I’m trying to put together the most comprehensive list I can of ways in which academics curate information as part of their usual core duties. However I’m struggling slightly and what I have below doesn’t seem comprehensive:
– producing a reading list for an upcoming writing project
– produce a reading list for a module or course
– collating articles you might like to blog about or share on twitter
– collecting academic resources for external groups
– keeping track of media coverage of your work
– keeping track of engagements with your work
– maintaining a list of your publication
Does anyone have any other examples? I’ll say thanks in a footnote in the book! Also if anyone has any examples of how they’ve performed these tasks that would be really helpful. The chapter is about notebook tools (e.g Evernote) and curation tools (e.g. Pinterest) but I’m keen to frame these in terms of other options e.g. e-mailing them to yourself (which I still do a lot) or writing them in a text file or word document.
Mark Carrigan 
9 responses to “Help: examples of academics finding, collating and filtering information”
Interesting chapter. I’m not sure if it is “part of my duties” but:
– I maintain a bibtex/txt file containing my collection of academic papers and books on GitHub. So that if anyone needs anything, he can check if I have it and ask me for a copy.
– I curate the media content of the philosophy twitter list (made up by Rani Lill Anjum) and produce a light and comprehensive magazine with flipboard http://flip.it/Fbegy
Hi Mark, could I suggest collating, disseminating and publicising information relating to social engagement/ campaigning. This is information not necessarily collected as part of work, but where the skills, insights, training, accumulated experience might be applied to non-subject related interests, but still connected to the academic’s situation as an academic eg campaigning against the neo- liberal university (eg Stefan Collini’s attack on government changes, EP Thompson on Warwick University Limited, Michael Bate on Copyright, Campaigns for Open access, information commons, etc.) This May at times be extended beyond academic issues to an involvement in community or political issues. (eg E P Thompson on anti-nuclear issues or academics involved in campaigns against the cuts)
Martyn
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hi Mark, I really like bundlr (which you alerted me to!). Here’s how I use this in teaching – on my third year module, on early childhood and parenting, I ask students to email me links to readings, research reports, news articles they find as the module progresses. I add the links to a bundle for that module/year (e.g. http://bundlr.com/b/sociology-of-parenting-and-childhood-2013). I encourage my students to think of the bundle as supplementary reading and to think about using some of these materials in assessed work. A link to the bundle is placed on the VLE. I also add to the bundle and continue to do this throughout the year. When I prepare to teach the module again I check the bundle so that I can update my reading lists and think about materials that can be used in seminar exercises. Fortunately, this is area is also one of my research interests.
thanks Andrea, those are both the sort of things I’m planning to write about – you got me experimenting with flipboard!
oh yes, definitely, that hadn’t occurred to me but that’s an excellent idea!
thanks emma, that’s really helpful. could i cite you on this as one of the case studies?
(apologies for taking ages to reply, my viva was on monday!)
Yes, it is fine to cite my bundlr example (of course, given you told me about the site!).
Mark, not part of my official duties as a Prof, but I’ve been using Diigo.com for years in two ways. First, I create groups for each of my courses and curate info from the web into these groups and ask students to do the same. I’ve been doing this for six years and its a way to keep students engaged with the material long after the course ends. Second, in my research with community organization partners, I also have a few topical groups that I use to curate relevant info from the web. We have a long-standing one called “Collective Impact on Poverty” and another called “Organizations and Community” I have yet to get them participating much in the generation of curated info, but they appreciate being consumers of my shared content.
Thanks and sorry I missed this comment – very interesting you’re doing this with community partners as well, I’d tended to think of these tools solely in terms of curation for teaching and research. Have added this into my chapter!