THE DIGITAL ACADEMIC: SOCIAL AND OTHER DIGITAL MEDIA FOR ACADEMICS

Deborah LuptonDepartment of Sociology and Social PolicyUniversity of Sydney

Why use social media?• Connect with other academics• Engage with the public – get out from behind paywalls• Share your research• Increase citations to your work• Access others’ research• Respond to current events• Curate online material• Conduct research• Use for teaching• Create and manage your on-line presence

Academia.edu• Create your academic profile• Follow other academics or interest groups (and they can follow

you)• Upload papers or links to published work• Informs you when you are Googled

LinkedIn• Professional work contacts• Provide details of your current and previous employment• Share news about your research• Join interest groups

Google Scholar• Creates a personal profile that lists your total publications and

citations, both for each year and career total• Creates an h-index and an i10-index• Lists each publication in order (by year or number of citations)

with citations for each one shown

Blogs• Write about your or others’ research• Write about current events• Have full control over your content• Receive and respond to comments• Publish instantaneously• Egs: WordPress, Tumblr

• My blog: This Sociological Life

Wikipedia• Create your own entries or edit others’ entries

Twitter• Make connections• Post links• ‘Curate your own academic department’• Chat with other tweeters in real time• Live tweeting from conferences• Follow interesting people

• My Twitter handle: @DALupton

Pinterest• Curate images• Use for research• Use for teaching• Publicise your own research

My Pinterest boards: http://pinterest.com/dalupton/boards

Storify• Collect material from the web: tweets, websites, images, blog

posts• Make a ‘story’ using this material in a narrative format

My Storifies: http://storify.com/DALupton#stories

Facebook• Create your own pages around topics of interest• Post interesting news items, blog posts and journal abstracts• Make comments

• One of my Facebook pages: Digital Sociology

Podcasts or YouTube videos• Present videos of research content for public access• Upload interviews with other researchers or yourself talking

about your research• Use visual material related to your research or teaching

Content curation and book marking tools

• Use to find, save and collect interesting material from the web• Can be arranged around topics and shared with others• Eg: Delicious, Bundlr, Scoop.it, Pearltrees, StumbleUpon

• One of my Scoop.it collections: The Digital Self

Quora• Use to ask questions or answer others’ questions

SlideShare• Use to upload and share your Powerpoint or Prezi

presentations on the web

Content aggregator tools• Use to organise and save the latest material from your

favourite websites and blogs• Streams in content automatically• A way to find content easily that is in your interest area• Eg. Prismatic, RSS feeds, Paper.li

Referencing tools• Collect your references and PDFs under topics• Create private groups to share PDFs among each other• You can make your topic reference collections available to be

accessed by others (reference details or open access material only, not PDFs because of copyright restrictions)• Can be used for automatic reference formatting of your

documents• Eg: Mendeley, Zotero, CiteULike

University e-repositories• Upload copies of your articles (post-print or pre-print),

conference/seminar presentations or working papers• A great way to digitally publish material that otherwise would

not be available on the web (eg a conference paper or working paper) or has not yet been published in a journal (post-print or pre-print)• These can then be accessed on the web and downloaded and

are searchable and citable by Google Scholar etc• Check copyright issues first

How to maximise your digital research profile

Publish a book/journal article/chapter/working paper/conference paper

Publicise on Twitter, Facebook, Academia.edu, LinkedIn , Research Gate etc. – make sure you provide a hyperlink

Write a blog about the piece and embed the hyperlink

Publicise the blog on Twitter, Facebook, Academia.edu, LinkedIn etc.

Issues to be aware of• Maintaining a professional persona• Decide how much personal detail you want to include• Never say on social media what you would not say face-to-face• Ensure you don’t breach copyright agreements with journal

and book publishers

Useful links• The A to Z of social media for academia• LSE Impact of the Social Sciences website• ‘Social media for academia: some things I have learnt’ (one of

my blog posts)