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.

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.

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.

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.

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.