Assyntk's List: digital presence

• Keep an eye on the boundary between observing and enforcing. If there’s a chance a company or property owner could be fined or prosecuted based on your results, make sure you know your rights and protect your collaborators. Aggregate data to keep people anonymous. Clearly define research and advocacy roles for you and your volunteers. Check out groups that do advocacy-oriented citizen science for for guidance, like the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.
• Have a clear data sharing policy. Will the volunteers get to keep any data they collect? Will you aggregate the data and share just the summary? Citizen scientists want to see their results; you need to determine how to do this transparently and ethically.
• at its heart, citizen science isn’t about the apps. It’s about tapping into your own inner scientist, the curious part of you that wants to dig into questions bigger than one person can solve on their own.
• Be welcoming. Having a variety of perspectives will lend credibility to the results. Citizen science is inherently about including more voices in science, so make sure your group reflects that.

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• Getting the balance right is difficult. Jim is absolutely correct, it's the personal that leads to engagement, and this is a very different voice from the objective one of academic papers (which is not to say it's better or worse, just different).

• Getting the balance right is difficult. Jim is absolutely correct, it's the personal that leads to engagement, and this is a very different voice from the objective one of academic papers (which is not to say it's better or worse, just different). So you need to put an element of personal in there, the people I follow on blogs and twitter don't just broadcast cold ideas. But having said that, one of the mistakes I think people make when they first start blogging is to go too personal. I'm not particularly interested if you went to the cinema last night and the film was quite good and then you had a curry. 

   

  So It's about that bridging between personal and professional. Now if you went to the cinema, and had a revelation about open access while watching a 3-D slasher movie, I'm interested. I think the personal element is essential in good online presence (but that doesn't mean I want to know when you've had an argument with your spouse). Which raises the question, are there some roles where it's effectively impossible to do good social media? I think it's very difficult to be a police officer or politician or senior manager online as you end up having to sanitise every output to the point where it becomes unengaging. If you don't there are people who will use it against you. So, as you go higher up the career ladder maybe effective online presence becomes more difficult.

•  What is the No. 1 reason that people quit blogging? Because they can’t find and develop an audience
• blogs that do find an audience tend to keep adding that type of content. This simple philosophy boils down to the equation: Mo’ pageviews = mo’ pages.
• Tumblr provides its users with the oldest privacy-control strategy on the Internet: security through obscurity and multiple pseudonymity.
• Tumblr offers full animated gif support is crucial as a differentiator from the static environs of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even Pinterest
• Tumblr is actually Facebook 2.0
• Facebook needs to exist because it’s holding down the Mom, siblings, and lame friends part of a person’s social life — the “public-private” life
• As long as Mom sees you on Facebook occasionally, she isn’t going to think to look for you on another site… which paradoxically frees young users to act out on a stage that seems more private to them despite being on the open web.

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• academic blogging holds out the possibility of extending the role of the academic, rather than threatening its diminution. It allows for discoverability, less specialised communication, and a degree of space and freedom to extend beyond the realms of research.
• does academic blogging dangerously blur the boundary between research and journalism?
• It is widely acknowledged that social media offers new possibilities for public intellectualism but what is much less understood is the transformed nature this can take.
• Rather than the broadcasting which defined the public intellectuals of the 20th century, social media facilitates ‘narrowcasting’ – relatively narrow audiences can be reached, with little or no funding needed, facilitating a broader and much more democratic relationship between academics and various publics.
• the possibility of extending the role of the academic, rather than threatening its diminution.
• I share many of the fundamental concerns which I hear expressed about impact and public engagement – particularly the entirely justified fear that this agenda, as well as the broader changes within higher education within which it is unavoidably implicated, threaten the autonomy of academic work. I think there’s a risk that the production of academic knowledge (in the broadest sense of the term) becomes subjugated to the contingencies of the political cycle, particularly as its mediated by funding bodies and other intermediaries.
• Part of the difficulty stems, I think, from the unavoidably top down way in which ‘impact’ and ‘public engagement’ are introduced and enacted
• Using social media has helped give my research a media profile which otherwise would have been impossible, particularly at this stage of my career.
• It’s made me easy to discover for journalists and it’s helped me forged a rich array of connections with the broader community who have been the subject of my research. I’ve also found that, increasingly, journalists have read my blog posts or listened to my podcasts before they contact me and it hugely aids the subsequent dialogue. The use of social media can help get academic knowledge into a public forum in a form which is broadly comprehensible but not simplified. In doing so, it helps ameliorate some of the more problematic issues that can emerge from the culture clash of academic knowledge and journalistic constraints. Far from subjugating research to journalism, actively participating in this making public of academic knowledge will actually fortify academia against the intrusions of media imperative i.e. the academic blogosphere mediates between academia and the media.
• Imagine if blog posts recounting the aims, arguments and findings of research papers become as ubiquitous as abstracts? What would the effects be? Among many others, it would likely make academic knowledge navigable to a great majority of people who are otherwise excluded from it. Rather than reducing scholarship to blogging, the former is extended through the latter, giving it a public visibility which it currently lacks and making it available in a way in which it currently isn’t.
• PhD student in Sociolog

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