What a brilliant idea. Find out more here about how to contribute.
We’ve been thinking a lot at #NSMNSS about what types of activities the network should support next. One idea we’ve been ruminating on for a while is creating a volume of crowdsourced blogs on the impact social media are having on social science research methods. (We are also supporting the development of a new Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods which many network members will be contributing to but this is on a longer time-span and will be published in a more traditional way.)
We got the idea for this from David De Souza (@dds180) and his hugely successful HR book of blogs Humane, Resourced which topped the best seller nonfiction business charts last year. We want to try and replicate this success and believe it will be a great showcase for network members to share their experiences and views about social media research with a wider audience. The broad idea is to reach 100+ pages of content collected from a multitude of contributors from across the social science world, in the UK and elsewhere. In the spirit of the network this will be a crowd sourced, digitally published volume.
Our best guess at the moment is approximately 50 contributors giving one blog each of 3 pages each = 150 pages of insight & personal reflections.
The theme of the book is how are social media blurring the boundaries of conventional research methods and practice? You can write about your experiences of using social media for research, new tools or methods you’ve used/developed or more conceptually about the challenges or opportunities shifting methodologies present to us as researchers. Give us a case study or not… Tell us how using new approaches improved or complicated your project… how you present your ideas or reflections is up to you. We’re also interested in how the research community is developing it’s capacity for using these approaches so if you want to write about teaching social media methods hop on board too!
Once we can see the content coming in we’ll try to organise the volume thematically.http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/call-for-contributors-to-book-of-blogs.html?m=1
Mark Carrigan 