Fires on the road

"Dissent is the highest form of Patriotism." - Thomas Jefferson 

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.” - Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

As I write this I am listening to Leonard Cohen after an evening indulging in a little wallowing by watching videos that firmly justify my sadness and anger. I have read advice to take the time to mourn and be alone, the advice to comfort others and allow yourself to be comforted, the advice to roll up your sleeves and get involved, to speak up, to be silent. I've done a little of everything, vacillating in the directionless way of the bereaved.

I debated whether to write anything here about current events at all. After all, this is a quasi-professional blog and while I have never hidden my political leanings in my professional life, I've tended to be cagey about discussing politics openly in that context. I feel like that position has become unsupportable now. I feel the pressing need to become more of an activist. I need to speak up. The problem is that I have no idea what to say.

I could say something about the danger of echo chambers and need for media literacy. I could provide resources attempting to analyse what went wrong, how it happened, who is to blame. I could theorise about the best and worst case scenarios that could emerge over the next four years. I could talk about the role of libraries in supporting their communities during difficult times or the transformative power of reading in crisis situations. I could discuss any and all of these, but I think others have said it better and frankly I don't have the energy to analyse or prosthelytise right now.

I think what I need to do right now is be honest.

I'm terrified. I know that this fear was mirrored by those on the right when contemplating a Clinton presidency. I know that it's a symptom of the unhealthy divisiveness that has grown up in American and British politics, that Brexiters and Trump supporters find my political views as insupportable, as alien as I find theirs. It's a different set of values that has been thrown into sharp relief against my own by the polarising forces of journalism, social media, isolationism and confirmation bias. But right now I find it unhelpful to empathise, to agree with President Obama when he asserts that deep down we all want the same things, because from my point of view, here and now, I can't see how that's the case. Because what I want is for women to have equal rights, opportunities and treatment to men, for working class families to be able to afford to live without having to work multiple jobs so they can actually see their children and afford healthcare, for Muslim Americans to not feel demonised, for Mexican Americans to not feel outcast, for Black Americans to not feel criminalised, for LGBTQ+ youth to not be contemplating suicide as an alternative to facing the next four years of watching their few small, hard-won rights be stripped away. Because I am a pacifist and fear the bellicose instincts of the President-elect. Because every human has dignity and rights and I fear his ableism. Because I am pro-choice and a feminist and fear his misogyny. Because I believe that the most pressing issue facing the entire world is not "Obamacare" but the dangerously rapid warming of our planet due to human influence. Because I am an immigrant, a friend of immigrants, a supporter of immigration and I fear the growing nationalism around the globe that the President-elect has tapped into, emboldened and legitimised through his success. Because I am at heart a progressive and I fear his authoritarianism.

My mind keeps wandering back to a book I read last year called Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi. The main character is a young woman in Germany in the 30s and sees the world around her change, sees her neighbours and friends become complacent, then fearful, then complicit in atrocities that start to feel mundane. The xenophobia, paranoia and cruelty fostered by fascism became the new normal. I saw a tweet a few weeks ago that I wasn't able to find again to attribute it that said something along the lines of: If you could travel back in time the question is not whether you would kill Hitler. The question is, would you vote for him? With hindsight we forget that the figure we rightly deplore was democratically elected, that there is something appealing at particular moments in time about a strong leader who gives us a common enemy to blame for our problems and promises a solution. Now that we've voted for him (though I feel it's only right to point out that only about a quarter of registered voters actually did as half of them didn't vote at all), will we be complacent until it's too late? Will we cheer as lives are destroyed because we can sleep a little more soundly knowing that at least people who look like us have finally got what we deserve?

Like many others I know I'm desperate to find ways to help; protests I could join, petitions I could sign, acts of defiance I could perform. I will do all of this that I can but I think and hope the small daily acts matter just as much. Being kind, being there for people, listening, including people. I think this comes back to the Buddhist idea of "Right Livelihood"; doing the work that's in front of you to the best of your ability. That's all you can do. It feels small. It feels insignificant right now in the face of huge forces mobilised by hatred and greed. But, as Susan Sontag observed, that's no excuse to not do it.

23 Research Things - Thing 11

While I don't think I'd ever really use them to put out my own content online, I am an enthusiastic consumer of YouTube and podcast content, and it's not just weightlifting tutorials and funny cat videos either. I love learning from these platforms. For example, I credit fandom podcasts such as The Tolkien Professor and Witch Please for making me a more careful, critical reader of fiction. Through 99% Invisible I've learned a lot about design and the way humans interact with the world.

The podcast I'm choosing to highlight for Thing 11, however, is Hello PhD, a fortnightly podcast "for scientists and the people who love them". I mentioned it in my previous post as a great example of communicating research and, although it doesn't focus exclusively on specific research projects, it provides great insights into the structure and culture of postgraduate science education. It takes a refreshingly critical stance toward that structure and also talks about mental and physical wellbeing in postgraduate training, mentorship, productivity, alternative routes outside of academia etc. Throw in the weekly science etymology puzzle and I'm totally hooked! The hosts are great at communicating complex issues within academia and advocates for loving what you do as a researcher. The podcast has a slight biological science bias but don't let that discourage you - the information is useful for all researchers and the people that work with (and/or love) them!

Source: http://hellophd.com/page/9/

From YouTube there are too many good educational videos out there to be able to pick the best, from the now outrageously popular TED talks to SciShow, the Gates Notes, Vox, Crash Course... the list goes on and on! I did need to pick one, though, so I thought I'd go in for some good old fashioned nepotism and share my friend Peter's YouTube channel, The Binary Tree.

Peter's great at explaining the theory behind computer science - something I admit I'm way more into than learning programming languages - in simple terms that appeal to my visual learning style. He's a great example of how accessible it is to share what you know with the world and get others excited about your area of interest.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

23 Research Things - Thing 10

I'll do my best to encapsulate my rambling and multifarious thoughts on communicating research into a single blog post. I suppose the people to whom it makes sense are already doing it, so I will do my best not to preach to the converted but instead address people who may not see the point in spending their valuable time translating their research into plain language.

Georgina and Ryan made some great points in their podcast on the topic, not least of which is that if you've devoted your time to researching something in great depth, hopefully it means you're quite excited about it. I recently asked one of my classes to chat to each other about their research topics and overheard one student ask another, "What are you geeking out on lately?" It's the same sort of language people use around a show they really love or a hobby they've gotten really into. I hope all of the researchers I work with feel that way about their work at least periodically.

To me, the "geeking out"- getting excited about an idea or a question or a problem and then pursuing it, finding it difficult to talk about anything else over dinner or out at the pub - is what it's all about. It's why I've always wanted to go into some field in education; to watch that spark ignite and help people take down the barriers to pursuing that shiny new piece of knowledge. The most influential people in my life have been educators, but first and foremost they've been great communicators who were able to share their enthusiasm, passion and curiosity. They're the Neil deGrasse Tysons and Bill Nyes of the world, but they're also the Katie Browns and Debbie Aldouses of the world. These are people who are passionate about knowledge and who are able to share that passion.

One of the chief advantages of the tools explored in previous Things is that they mean you don't have to be a brilliant public speaker or teach in a classroom to communicate your passion for your research. People like Katie Mack (AKA @astrokatie) have found the power of tools like Vine (RIP) and Twitter for sharing their research and have huge followings because they get people excited by and interested in what they're doing. The "Dance your PhD" Contest launched by Science shows how engaging, funny and accessible communicating research by video can be, while podcasts like Hello PhD provide a forum for those who prefer the spoken word.

The thing in common with all of these is that they've learned to make complex research topics accessible. The first step is letting go of the idea that your research is too complicated for other people to understand. Obviously they won't understand it at the level that you do, but I agree with Ryan that there is no concept or process that can't be explained relatively simply. I would also argue that in translating your work into a simpler, more easily communicable form, by coming up with your "elevator pitch", by trying to condense it into the length of a Tweet, or by explaining it in an animation, you change your perspective on your subject. You can actually learn more about your subject by simplifying it and communicating it.

When you communicate your research, you never know where the conversation will take you.

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 - 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