the digital academic: social and other digital media for academics
DESCRIPTION
A presentation used in workshops to teach academics about how to use social media and other digital media for professional purposes. Includes discussion of Academia.edu, LinkedIn, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, institutional e-repositories, Storify, SlideShare, Pinterest and more.TRANSCRIPT
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)