Reflecting on Twitter’s trajectory under the ownership of Elon Musk, Charlie Beckett, suggests recent events have highlighted both the value of the platform for mass-communication and how pre-existing tensions on the platform are similar to those exper…
Category: Featured
The Lovelace Effect – AI generated texts should lead us to re-value creativity in academic writing
The continuing development of AI generated writing has led to a debate around its use in higher education. In this post, Simone Natale and Leah Henrickson, draw on their research into computational creativity and introduce the concept of the ‘Lovelace …
When publishing becomes the sole focus of PhD programmes academia suffers
Reporting on their findings from qualitative research project focused PhD students across China, Hugo Horta and Huan Li explore how a culture of publication has become central to doctoral study and discuss how this can negatively impact wider aspects o…
Book Review: The Science and Art of Interviewing by Kathleen Gerson and Sarah Damaske
In The Science and Art of Interviewing, Kathleen Gerson and Sarah Damaske offer a new overview of why interviewing is a useful and powerful research tool and how we can make better use of it. Guiding us through the process, from identifying our researc…
Can blogs change the world? Uncovering pathways to policy influence through LSE Blogs
For some academics being asked to write a research blogpost can feel like shouting into the void, another addition to a constantly expanding mass of online content. However, the network of connections that can spring out of these engagements and their …
To understand uses of personal data in the present, people draw on the past and imagine the future
The collection and analysis of data about us now occurs across many aspects of everyday life, but how do people come to understand these complex processes? Drawing on Living With Data research, Susan Oman, Hannah Ditchfield and Helen Kennedy show that …
How intelligent open science can inform our response to global crises
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the potential strengths and existing weaknesses of open science practices and open data sharing to addressing urgent social and technological challenges. In this post, Lucia Loffreda and Rob Johnson present a new repo…
Navigating co-design and nudge: Evidence and expertise in practice
In a previous blogpost Colette Einfeld and Emma Blomkamp argued bringing together nudges and co-design in practice illuminated fundamental differences underlying these approaches. Reflecting on a project to improve healthy food choices in a hospital se…
Academics can easily leave Twitter’s town square, but it will be much harder for their institutions
The fate of Twitter, both for academics and everyone else, has been a pressing issue in the past weeks. In this post Andy Tattersall argues that whilst individual academics could quite easily leave the platform, the centrality of Twitter to academic in…
Book Review: Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project that Matters to You (and the World) by Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea
In Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project that Matters to You (and the World), Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea offer a new guide to deciding on your research topic and formulating your research questions to develop a project that rea…