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Monday 31 October 2016

23 Research Things - Thing 9

Reddit touts itself as "The Front Page of the Internet" and this claim is actually borne out in my experience. Everything seems to be on Reddit before anywhere else online. One week after it's on Reddit, it will start circulating on Twitter, quickly followed by Tumblr. Six months down the line your cousin will tag you when they post it on Facebook. My direct experiences with Reddit to date have been my husband showing me cute animal gifs, and occasionally responding to a meme or news story I'm telling him about with "Yeah, I already saw it on Reddit." That alone was enough to make me wonder whether I should be using it too so I used this prompt to take the time to set it up.

My first impression is that it would take a lot of time to figure out how best to use it for research or any other sane, grown-up use of social media. I disliked that you were automatically subscribed to the cute animal gif and politics subreddits. It took me a while of combing through a list of all the reddit pages unsubscribing from ones I was automatically added to before I could get the drop-down list of my subscriptions to a manageable size for further unsubscribing. There are seemingly endless communities you could join, all of which leads to it feeling pretty overwhelming. Careful curation seems to be the only way of dealing with it, but having recently deleted my Tumblr account, cut back on my Pinterest time to times I'm genuinely in need of inspiration and culled my Feedly, all in aid of only getting useful content, this feels like another time-sink and source of input-overload. Having just quit Tumblr, it feels like a brand new way to wear out my finger with incessant scrolling. For that reason it may be easier to search for threads you're interested in rather than using the front page, where content seldom seemed to be what I was directly interested in.

That being said, I think there are a few conceptual Subreddits that are worth following. I loved /r/explainlikeimfive for inspirational use of plain language to answer complex questions, for example. I could see myself using it for personal topics like personal finance and productivity as well. I enjoy that you can fully curate your front page, and once you get used to where to find the subreddit each thread was posted to you can start to think about which ones are cluttering up your front page for curation purposes. Reddit's advantage is in its grassroots nature, which it has somehow maintained despite how long it has been around. You can deal directly with other users you don't know in real life and it seems like a great way to have conversations without as much of the creep factor I get from Facebook.

The ultimate test of any of the tools I've explored as part of 23 Research Things is: would I recommend researchers use it? If so, how? I'm having trouble answering that one. I think it very much depends on personality. I've been around the internet long enough to find the message board structure and upvoting familiar, despite the rather clunky-looking UI. However, the barrier to entry is higher than for something pretty like Twitter and you have to wade through a lot of non-scholarly content unlike in ResearchGate. If you did use it for research I think you would need to do a lot of curating, be very disciplined about how much time you spend on it, and mine threads for useful information using the search function when you wanted specific information. I plan to give Reddit about a week before I see whether or not it stays part of my professional life.

Another tool mentioned, Wikis, are a useful form of knowledge management for groups - indeed, it's one of the classics - but I think that other tools have surpassed it in terms of usability if not robustness. It's good to think about the various web-based sources of knowledge sharing in terms of research in order to give yourself more options, even if you don't necessarily end up adopting them.

Wednesday 26 October 2016

23 Research Things - Thing 8

For Thing 8 I had a look at ResearchGate and Academia.edu. The handy side-by-side comparison provided by the Moore shows exactly why between the two I favour ResearchGate, even though it sounds like the name the popular media would give a scandal involving researchers. Just as Apollo, the Cambridge repository, has developed a "Request a copy" form on otherwise closed access records, I think the ability of students and academics to contact an author in order to circumvent publishers' paywalls is an important feature of a site.

Dec2010 20
Opening the gates to connect people to the information they want is one of the key benefits of ResearchGate.
 As much as I teach people to be wary of illegitimate copies of papers online and direct them to openaccess.cam.ac.uk to ensure their manuscripts are archived in a way that meets legal, funder and publisher requirements, ResearchGate's facility to request copies is a service I certainly recommend to my user group when I reach a dead end trying to source things through Inter Library Loan.

I've had an account for a few months but, as fellow #23researchcam participant Luther noted, it may be a better service for people who have a portfolio of academic work to share and discuss. It's also one of several ways to follow academics you're interested in, provided they're active users. While Scopus can alert you when favourite academics publish, and the same service is available on Google Scholar if they have made their profile public, both Academia.edu and ResearchGate seem like a slightly more personal service, giving you the opportunity to comment and discuss as well as receiving updates.

Tuesday 25 October 2016

23 Research Things - Thing 7

So far 23 Research Things has been chiefly an exercise in self-reflection. However, occasionally it has thrown in some prods to do something truly useful. This week, prompted by Thing 7, I've gotten my LinkedIn account out of mothballs and dusted it off a bit.

Generally I only update LinkedIn when there's a big change to make, like a new job or new project, or when I'm looking for work. Thankfully, I've been in my dream job for almost a year now, which means my profile and privacy settings were a little neglected. I took the opportunity to change my profile such that the public version is more minimal, turn off the spammy notifications and add a bit more description to my current job. I also joined a group from the list of recommendations LinkedIn provided. I went with Library and Information Research Methods as I do a fair amount of practitioner research-related stuff in my current role and it's definitely a topic I advocate for as well.

My feelings about LinkedIn are decidedly less strong in either direction than with almost any other social media platform, perhaps because it's about as bland and impersonal as social media gets. While it allows you to include information like activities and volunteer work, those appear as a black and white list, divorced from any context, descriptive language or images. It's one thing to list "fitness" as one of several hobbies and quite another to post a photo of myself, mud-streaked, bedraggled and close to tears of joy after completing a Spartan Race. While I'm happy for employers and potential contacts to know about that facet of my life, LinkedIn is not a place to be your expressive, unvarnished self. It's the web equivalent of handing a generic CV to someone.

(This shot won't make the shortlist for LinkedIn profile pictures despite being one of the proudest moments of my life.)

Those impressions aside, it is undoubtedly a useful tool. In addition to its functions as a digital business card, I use it to capture large scale projects, committees outside of work and other such activities that I would no doubt forget about between re-spruceings of my CV. Since it's generic it doesn't really give me the categories I'd like. I'd prefer to export my Symplectic profile to LinkedIn and make it possible to capture my professional development in categories like "Teaching" and "Conferences". Regardless, I feel like it's a valuable point in the constellation of my online presence, even if it does tend to go unregarded for months at a time.

Edit: I was just highly amused by the disparate points of view on LinkedIn between my post and this one by Librarian At Heart. I thought I'd clarify that I'm not really bemoaning the lack of muddy-faced photos of me on LinkedIn - that's definitely not the place for them - simply noticing how my ambivalence possibly comes from the austere nature of the site. Equally it's hard to feel like you're connecting with real people on LinkedIn. I suppose it's not necessarily more curated or polished than any other social media site, just polished in a particular way.

Friday 21 October 2016

23 Research Things - Things 5 & 6

These days I find myself in a bit of a post-Honeymoon period with Twitter and often question what it adds to my professional life. The fact that many professionally relevant conversations and connections happen there is reason enough for me to want to remain but I think it tends to demand more than it gives. That's why I'm having a little difficulty summoning enthusiasm for Thing 5, an exploration of how Twitter can be used in research.

I teach academics about communicating and sharing your research and strongly encourage some form of non-academic dissemination, not only for increased citation rates but for practice communicating your ideas in different modes. Of course Twitter is brilliant for this for all the reasons discussed in the video for Thing 5, but it also depends on where people are comfortable and what suits their communication style. I am firmly of the opinion that Twitter should be optional, no matter what field you're in, and important work-related discussions shouldn't happen exclusively on Twitter just as business decisions shouldn't happen exclusively on the smoking terrace.
Twitter: the smoking terrace of our generation? (Does anyone else remember this episode of Friends where Rachel takes up smoking because her colleagues are making important decisions during their cigarette breaks?)
Part of the problem is the feeling one has on Twitter of shouting into the tempest. There is so much information being generated every second that it's hard to feel you're providing valuable content. For researchers the fear that what they're saying won't be of interest and won't even be noticed must be tremendous. Add to that the time spent setting it up, getting used to it and Tweeting enough to make the whole endeavor worthwhile, I certainly empathise with academics I talk to who just don't see the point. However, I do think it's important to give researchers the opportunity to reframe Twitter as an opportunity for a different kind of scholarship and connection. At its best, Twitter is highly adaptive, timely, grass-roots, creative, inclusive and accessible, which is why I'm still there.

Thing 6 deals with content creation/curation through tools like Storify. I have seen Storify used to link together tweets from a conference before but hadn't thought of it for linking longer thoughts or related items. I think Librarian Errant hit the nail on the head with their reflection on today's featured tools, writing:
I found today’s Thing a useful reframing of resources that I had not previously considered for use in a content-creation context. One of the things I’m considering doing as a result of the 23 Research Things Cambridge programme is start creating some kind of themed collections of links, in a location less ephemeral than Twitter. I had been intending to do so on my blog, perhaps making use of something like Pocket to gather the links together until I was ready to post them. However, I’m now wondering if Paper.li or Scoop.it might be better.
That's a use I wouldn't have thought of either. I do wonder how much more discoverable those resources would be. I have yet to be convinced that Twitter offers much opportunity of distinguishing the signal from the noise. However, I do think it's worth a try, even if I'm only curating resources for my fellow librarians!

Ideas for curated content (please comment if you'd find any of these particularly useful!):
- Conference poster design
- Practitioner research
- Embedded librarianship
- Productivity
- Bullet Journal

Monday 17 October 2016

23 Research Things - Thing 4

Thing 4 of 23 Research Things deals with pulling in information. Keeping up to date with conversations and papers in your area of interest could be a full time job, particularly if you're struggling to maintain interest. Adding it to your workflow and curating it into a manageable form is a great way to stay engaged.

I actually just recently (as in last week) resurrected my Feedly account. Since it's a tool we talk about in training sessions at work I thought I'd engage with it a bit more after having quit using my account months ago. In the process of reworking my workflows and breaking bad digital habits, I've found using Feedly to keep up with news and blogs keeps me away from more distracting social media sites. It means I actually read articles that interest me and once I've read them they don't appear again. On Feedly I tend to skim the new stories a few times per day, and if something interests me I'll either read it then and there if I have time or save it for later if I don't. I've also been using the knowledge boards as a way of tagging and saving articles I think I might want to read again or refer to in teaching or a blog post, for example. As soon as I've browsed the headlines in a topic I mark all as read so that they disappear from my feed, assuming that if it didn't catch my attention then, it won't later. This gives the same feeling of victory as getting to Inbox Zero and I enjoy how little time it takes me to get there.
Behold my dragon hoard of information: My Feedly account, featuring a familiar face.
However, the desire to stay engaged must be balanced with the fear of missing out (FOMO) that pervades my online existence. I've had to learn to edit ruthlessly, culling the information sources that don't add to my life and reminding myself that it's okay not to scroll all the way to where I left off. On Feedly, for example, I've had to unfollow news feeds that add 10+ stories an hour for the sake of my own sanity and the health of my scrolling finger. I'm constantly editing what appears on my Twitter timeline and I've all but abandoned Tumblr for the same reason.

In addition to RSS feeds, I also teach academics and postgraduate students about setting up alerts on Google Scholar, Scopus and/or Web of Science for favourite authors, sources or searches so that new content is brought directly to your inbox. I have done this myself but have yet to reap any benefit from the seeds I've sown. I admit I've also not gotten the hang of Pocket yet either. I've installed it and I'm trying to use it, but I'd rather use a reference manager to grab things for work or study, while non-work articles get read the day the tab is opened or else I assume I wasn't that interested. I'm going to give Pocket another honest try, though!

I suppose the take home point is that all of these tools are only as good as the effort you put in to customising them and using them regularly. I've definitely incorporated Feedly into my daily workflow, but I'm still seeing what else works.

How about you? What do you use to gather and read new information on your favourite topics?

Friday 14 October 2016

23 Research Things - Thing 3

When I teach academics about managing their online profiles it's with the notion of using social media to share research and to ensure that their work is associated with them, not someone else with a similar name. For me, the need feels less imperative because concerns of authorship aren't particularly high priority. However, doing the exercises from Thing 3 has reinforced that even if you teach something regularly, you can still improve your own practices.

I'm unconcerned that, in addition to my own online presence, a search for my name delivers a clinician, a blogger and a bassist. Actually, Googling myself is a fairly uneventful experience. Most of my public content is pretty generic and work-related since I have made efforts in the last few years to adjust my privacy settings, be a little more mindful about what I post and break away from the fear of missing out that has at times had me compulsively refreshing pages in case a new post turned up in the last 60 seconds.

My Visitors and Residents exercise

The biggest surprise for me was YouTube, which I didn't even consider as an online space over which I had ownership, hence why I forgot to put it on my V & R map. I consume content on YouTube frequently and have an account there, but what surprised me was that anyone could see my playlists and favourites. While there's nothing dodgy on there (apart from revealing my very random taste in music), I saved videos to playlists for myself, not for public consumption. I have gone through and changed all of that content to private now. Having checked my email accounts with haveibeenpwned, I am most concerned about my Tumblr accounts and will make sure I do my routine password change sooner rather than later.

Looking at my V & R map I can see that my online priorities are shifting from personal to professional: my map a few years ago would have been weighted much more firmly toward the upper right hand quadrant. Part of this shift relates to developing a workflow of "Personal on paper, collaborate on the cloud". But there is still a large degree of bleed-through between professional and personal. Unlike Librarian Errant, I put my name to my online identity, both personal and professional, and rely on privacy settings to ensure I am only allowing certain people into aspects of my personal life. Certainly this allows people to find my content in the professional context, but I do wonder how much I edit myself because I've put my name to things.

Ultimately I don't think there is one right solution. As the Visitors and Residents exercise demonstrates, public vs. private is relative; other people would cringe at the thought of posting things that I consider completely benign to share online. The main thing is to consider security concerns, and, as I teach my academics, that requires setting aside a little bit of time every now and then to figure out what other people find when they Google you.

Wednesday 12 October 2016

23 Research Things - Thing 2

It's Wednesday and that means 3 things:

1 - My legs hurt from doing squats and deadlifts at the gym this morning,
2 - I'm getting ready for my weekly cycle out to West Cambridge to be the roving librarian at the Whittle Laboratory and,
3 - It's time for another installment of 23 Research Things!

Thing 2 is about reflective blogging. Hooray! A Thing I do anyway!

Self five!
(30 Rock via https://lockerdome.com/6956494474193729/6944414779055892)


I've had personal blogs off and on since the early 2000s, back when LiveJournal was the place to over-share your feelings with strangers and obsess over which 100x100 pixel profile picture best expressed your mood. I started this blog in 2014 as I was starting think more about career development. My first post is still unpublished and is ironically titled "Social media: are we just talking to ourselves?" It was going to be a hard-hitting piece on the echo chamber effect, illustrated by quotes from Brave New World. Looking through my list, I've started and abandoned almost as many posts as I've published.

This assignment is to talk about how we feel about blogging as a tool for reflection and obviously I can see its merits. But I want to point out that it isn't always comfortable for me and I can certainly empathise with people who have serious reservations about sharing non-academic writing in such a public setting. After all, even if you are sold on the benefits of reflection in the learning process (which I am), why do those reflections need to be posted where anyone can see them? The paradoxical doubts of, "Do I really want strangers to be able to read this?" and "Probably nobody cares what I have to say anyway" can silence many potential bloggers. It's perfectly valid to write and reflect privately, and I certainly do that as well. I am a paper and pen journal writer and those notebooks will hopefully be consumed by a fire as soon as I die so that I don't have to be posthumously mortified (no pun intended) by the thought of people reading about my more navel-gazing moments.

The benefit of blogging over private journal writing is that by changing the audience to whoever it is you think might read your blog (Hi, Mom!), you are exercising a different voice. It's not the free-flowing stream of consciousness of a personal journal, nor is it the rigid structure of academic writing. You are communicating in an informal but public register, which is a crucial thing to practice as a researcher. I think of it as a format for complete thoughts, hence the unpublished blog posts sitting in my list. I was obviously thinking about a particular topic and wanted to get it written down somewhere, but I didn't have enough to say to share it. That's fine. The writing process itself is the valuable part. The public nature of this format simply holds me accountable; I feel guilty when 6 months go by with out a post, not because I think my eager readers are clamouring for it, but because I know people can see how little I've been writing and I like to challenge myself to write complete thoughts.

Reflective writing is valuable for a few reasons. First, it reinforces things you've learned. Writing about what you've recently read or attended classes in is part of the alchemical process of creating deeper understanding. Second, it allows you to clarify for yourself how you feel or think about particular topics. Third, it's just another chance to practice writing and communicating. And finally, it frees you from the burden of hanging on to whatever is on your mind.

That last one's a bit odd. Let me clarify.

You may recall from my Thing 1 post that I'm on a bit of a productivity kick at the moment. While working on some pre-planning for my first Bullet Journal last night I came across this video of David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, doing a Ted Talk on stress-free productivity.


In it, he describes how people feel that they could be more productive, if only they had more time. But too little time, he argues, is not the problem.

"You know what you’d do with two more hours? You’d have two more hours of overwhelming stickiness. Actually, for most of you, it’d be a good thing you don’t get two more hours. Because the issue is not time.
How long does it take to have a creative idea? Zero time.
How long does it take to be inspired? Zero time.
How long does it take to recognize an opportunity you could leverage and take advantage of? Zero time.
Time is not the issue for those things. There is something required for those things. What’s that? Psychic bandwidth.
You need space to think."
Creating that space to be truly present and focused, he says, requires that we get rid of all the other stuff cluttering up our thoughts by writing it down. Anything you're thinking about, from jobs you need to get done to the relationship between social media and Aldous Huxley novels, is taking up bandwidth that you need to focus on what you're doing right now. Furthermore, he says, it helps you identify the task at hand. If you're mulling over a course you just took or a conversation you just had, write about it and figure out what action you need to take. "What exactly is the work you need to do?" That is the chief value I see in reflective blogging; it's identifying the "What now?" as Georgina put it. Learning for the sake of learning is fine, but if you can figure out what you can change as a result you will get more out of it, and maybe free up some bandwidth to have some great ideas.

Monday 10 October 2016

23 Research Things - Thing 1

Hello! I'm joining in with 23 Research Things Cambridge and will do my best to post all of the "Things" in a timely manner. Thing 1 is an introduction and a chance to reflect on what we hope to get out of our involvement. I think this also might be a good chance to introduce myself in case any new readers find this blog as a result of the programme.

The author, as viewed through a series of tubes
My name is Kirsten and I'm Assistant Research Support Librarian in an HE Engineering Department. I work with Masters and PhD students and researchers through various phases of the research process, from research ethics to accessing resources to understanding the 21st century academic publishing landscape. I do quite a bit of teaching and one-on-one work as well as developing the online support for our students and academics. While I already do a fair amount of CPD around research, I thought 23 Research Things would be a great chance to find some new ideas and be reflective about my practices.

This is rather timely as I'm looking at revamping my productivity and goal setting at the moment, moving toward an analog system that will allow me to take notes and do more reflective writing with pen and paper by trying out bullet journaling. So I'm already thinking a lot about how I manage my own information and what my personal and professional goals ought to be over the next 6-12 months. The schedule of upcoming Things looks like it will be a good blend of strategies I've thought about a lot and ones I haven't really explored personally. I'm hoping to gain a lot of perspective, both on my role in research support and as a researcher myself.

I'm also looking forward to hearing from other participants - particularly people outside the library world - in order to expand my understanding of the ways in which people do research. Look for regular updates on this blog and I hope to hear what you think as part of this programme!