Image from Mochimochiland.com

This blog post by Anna Tarrant (aka PhD2Published’s Managing Editor and co-instigator of #AcWri) is part of a series that asks after new forms of scholarship projects and demonstrates how academic out-put is changing in the digital age.

From blogs like the Thesis Whisperer to Twitter communities like #PhDchat there are a number of ways in which academics are harnessing digital communication technology to support each other and their work within and without institutions. And some are even outright reinventing what academic scholarship might be. We are well beyond the early phase of academic listserves and blogs and into a – perhaps third wave – of digital discourse design.

In this series I’ve invited the people responsible for these types of projects what their intentions where when the established them. How their projects have changed the way they (and we, as participants) work, research, share, support and interact with each other as global colleagues. And how they might describe what the emerging skill-sets are and their benefits and pitfalls.

When I first contacted Charlotte just over a year ago asking if I could become the Managing Editor of PhD2Published, I never suspected what kind of new doors it would, and could, open for me. In this blog piece I reflect on the role PhD2Published has played for me in the early development of my academic career and muse about how online spaces such as this are integral to an emerging movement that is transforming academic knowledge production and empowering contemporary academics. While my personal experiences are fairly unique, one of the ways in which I think we can learn about and understand the position, increased uptake and legitimacy of online academic spaces is by adopting autoethnographic methodologies; reflecting on our own positions in these new online participatory cultures.

I found PhD2Published while looking for some guidance and support for my newly forming publishing plans. I was on a short, fixed term contract as a Senior Teaching Associate at the time, which meant that the majority of my thinking and time was dedicated to teaching plans, maintaining relationships with my students and marking. While I maintained a fantastic mentor in my PhD supervisor, I felt adrift. It wasn’t part of my paid role to publish at this point, but I was conscious of the need to develop personally in order to competitively pursue the career I so long for (something permanent that combines both teaching and research – note I am currently in my third short-term academic contract since Oct 2010). At this time, I knew that I had to have a publishing strategy and some personal goals to become established in my field. Feeling lost in my institution and disconnected in terms of my research aims and development, I went in search of something else; support, community, the ‘how to’ of academic publishing. In the end, I turned to the Internet for this support and PhD2Published couldn’t have provided a better opportunity.

In the past year or so, since being involved with the site as a Managing Editor, I have learnt so much. In brief, I have learnt how, and where to publish to maximize my impact. I have had two traditional style journal papers accepted, I have contributed to various blogs, including the Guardian Higher Education blog, I have learnt how to use Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms to enhance my professional profile and have set up my own professional blog, which has even attracted attention from people outside of academia. I have also up-skilled; not only have I learnt how to run and manage an academic blog, I have networked much more widely on a variety of social media platforms to the point where I am recognized for my work at conferences. I have learnt a great deal from others – having also collaborated on #Acwri, the monthly live chats Dr Jeremy Segrott and I run on Twitter. And I have continued to publicly share my experiences in order to support others.

The #AcWri live chats in particular were established by myself and Jeremy after PhD2Published’s writing initiative, AcBoWriMo (now AcWriMo), when Jeremy was publicly searching for a community for academic writing discussion. It was quickly recognized that a much larger community of academics (of different disciplines, career stages and nationalities) wanted support with the emotional, as well as practical elements of one of their main crafts. Jeremy and I decided to collaborate and run fortnightly live chats on Twitter focused on different aspects of academic writing under the hashtag #AcWri. The intention of this was to establish an on-going, online participatory community, an open platform for sharing knowledge about academic writing (empowering each member as experts in their right) and to generate useful resources in the form of sumWwri has been successful in these goals so far, but what does this mean for academic knowledge production and has this changed our ways of working?

The establishment of the #AcWri community has emerged from, and aligns with PhD2Published’s (and other sites’) ethos of open, participatory learning but it has also contributed to changing the ways we work/research, publish/share and network/support each other. It allows a diverse group of researchers to connect and share their knowledge beyond the physical boundaries of institutions and to publish in new ways that are available to others beyond academia. It has allowed for a more engaged and open conversation about the ‘hidden injuries’ (Gill 2009) of neo-liberal academia (in this case through frank discussions about writing, a key part of the publishing we need to do, or risk ‘perishing’). It also allows us to share our successes and failures, to support and to network with one another in ways that have been less available to us before. The need for these spaces is evident in that the community, in size and quality of contribution, has flourished and is also self-perpetuating without the need for Jeremy and I to intervene beyond the live chats.

Importantly, the increased use and uptake of these online academic sites indicates broader changes, both within, and outside academic institutions that cannot be ignored. What is (not) happening within institutions that is encouraging more scholars to go online? Is this indicative of an absence of support in contemporary academia for its staff, particularly those who are Early Career? All of these questions are beginning to be raised and I am really excited to be part of a group of scholars (who have also written for this series of blogs) who are reflecting on, and even theorising about the increased uptake of online academic spaces where academic knowledge production is taking place. Through my involvement with PhD2Published and #AcWri I have personally developed essential and empowering skills that are required by the contemporary Early Career academic and yet for some reason these spaces still lack legitimacy

Image from Mochimochiland.com

This blog post by Inger Mewburn (aka The Thesis Whisperer) is part of a series that asks after new forms of scholarship projects and demonstrates how academic out-put is changing in the digital age.

From blogs like the Thesis Whisperer to Twitter communities like #PhDchat there are a number of ways in which academics are harnessing digital communication technology to support each other and their work within and without institutions. And some are even outright reinventing what academic scholarship might be. We are well beyond the early phase of academic listserves and blogs and into a – perhaps third wave – of digital discourse design.

In this series I’ve invited the people responsible for these types of projects what their intentions where when the established them. How their projects have changed the way they (and we, as participants) work, research, share, support and interact with each other as global colleagues. And how they might describe what the emerging skill-sets are and their benefits and pitfalls.

Recently I changed jobs, moving on from RMIT University to The Australian National University (ANU). For those who are unfamiliar with the pecking order of Australian Universities, this is like moving from an obscure Polytechnic in a regional town to somewhere like Oxford or Cambridge.

It’s hardly suprising then, that my move sparked a lot of, what one colleague called, ‘corridor talk’. I had many curious emails and phone calls from my RMIT colleagues along the lines of “Did ANU employ you because of the Thesis Whisperer blog?”

Well, yes.

And no.

If the only thing I was capable of was blogging I’m sure ANU wouldn’t have been interested in me – certainly not interested enough to fly me in and out for a year until my son finishes primary school. The blogging merely made my many years of experience in research education visible.

The Thesis Whisperer blog enabled the right people at ANU to notice my expertise at the right time. The fact of the matter is, had I continued to plod away, teaching and publishing in respectable journals (ie: the conventional career strategy advocated in many a workshop), ANU management would never have known I existed.

The move has caused me to reflect on the passive – and occassionally active – resistance I have encountered from other academics about blogging. “A waste of time,” some said “not scholarly” others opined. I’ve noticed that blogging is often framed in this everyday talk as mere self promotion and not the serious, scholarly work I believe it is.

So I hope you’ll forgive me for admitting to feeling a little bit smug about how it all turned out.

Those years of invisible – and unpaid – work have finally paid off, and in the most delightful way. I now have a new job, one which has more scope for me to do the work I love – helping research students finish their PhDs.

When the benefits of blogging to the individual are so clear, why don’t more academics do it?

Many academics tell me they just don’t have time. As Pat Thomson wrote on the LSE impact blog said recently, the question “how do you find the time to blog?” is often a way non-bloggers can indulge a bit of stealthy criticism on the bloggers amongst us. Which is why, perhaps, bloggers like me feel they need to write pieces like this. We feel moveed to defend ourselves about a practice that is seen as a little… unsavoury.

I agree that institutional paperwork can be onerous, research is time consuming and students are demanding, but this has been the case since I started as an academic in 1995. Today we have advantages that were still the stuff of science fiction in 1995: extremely light-weight computers, ubiquitous wifi, tablets and smart phones, google scholar, cloud computing.

While I can understand not writing a blog (sort of) I really can’t understand people who don’t read blogs, take part in Twitter or otherwise take part in the scholarly dialogue which is happening online.

I notice that those who complain about time are usually those who haven’t even tried to integrate this technology in their daily routine. In vain I try to point out that we all have odd bits of time in our day which can be put to use: at the bus stop, on a train, waiting an appointment, a solitary lunch time here and there. All of these moments are an opportunity to fire up an RSS reader on our phone or laptop and learn something new online.

No doubt you, as a blog reader, know this already. I don’t have to point out the benefits to the converted. The question I have for you is, how many of your colleagues are doing the same? And more importantly – why don’t they? It’s a question that is beginning to fascinate me and one which I don’t have a ready answer for.

When Charlotte asked me to write a post about how we can legitimise and encourage this new kind of scholarly practice she gave me a couple of words: hybrid, ‘outstitutional’, feral. I like these words because they make me feel a bit edgy and special. At the same time I think it’s a bit worrying that words like this are used to describe my Thesis Whisperer work. Interesting or not, such words tend to situate blogging as ‘other’ to mainstream academic practice. It’s not the way I want my work to be viewed.

As Martin Weller pointed out in a recent paper about digital scholarship and tenure (and on his blog) blogging is unlikely to become a mainstream academic practice if there are no insitutional incentives to blog. Weller highlights that academics don’t just blog (or research for that matter) to gain monetary reward, but that institutional attitudes to rewarding blogging (or not) have the capacity to influence behaviour.

In a recent article on the Guardian Education network Claire Warwick put forward one of the best explanations I have heard to date. She talked about her friends who don’t tweet and pointed out: “They know Twitter exists, but they are either too busy; can’t be bothered; prefer traditional forms of academic interaction – face to face or via conventional publication; or think that Twitter is too ephemeral a medium for considered scholarly debate: ‘The talk-radio of academia” She goes on to comment: “I think academics, perhaps even more than most people, are driven by the herd mentality, especially when it comes to questions of prestige.”

This is quite true, but I still think the incentive structure is only part of the answer. Reluctance and determined avoidance may have multiple causes. The emotions that surround scholarly work are rarely attended to, but they are complex; ranging from curiosity and excitement to fear and envy and every stop in between. This volatile mix extends into online spaces.

We need to listen carefully to the way people express their reluctance to social media in order to understand what is going on. Recently my friend Joyce Seitzinger, better known as @catspajamasnz, told me about something that happened to her when she was helping to run a seminar on social media. One of the academics seemed very upset, even angry, so Joyce took her aside to ask what was wrong.

“You people make me want to throw up,” the academic said.

I was struck by the violence of this reaction. It is so other to my own attitude to social media, which has always been dominated by emotions of excitement and curiosity. Why would one want to throw up – anxiety? Anger? Or both?

I remember feeling similar, complex emotions at high school towards the cool kids. I was a nerd and I liked being a nerd, but they made fun of me for being who I was. Getting visibly upset or angry only made me more of a target, so I tried treating the cool kids with derision or ignoring them. Inside however, I felt angry and inadequate. I hated that I cared what they thought of me. I didn’t want to be them – not really – but they certainly made me want to throw up.

I wonder: have I become the cool kid? Am I witnessing a similar set of complex emotions, but from the other side?

It is not really up to those who do use social media to try to therapise others. If others don’t want to partake, whether from fear, or disinterest, there’s not much we can do to convince them otherwise. We can only model other ways of being an academic and hope others may follow our lead. So I have changed my standard line on blogging and tried to be less defensive.

When people tell me they don’t have time to blog I point out the time they can save because of the good work being done on so many blogs, Patter, Explorations in Style, The Research Whisperer and LitreviewHQ just to name a few. I highlight how much free labour goes on to produce these blogs. Then I ask: “what do you have to give? How can you make a difference?” Because making a difference, surely, is what being an academic and a teacher is all about.

So I’d be interested to hear what you think. Why do you think academics are reluctant to blog? Are any of the explanations and suggestions here useful? Do you have more ideas?

Image from Mochimochiland.com

This blog post by Charlotte Frost (aka PhD2Published’s founder/director) is part of a series that asks after new forms of scholarship projects and demonstrates how academic out-put is changing in the digital age.

From blogs like the Thesis Whisperer to Twitter communities like #PhDchat there are a number of ways in which academics are harnessing digital communication technology to support each other and their work within and without institutions. And some are even outright reinventing what academic scholarship might be. We are well beyond the early phase of academic listserves and blogs and into a – perhaps third wave – of digital discourse design.

In this series I’ve invited the people responsible for these types of projects what their intentions where when the established them. How their projects have changed the way they (and we, as participants) work, research, share, support and interact with each other as global colleagues. And how they might describe what the emerging skill-sets are and their benefits and pitfalls.

People tend to think that PhD2Published is simply a blog about academic publishing. Well, that’s true, but there might be some in which it helps promote an understanding of publishing that you hadn’t realised about.

PhD2Published was set up as a research tool. What I mean is that I started the blog as a way to get myself published. I thought that by running a resource on publishing I would learn a lot about academic publishing that I could pass on. I could build a career platform for myself that would allow me to directly network with academic publishers. It functioned in a way that was like simultaneously writing and testing a ‘how to’ guide.

In addition to this, in order to run the site, I was having to learn about other publishing platforms as I went along. These were the publishing platforms of social media including WordPress and other blogging platforms, Facebook Pages, Twitter, YouTube, Google + (I still haven’t nailed Google + by the way) etc etc. Although not yet legitimate modes of publishing academic work, they are an increasingly important way in which we can do research and share our ideas. Jesse Stommel and I have referred to this open way of working as ‘public scholarship’ and even if the REF doesn’t officially recognise it, many of us recognise the strength it gives our work.

PhD2Published was designed as a public way of learning and sharing ways of being public with our work. However, knowing the framework I had built for going on this public learning journey, I wanted the site to be used by others in the same way. It might share all of its articles and advice for free, but my feeling was that it should also be free for people to use the same way I had. This is where the role of Managing Editor comes in.

Managing Editors are people who get to come on board and use the site to learn the same things I have – more, hopefully. They can publicly investigate the parts of academic publishing most relevant for their own career paths. For example, I was told I needed to get a book published but in many other areas of academia the journal article reins supreme. So a PhD2Published Managing Editor can use the project to compensate for what they didn’t learn at grad school and, like me, they can do this in a way that shares this knowledge and allows others to make use of it. They can also network directly with – say – the journal editors most likely to publish their work and find out well in advance of submitting, what the editors are looking for and what mistakes they must avoid making.

Likewise, they get to learn about how to use and write for all of the public ‘publishing’ platforms that the site functions on and that interest them. Twitter is increasingly used at conferences but if you’re someone used to having a Facebook account just for keeping in contact with close friends, it is a confusing realm to make sense of. Having to use all of these social media on behalf of PhD2Published and with all the archives of how they’ve been used in the past for the project as well as my advice and support, Managing Editors can quickly make appropriate use of social media.

In addition to all this, from the start, I have kept files on how PhD2Published operates which I give Managing Editors complete access to. This means that not only does a Managing Editor come on board and learn how to get published by expanding their knowledge of publishing and networking with prospective publishers. Not only do they learn how to use and write for a range of social media. But they also learn how to set up and run a resource dedicated to public scholarship. In a sense then, PhD2Published is like its own own little publishing laboratory.

I cannot emphasise the importance of this last aspect. It is more and more the case these days that an academic is required to handle certain public-facing aspects of their research. For many, this will mean having a web presence. It is all very well learning how to write a research paper, and it’s great to compare this with blogging and nail the art of writing a good blog post too, but what about building a community around your work? How much do you really know about doing that? And how much do you know about setting up an online project not just to showcase your work but to actually do quality academic research?

There may well come a point at which in addition or perhaps even instead of writing journal articles or a book, a researcher will be required to demonstrate their research-community-building credentials. Right now, institutions in the UK want to see cold hard REF-ables, but I believe it is only a matter of time before a successfully run knowledge-engagement-community itself becomes a REF-able output. What resources like PhD2Published do, therefore, is not just help early career academics consider what is required of them now, but it allows them to explore the future of academic research and publishing models and develop valuable transferable skills.

PhD2Published is a resource on and model for contemporary modes of knowledge generation and transfer. And yet I don’t know how to describe it. Recently I’ve taken to calling it ‘new-form scholarship’. If I had the time to write up all the things I learn from running it, I could argue that it forms part of a practice-based research model but in truth its just one part of my on-going research into publishing in the arts. I also lack the time and sometimes also the vocabulary to describe the benefits of being involved. Apart from anything else, it’s deeply empowering to set up your own project outside of an institution and build not just a knowledge resource but a dedicated community of participants. And it’s extremely rewarding to make a quite mystifying part of academia more transparent. It also takes a lot of work. Even when I’m not editing the site myself I’m working on it and last year’s AcWriMo (our off-shoot writing project) cost me (wait for it) over 100 hours of unpaid work to keep the information and motivation flowing.

So now what? How can we continue to harness the benefits and skills of these open and collaborative ways of working? How can we consolidate what is being learned this way and prove its academic credentials? Can we and should we fight for this work to be more legitimate or do we risk pinning the proverbial butterfly to the board and stilling the dynamism that makes it what it is?

In a previous post for PhD2Published, I mentioned that I would be talking in a symposium at the Society for Research into Higher Education Conference 2012.

I went last Friday (14^th December 2012) and really enjoyed the experience. Professor Pat Thomson started with a really interesting talk about her project with Inger Mewburn (aka The Thesis Whisperer) about analyzing blog spaces for academic purposes, followed by Dr Jeremy Segrott who presented our talk about #acwri. Andy Coverdale spoke next about the use of social media and the way in which it aids the research process for PhD students, and then I concluded the session with discussion of how PhD2Published is an empowering space (for me in particular as Managing Editor) and one outside of institutions that is transforming academic knowledge production.

We seemed to get a good response to our papers from a really engaged audience, which was encouraging and we all commented on the strangeness of meeting face-to-face having ‘known’ each other on Twitter for so long (there is proof in the slightly blurred photo in the Storify below!). The symposium was the first real opportunity to meet up directly as a group and to share our experiences and reflections on social media use as academics.

Below is a Storify of some of the Tweets from the day that we Tweeted directly from the symposium to give an idea of what the papers were about and what we discussed:

Since the AcWri live chat officially launched on Twitter recently, Jeremy and I (Anna, PhD2Published) have been summarizing the chats with the aim of generating a useful and lasting resource for all academic writers. From now on, the plan is that each summary will be posted to both the PhD2Published site and Jeremy’s own personal blog so that everyone can access them after each event. The first of the chats have already happened and provide some great information, hints and tips about academic writing. The summaries for these from previous weeks can each be individually accessed using the following links:

Thursday 16^th February 2012: The very first chat initiated by Jeremy: Starting a chat

Thursday 23^rd February 2012: With PhD2Published, the second chat involved further exploration of potential academic writing related topics to discuss during the chats, including some initial discussion about academic writing issues. See the summary here.

Thursday 5^th March 2012: Writing Journal Articles

It is hoped that these provide a great online resource and introduction to the AcWri community. If you are an academic writer, or a writer more generally, please do get involved. The bigger the community, the more ideas and questions we can discuss and the more support we each gain. Acwri live chats are run on Twitter on Thursdays at 6pm GMT every fortnight.

The latest #acwri live chat held on Thursday 12th April 2012 is summarised below and is available here:

It was identified that there is very little information on the subject of actually writing conference papers (P2P found one useful one during the chat and I am sure there are many more – please do share!). Predominantly focus is on presenting them. This is a significant gap given that presentations are so important in trying out new ideas and networking, and are also another form of academic writing:

Todays post is about the value of blogging and promoting research through social media. It is written by Amber K. Regis who completed her PhD in Victorian life-writing at Keele University. She is an Associate Lecturer for the Open University and teaches English literature at the Universities of Chester and Liverpool John Moores. She blogs at Looking Glasses on Odd Corners on life-writing and life-narratives across different media. She has published work on John Addington Symonds, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. You can follow her on Twitter: @AmberRegis

I started a research blog in the final months of 2011 in a wave of enthusiasm. I was going to become an overnight internet sensation; I was going to get my research ‘out there’, reach new audiences and make a name for myself! And do you know what? I thoroughly enjoyed the act of blogging, and while I’m still waiting go viral, I have managed to share ideas and start conversations with a multitude of readers (including many beyond the ivory tower of academe). But blogging is also a commitment that takes up time, and in recent weeks time has been desperately lacking.  Like so many other post-PhD researchers, I’m juggling multiple jobs while I seek the ‘holy grail’ of a permanent academic appointment. Prepping, marking and commuting has taken its toll and I’ve been neglecting my blog.

But, rather surprisingly, the blog has remained active during my absence. Others have started to take notice.

Shameless self-promotion?

I’ve already admitted that increasing my online presence was a key motive in setting up my blog, and it has received several special mentions in recent weeks:

• A post on material objects and life-writing was quoted by Charlotte Mathieson, an Associate Fellow in English at the University of Warwick, in a recent piece on literary tourism for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online.

• Responding to a tweet from @TimesHigherArts, I was given the opportunity to promote a post on celebrity memoir in the ‘What Are You Reading?’ column of the Times Higher Education

• A keynote speaker at a recent Victorian Studies conference referred to a post on souvenirs and collecting. I was sitting in the audience. It was all terribly flattering, but I blushed and looked at my feet.

As a means of self-promotion, blogging appears to be paying off. Each special mention resulted in increased traffic and a number of Google search hits. Internet sensationdom is just around the corner…

But why is this kind of ‘self-promotion’ so consistently paired with the pejorative ‘shameless’? And why did I blush when my blog was mentioned at a conference? After all, wasn’t this what I wanted? But alas, was my face now registering the inevitable ‘shamelessness’ of attention seeking in the blogosphere?

Not-so-shameless self-promotion?

I do not believe that self-promotion is a shameless or even a necessarily selfish activity. Indeed, the three instances above demonstrate a range of benefits to increasing online visibility and engaging with social media. Attention has been drawn to my work, yes, but I have also engaged directly with other researchers, forging connections with peers and more senior academics. Social media have thus transformed self-promotion into a mode of continual networking—formerly an oft-dreaded activity that required awkward conversations over coffee cups during breaks in conference schedules. But networking can now extend beyond the temporal and physical space of a conference; conversations can start before an event and continue long after, mediated online.

So yes, all this blogging and tweeting is a form of self-promotion, but it is certainly not shameless. The clue is in the title: social media and the social web. Making connections, forming communities, offering support; in getting your name ‘out there’, you are not a voice crying out in the wilderness. Self-promotion in the age of the social web is very much a team sport; plugged-in academics are networked and networking all the time.

BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP YOUR RESEARCH. Don’t be victimized by unexpected electronic failures that could destroy your files. Always back up important electronic files, including your raw data and draft text for your research. If you have questionnaires or computer output, keep the originals at least until the dissertation is handed in. After editing or modifying a draft chapter, resave it on removable media.  Print out a copy from time to time.  Back up text material frequently. Similarly, keep all valuable devices (including computers and removable media) that hold important, valuable information secure from theft.  Do not assume that theft won’t occur in the ivory tower or when you travel.

Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/2965186113/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Leonard Cassuto said in the Guardian: ‘If a graduate student asks me, “Should I blog?” my answer, at least right now, would still be, “Probably not “’. Just weeks ago I gave a talk at the British Library saying very much the opposite. Cassuto is a more established academic than myself, but I still think I have a point – and so did the people who invited me to give that opinion.

To discuss the fact that I came across Cassuto’s article and talked about it on Twitter would be to open another – if related – can of worms. Suffice to say that engaging with twitter for this type of academic commentary is the way I work. I’ve said time and again that Twitter and blogging allow me to usefully interact with so many academics – and non academics I hasten to add – whose opinions I value. I stand by this method of working as it helps me find great new people and ideas on a daily basis and this regularly directly informs my work.

I do recognize that my subject area lends itself particularly well to this type of information exchange. I’m currently writing a book on art mailing list culture and social media and my area of expertise is in art forms that thrive in these networks of sharing. I have had many people point out to me that they themselves aren’t working in a field where social media is considered appropriate and/or they are handling sensitive data that can’t be shared. However, I still take issue with much of what Cassuto says and I still think online discussion platforms have their place in academia.

Like Cassuto, I will divide my response into two sections. The first deals with form because I would argue that he doesn’t credit blogging or any other type of online communication with being anything other than ‘unpublished’, ‘unedited’, ‘unofficial’ writing. There is much about his tone that indicates he sees it as a lesser form of writing and I take issue with that. Read more

This is the second part of Dr Ernesto Priego’s series on collaborative blogging as a scholarly activity.

“Every moment has its discontents, its challenges and failures. Yet no moment is every truly last, at least not so long as we persist in human conversation.”

–Stuart Moulthrop, 2005 [PDF]

From the start I knew that if The Comics Grid project was attractive to others it was going to grow fast. I therefore considered essential to design specific guidance documentation, that was later reviewed by the core editorial team. What started with one person, then five, has become now thirteen active contributors, including reviewers and editors. We have published 52 posts since January 2011, and have since maintained our publication schedule of two original posts per week. The blog has been viewed almost 28,000 times, and our analytics reveal that most readers find us by making comics research-related queries on Google.

A sense of mission is what has kept editors and contributors working together in spite of the logical challenges imposed by lack of face-to-face interaction (all work is done online, by email, on shared Google docs and on the blog’s dashboard). In what follows I’d like to share with you one the points that summarise our mission:

Read more

I hope from this week’s posts you can now see the different ways that social media applications can be used for your research and researcher development. Different applications and strategies will be applicable to different disciplines and research methodologies however, what will apply to everyone are digital research ethics. In this post I discuss the three major ethical implications raised in my PhD research – Informed Consent, Access & Data Protection: Read more

As part of our week devoted to social networking here we present the second in the two part guest post by our intern Lucy Wickens on how to use Facebook for networking and research, you can see her previous post here.

Welcome back!

So hopefully by now you have successfully set up an account and are eager to become avid Face- bookers! Read more

This is the second of our social media week posts. Here Eloise Zoppos examines how postgraduate students can manage their professional social media use. Eloise Zoppos is now embracing the virtual for the professional and you can find out more about her on her website http://eloisezoppos.com or follow her on Twitter @eloise_z.

Lately it seems like everything virtual is now normal: using Facebook to contact friends, reading the news online, calling people through Skype, online banking. Over the last few years, this rise in online activities has slowly begun to seep into the academic world with online conferences, virtual internships and online resumes (hosted on both LinkedIn and personal websites) just to name a few. This got me thinking about whether as a postgraduate student interested in getting published I should be investing more time into using social media for professional purposes. Read more

This week we are running a series of posts on different aspects of social media use in relation to conducting research and for researcher development. It appears to be particularly relevant as the Wall Street Journal Health published an article yesterday (25^th April 2011) that illustrated the value of social media in research:

A new clinical trial found that lithium didn’t slow the progression of Lou Gehrig’s disease, but the findings released Sunday also showed that the use of a social network to enrol patients and report and collect data may deliver dividends for future studies. Read more