Tag: research

  • Using @IFTTT and Twitter to curate material for research projects

    Two new projects I’m in the early stages of working on both necessitate engagement with phenomena that are developing rapidly. This poses an obvious question: how to identify relevant material and then archive it in a useful way? I’ve written a lot about the curation process before and I won’t rehash it here. Instead, I […]

  • “They were stalking the corridors, the lecture rooms, the offices…”: open research, ethics and impact

    The Last Seminar by Stan Cohen must surely merit consideration as the strangest paper ever to appear in a Sociology journal. It tells the story of a gradual invasion of the university campus by those who are neither expected nor welcome: research participants. Encountering  strangely familiar figures in their everyday working lives, befuddled sociologists suddenly begin to […]

  • Why should academics blog about their research? An answer in pictures

    Thanks to Jacqueline Bartram who drew these great cartoons as I was talking at a Hull event last yearabout academic blogging. Why should academics blog about their research? It provides a home for things you reluctantly cut from your publications: It allows you to get early feedback on ideas and try them out for the […]

  • the origins of digital capitalism 

    From The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff, loc 730-744: At the same time, society’s greatest inventions and innovations of the past two hundred years— rockets to the moon, penicillin, computers, the internet— were not bestowed upon us by lone entrepreneurs and firms operating in free markets under conditions of healthy competition. They were […]

  • Life in the Accelerated Academy, part 2

    The idea that a part 2 to yesterday’s post would be less rushed seems rather naive in retrospect. Feeling rushed in the morning is different to feeling rushed in the evening but it is nonetheless feeling rushed. Much of my motivation for the Accelerated Academy project comes from a desire to understand this aspect of […]

  • The Mobile Apps in Research Summit 2014

    On December 4th 2014 The University of Birmingham will be hosting the second Mobile Apps in Research Summit. We are excited to announce that delegate registration is now open. This year’s Summit includes some discussion-based workshop sessions, by popular demand, as well as presentations, panels and networking. Programme Welcome Panel: Supporting apps in research – […]

  • Art, research and sociology’s promiscuity

    I’ve just come back from two days talking, thinking and occasionally getting frustrated by the question of the relationship between art and social research. This is something I’ve been curious about for ages. Here are some reasons why: I think the communicative repertoire exhibited by most sociologists is profoundly limited and I think of performance, in the […]

  • Pretty much everything you need to get started on social media as an academic contained within…

    My getting started with social media bundle has pretty much every training resource I’ve ever produced in it. Some collections of other people’s stuff about Twitter, blogging and podcasting. All my Prezis from social media workshops. The LSE Impact Blog’s Twitter list and Twitter guide. Go through the former list, follow anyone who seems interesting and Twitter will […]

  • Internal conversations and natural language use / question for qualitative researchers

    Much of my thesis centers around the notion of internal conversation. Leaving aside broader theoretical issues (what it is, how it works and why it’s important etc) it also poses an obvious epistemic question: if you’re using interviews then how can you claim to gain knowledge of people’s internal conversations? I’ve never thought this was much […]

  • “Should I be conscious of the language I use on Twitter?”

    The panel (below) responds at this Digital Change GPP event earlier in the year. Charlotte Mathieson – English and Comparative Literary Studies. Robert O’Toole – Institute of Education. Eleonora Belfiore – Centre for Cultural Policy Studies.

  • What about the authors who can’t pay? Why the government’s embrace of gold open access isn’t something to celebrate

    Sometimes I worry that Twitter is an echo chamber, reflecting my own prejudices back at me and shielding me from contrasting views. On other occasions though, I find this same characteristic immensely comforting. Such as when reading that the government has officially embraced the recommendations of the Finch report and finding that other PhD students […]

  • The problems facing a digital research culture amongst PhD students and how universities can solve them

    The recent Researchers of Tomorrow study highlights an interesting trend relating to current doctoral students using digital technology as part of their research. Though I haven’t read the full report yet – yes, I do recognise the irony in this given some of the other findings – I wanted to get some thoughts down while […]

  • Scholarly Publishing and ePresses – Interview with @agatamontoya about the new university presses in Australia

    A podcast I did with Agata Montoya, an editor at Sydney University Press, as part of my Digital Change research. If you want to find out more about these issues, you should check out these articles by Agata: here and here.

  • Online Communities and Digital Research Methods: a cautionary note

    One of the most exciting things about the internet from a sociological perspective is the impact it has on the formation of communities – groups who might otherwise be too geographically dispersed are able to come together, often elaborating some degree of collective identity from the dialogues which ensue as they gather in this ‘virtual’ […]

  • “Why do you find blogging useful as a researcher?”

    I asked this question on Twitter a couple of days ago in preparation for a Blogging for Researchers workshop I’m running at the University of Warwick. I’ve included some of the answers I received below. I’ve also collated a collection of resources here. Part of the reason I asked this question was because I wanted […]

  • Continuous Publishing, Open Research and Impact (part 2)

    Part 2 of this post. I had to stop writing because the battery on my phone was dying. Though the fact that I can write part 1 of the post (on my phone in a coffee shop in Manchester while waiting for a train) and write part 2 of the post (from a desktop computer […]

  • Using visual metaphor to explain how stuff works: what theorists can learn from beatboxing?

    In this video the Beardyman, UK beat boxer renowned for his use of live looping, collaborates with the visual artist mr_hopkinson to visually describe the practice. As someone who is fascinated by this kind of music but had never understood how it works, I was incredibly impressed by the articulacy of the visual message. The video communicates embodied practical knowledge through […]

  • My notes on the digital scholar (chapter 1)

    My summary notes of Martin Weller’s superb book The Digital Scholar, with my own reflections prompted by the book in brackets. The resources involved in scholarship are changing in the digital age. This is not a case of new replacing old, as books and journals are as influential as ever, rather it is a diversification of the […]