The last seminar?Social media and open research

@mark_carrigan)

"Then Bridges, who I thought had been deliberately avoiding me, walked up to the desk at the end of a class in which he had participated with his usual intense stare.

'You don't know anything about it, do you? It's all a game to you.'I asked him what he meant.

'Prison', he said, 'You think because you've spoken to a few cons you understand it all. Well, you don't, you just don't.'

He was slowly shaking his head. The tone was polite, but condescending. I'd heard that tone before."

‘The criminal, the ill, the poor, the mad, the desperate. They were stalking the corridors, the lecture rooms, the offices...

‘Those of us who had done any empirical research were being infiltrated by our subjects. ('Infiltrated', is that the right word? I'm still not sure how to describe what was being done to us. Penetrated? Visited? Invaded?) I could not explain how this had happened but they were certainly here, taking revenge against us for writing about them.

Participants and the research process

‣ How would direct confrontation with participants (re)shape our practice?

‣ What would involuntary confrontation with participants in past research look like?

‣ What would it feel like? How would a prior knowledge of such future rencountering (re)shape our practice?

‣ Not new questions - though dramatic treatment of them is interesting

Possible avenues

‣ Single author or multi-author blogging

‣ Twitter or Tumbr

‣ Podcasting (interviews, talks)

‣ Facebook page (?)

‣ Videocasting (interviews, talks, documentaries)

‣ Live streaming events

‣ Engaging with community blogs

• Fast – technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. The academic does not need to attend a training course to use it or submit a request to their central IT services to set it up.

• Cheap – tools that are usually free or at least have a freemium model so the individual can fund any extension themselves.

• Out of control – these technologies are outside of formal institutional control structures, so they have a more personal element and are more flexible.

Open Research• In adopting fast, cheap and out of control tools

we make the research process newly open.

• Addresses the methodological and ethical difficulties which can result from too wide a gap between researchers and the groups they are researching.

• Using these tools proactively helps ensure that changes in the broader field of research which are, by definition, unpredictable can be negotiated more actively than would otherwise be the case.

Beyond Impact and Public Engagement

• Digital footprint & discoverability

• Greater impact arising from discoverability then pursuing ‘impact’ as compartmentalized activity

• Discoverability also represents a challenge - methodologically and ethically