
• Easily manage events
• Tie in with other social media tools
• Lanyrd enables sharing of presentations, profiles and follow up
15. • Privacy and the blurring of boundaries between personal and professional use
• The risk of jeopardising their career through injudicious use of social media
• Lack of credibility
• The quality of the content they posted
• Time pressures
• Social media use becoming an obligation
• Becoming a target of attack
• Too much self-promotion by others
• Possible plagiarism of their ideas
• Commercialisation of content and copyright issues
From Lupton, 'Feeling better connected' Social media us by academics' (2014)
• Be aware of University advice:
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/iss/security/training/social-networking/
What are the potential pitfalls?
16. • Altmetrics: metrics based on the social web
• Track how many times a research paper (or any other digital
content with a DOI) receives ‘attention’
Engagement and impact?
ImpactStoryAltmetric
18. References
References
Lupton D. (2014) ‘Feeling Better Connected’: Academics’ Use of Social Media.
http://www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/arts-design/attachments/pdf/n-and-
mrc/Feeling-Better-Connected-report-final.pdf [Accessed 27th November 2014]
Terras, M. (2013) Is blogging and tweeting about research papers worth it? The Verdict.
Melissa Terras' Blog. http://melissaterras.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/is-blogging-and-
tweeting-about-research.html [Accessed 12th February 2015]
Terras, M. (2013) Is blogging and tweeting about research papers worth it? Engage
Social Media Talks, University of Oxford. http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/blogging-and-
tweeting-about-research-papers-worth-it [Accessed 12th February 2015]
Notes de l'éditeur
Q What is Social media?
Interlinked
User generated content
Allows (encourages) people to present themselves, connect with each other, share content – opinions, ideas, information, discover, communicate
Leaves a trail of data – useful for advertisers, useful for analysing behaviour and networks
Q What benefits would you hope to get out of using social media?
Culture of sharing is growing in academia – open science, open access to research
PhDs esp often site isolation from other researchers
Current awareness
Link SM together
Q What social media are you using already? Do you use sm for academic purposes?
Does anybody keep a blog?
Originally weblog – personal journal, ridiculed for being too parochial
Very much established
Shorter form of writing, easy to edit update
Very versatile
Simple to use
Healthy and growing academic presence on Twitter – facilitates very niche interests as well as popular and general interest e.g. news sites, commercial, entertainment, personal
Public engagement – unmoderated, very public – can be nasty, subject to trolls (I haven’t experienced this)
Evidence to show that blogging and tweeting about research papers significantly increases downloads, especially from open access repositories
Video is an engaging medium, useful for novices
Open up your expertise or share other people’s videos
Not going to cover FB as such – Q Does anyone use FB?
Academia – Quite large, all disciplines including those who support academics. Not informal like FB, just about your academic work. News feed, posts, groups, research topics, papers (people’s own, bookmarks to others) endorsements. Analytics
ResearchGate – Aimed at scientists mainly. Profile, upload your papers, research interests, groups, q&as, score! Based on how much you ‘contribute’ – uploading, answering qs etc. It will create a basic proflie for you if your collaborating authors add details of a publications
3. Piirus – relatively young, Developed by Univesrity of Warwisck. Facilitates matching researchers with similar interests and methodologies
Make connections with other professionals. Look at their profile, connect.
Useful to keep up to date so people can contact you (e.g. potential collaborators, employers, media)
Slideshare – easy to use. Will suggest presentations for you, create a profile.
Easy to embed a presentastion on a blog or webpage
Instead of Endnote, which is what the University supports
If these become embedded in your way of working they can be very powerful.
Allow simple adding of publications and web content through your browser
Social element is secondary, but the data generated does influence on the ratings of publications (more about that later)
Allow research groups to read collectively
Involve downloading desktop software
Figshare:
Potential to disrupt scholarly communication! Provides access to all kinds of figures, diagrams, images
Github
Admit it’s beyond my comprehension, but allows computer programmers to share code and work collectively on solving problems
Eventbrite: Conferences, lectures, seminars, meetings
Lanyrd: Tech bias. Allows searching, sharing of presentations, speaker/attendee profiles, ties in with Twitter hashtags etc
It is not always clear what could happen to the data and documents you upload to the cloud – not necessarily governed by the laws of the territory you are in!
You are always generating usage data. Not always something to worry about, but something to be aware of.
As more interactions are happening online, and with increased adoption of the open access ethos, traditional ways of measuring engagement and impact – e.g. citation counts – are being stretched. Complimented by data generated by the networked researcher
Altmetrics – emerging field / movement looking at developing new ways to use the web to measure impact, influence of scholarly communications, beyond counting citations to journal articles
2 products to highlight
Altmetric allows you to easily see the buzz around a paper/d object. Not just volume but also who counts
Impact Story Profile of your work, links together you different outputs and shows metrics for them