In Hackerspaces: Making the Maker Movement, Sarah R. Davies examines the increasingly high profile of hacking and making, drawing on visits to hackerspaces and interviews with those involved in them. Attending to the multiple strands of hacking and questions regarding the commodification of the “hacker spirit” as well as the movement’s diversity, this is an engagingly written book that addresses readers beyond a purely […]
Category: digital scholarship
Book Review: Communicating Your Research With Social Media: A Practical Guide to Using Blogs, Podcasts, Data Visualisations and Video by Amy Mollett, Cheryl Brumley, Chris Gilson and Sierra Williams
With Communicating Your Research with Social Media: A Practical Guide to Using Blogs, Podcasts, Data Visualisations and Video, authors Amy Mollett, Cheryl Brumley, Chris Gilson and Sierra Williams offer a definitive guide to communicating research using different social media tools. Reflecting on the utility of social media to all facets of the research landscape and lifecycle, this is a valuable book that will encourage readers to find the […]
Four questions you should ask yourself before undertaking a multimedia research project
There is no escaping the power of images. Researchers who use photography and video as part of their projects have the potential to reach huge audiences through visual-obsessed social media channels. As part of a series previewing their new book Communicating Your Research with Social Media, Amy Mollett, Cheryl Brumley, Chris Gilson and Sierra Williams run through the questions you […]
What does the future hold for academic books?
Between August 2014 and September 2016, the Academic Book of the Future Project, initiated by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Library, explored the current and future status of the traditional academic monograph. Marilyn Deegan, one of the co-investigators on the project and author of the project report, reflects on its findings, welcoming them as an opportunity to open […]
“Writing sprints” can facilitate collaboration and encourage new ways of thinking about academic writing
Claire Taylor and Niamh Thornton describe their experience of hosting a “writing sprint”, a time-limited exercise in which academics from many disciplines and from all over the world were brought together virtually to produce an academic article. Despite certain challenges, the writing sprint proved a great way of facilitating collaborations and providing opportunities for reflections on the process of writing […]
Research should not allow the loud voice of online content production to drown out the quiet majority of internet users
Social science research aims to record, analyse, and make sense of social mess; to observe and account for everything in a given setting. Why, then, does so much of the research carried out online refuse to do this? Harry Dyer argues that in order to understand the social uses of the internet, it is crucial that research is not focused […]
Hack-to-Learn at the Library of Congress
When hosting workshops, such as Software Carpentry, or events, such as Collections As Data, our National Digital Initiatives team made a discovery—there is an appetite among librarians for hands-on computational experience. That’s why we created an inclusive hackathon, or a “hack-to-learn,” taking advantage of the skills librarians already have and paring them with programmers to […]
“Words divide, pictures unite” – great historic examples of the use of data visualisation for research communication
Students, researchers and academics from across a variety of disciplines use data visualisations and infographics in their blogs and projects to better tell the stories in their data and enhance audience understanding. As part of a series previewing their new book Communicating Your Research with Social Media, Amy Mollett, Cheryl Brumley, Chris Gilson and Sierra Williams explore a short history […]
OpenAIRE can form the basis for a truly public European Open Access Platform
In a previous Impact Blog post, Benedikt Fecher and colleagues envisioned a European Open Access Platform, an innovative public information infrastructure that would integrate publishing and dissemination into the research lifecycle, rather than having it outsourced. Tony Ross-Hellauer describes how OpenAIRE is working to make this vision a reality, and how it can contribute further to create a participatory, federated […]
Introducing the Impact of LSE Blogs project!
Since launching in 2010, more than 2000 contributors have written for LSE’s public-facing academic blogs, reaching an ever-expanding, international audience. But how do we measure the impact of this particular form of research communication? In the first of a short series of posts, Carlos Arrebola and Amy Mollett introduce the Impact of LSE Blogs project. As well as following the progress […]