Laura CzerniewiczSeptember 2012
ACADEMICS’ ONLINE PRESENCE
Assessing & shaping your visibility
Still true?
• On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
Peter Steiner, New Yorker 1993
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What is your digital footprint?
What is your digital shadow?
Take control
o Digital footprint- the content you create
o Digital shadow- content created about you• The amount of information that
individuals create themselves (digital footprint) is far less than the amount being generated about them (digital shadow)
Consider
What do you want your digital footprint to look like?
What kind of online presence do you want?
WAYS OF THINKINGAbout online presence
PRESENCE
Extent to which you as the scholar are
visible to others online
GROUPS
The extent of your
engagement with
communities
SHARING
Extent to which you allow users to exchange and distribute your
informationIDENTITY
The extent to which others can
identify you online as a
scholar
CONNECTIONS
The relevance and appeal of your work to
others
CONVERSATIONS
Extent to which others engage with you and
you with others
REPUTATION
Your online standing and the extent to which you influence
others
Building Blocks of the
Networked Scholar
ADAPTED FROM
Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social mediaJan H. Kietzmann, Kristopher Hermkens, Ian P. McCarthy, Bruno S. SilvestreBusiness Horizons (2011) 54, 241—251*Read the article here*
• The honeycomb of building blocks can be used to assess your level of online connectivity as a scholar.
• They are not exclusive and neither need all be present.
• They are constructs that allow us to make sense of different aspects of a networked scholar.
Scholarly primitives & the open researcher
• “…basic functions common to scholarly
activity across disciplines, over time,
and independent of theoretical
orientation.”• John Unsworth. "Scholarly Primitives: What
Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common and How Might Our Tools Reflect
This?" "Humanities Computing, Formal Methods, Experimental Practice" Symposium,
Kings College, London, May 13, 2000. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html
Discovering Annotating Comparing
Referring Sampling Illustrating
Representing
Discovering Annotating Comparing
Referring Sampling Illustrating
Representing
Compare Resources
Take Notes/Annotate Resources
Find Research Materials
Manage bibliographic information
Make a dynamic map
Edit imagesBrainstorm/ generate ideas
Blogging Twitter
Sharing – the defining concept
o Opening scholarship through sharingo Sharing as multiplying, not dividingo Sharing used to mean exchange, now
means exchange AND distributiono Forms of sharing (Latour)• Intermediaries transport messages (content,
code, meaning) with-out transforming them. • Mediators transform, translate, distort, and
modify the meaning or the elements they carry
Wittel, A (2011) Qualities of Sharing and their Transformations in the Digital Age in International Review of Information Ethics Vol. 15 (09/2011)
The process
ASSESS
Assess & monitor your general online presence
Assess & monitor
o Regular Google searcheso On-going Google alerts of your nameo Measure your digital footprint
Example
Analyse the results
o How many of the results are relevant?o What types of results come up? • Are all of them from your institutions? • Publications? • Online profiles?
o If the results are obviously nothing to do with you, would that be obvious to someone else looking for you?
o Consider what you would like to appear
Consider your profile/s
o Profiles • LinkedIn• Academia.edu• Facebook?• Your institution• Google Scholar
o Decide on a main profileo Improve and maintain ito Link the others
Academia.edu
Social media analytics
Facebook analysis
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/08/wolframalpha-personal-analytics-for-facebook/
Improve your profile
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My question is “Am I making an impact?”
Broaden impact
Consider
What changes would you like to make in your online profile/s?
What are your options?
What is realistic?
GET YOUR OUTPUTS OUT THERE
Maximise the visibility of your work
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Go as open as you can
o Put journal articles you can online• Check out Sherpa Romeo for publisher
archiving policieso Archive• in repositories• In subject portals and aggregators
o Publish in open access journalso Open everything – all scholarly output
possible (teaching, popular etc)
Open access & increased citations
o Open access publishing increases visibility, opportunity for use and possibility of impact
o Majority of studies have shown an increase in citations arising from open access• Of the 35 studies surveyed, 27 have shown
a citations advantage (the % increase ranges from 45% increase to as high as 600%), 4 showing no advantage
Swan A (2010) The Open Access Citation Advantage: Studies and Results to Date. Available at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/
Check the self-archiving agreement of existing journal articles
Archive in open access repositories
Use discipline-specific archives
Publish in open access journals
Upload videos & podcasts
Upload presentations
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Make sure your resources are properly curated
Maximise discoverability
Take metadata seriously
“Well said! "metadata is a love note to the future" from @textfiles talk via @nypl_labs & @kissane http://t.co/FjvCLVUZ
Consider
What can you realistically do to get more of your resources online?
Do you have funds to pay for help?
Is there someone in your university who can assist?
CONNECT & COMMUNICATE
Social bookmarking
o The value of social bookmarks• Delicious • CiteUlike
o Useful for you across deviceso Builds connectionso Consolidates your presence
Example: delicious
Example:citulike
Resources & community sites
o More than social bookmarking• Diigo• Mendeley• Research Gate
MENDELEY
community
device agnostic
Mendeley analytics
Make your name as a curator
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Get on to Twitter
Some Twitter guidelineso Get into a routine o It is legit to retweet your tweets especially if rephrasedo Provide updates from special eventso Use hashtagso Follow others / reciprocate o Promote your Twitter profile through your email signature,
business card, blog posts etc.o Being careful with Twittero Tweet about each new publication, website update or new blog
that the project completes.o Ask for feedbacko Link to a URL of publication, presentation, podcast etco Tweet about new developments of interest o Retweet interesting materialo Use Twitter for ‘crowd sourcing’ research activities
Mollet, A; Moran, D and Dunleavy, P (2011) Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities, LSE Research Online
Blogging as a scholarly activity
o Create and write a blog• For colleagues, community and/or
studentso Scholarly blog aggregators• Research blogging
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/26/blogging-to-print/
All this & more
