Between constant email access through your smart phone and twitter conversations that pay no heed to boundaries of time or location, it’s easy to get lost in an online information overload. Mark Carrigan writes that curation tools are the only thing that can save a busy researcher’s sanity.

Do you suffer from information overload? Do you find it difficult to organise and process the things you find online so that you can apply them productively in your day-to-day working life? If so then curation tools could transform your experience of the digital world. Increasingly seen as the ‘next big thing’ of social media, the last year has seen an explosion of different tools which can be used to manage, sort and catalogue material. However the novelty, as well as the choices available, render them confusing – what tool should you use and how should you use it? Furthermore what are the specific uses to which academics can put these tools?

Curation is the broader concept behind Pinterest, by far the most famous of these tools, which was the subject of Deborah Lupton’s great article a few weeks ago. She notes how Pinterest;

“draws upon the idea of older techniques of collage or scrapbooking: collecting interesting images, grouping them together under a theme and displaying them to others.”

It allows the user to go round the internet, collecting images they find through the use of a convenient browser button (in a similar way to creating new browser bookmarks) and make these titled pinboards available online. Crucially, it also allows users to add a commentary to each ‘pinned’ item and, I would argue, this is where collating online material becomes curating in the proper sense of the term. As Lupton says, few academics seem to have heard of Pinterest. Yet even fewer academics, as well as internet users more broadly, seem to realise how many  curation tools are out there. I briefly discuss four I’ve experimented with below though, I should stress, there are others out there. At the heart of all these tools are the same core practical tasks which anyone working in an information rich environment faces: collecting, sorting, evaluating and sharing information.

While Pinterest is primarily focused on images, the others are, arguably, more versatile. Furthermore as Lupton astutely points out of Pinterest and its ‘pinboards’, these tools tend to be structured around some central embodied metaphor e.g. ‘bundling’ up a range of things you find online or ‘scooping up’ things you find online and pasting them into your ‘magazine’. Beyond the practical features of each, for instance the centrality of images in Pinterest, I would suggest that these metaphors are actually a key factor in why particular individuals will take to particular services e.g. without realising it I’ve been thinking in bundles for a long time and just got the point of the service instantly when I used it. So it’s definitely worth experimenting with them and seeing which one you’re most intuitively comfortable with. Much as with other digital tools, there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to use these – it all comes down to your practical purposes, how they unfold as you experiment with different tools and which ones you ultimately find most useful for your personal needs.

1. Storify is perhaps the mostly widely known of these four. It allows you to search multiple social networks and knit together items you find into sequential stories. I’ve found this useful for preserving Twitter debates that I’ve particularly enjoyed. However I’m aware this only represents part of what the tool is capable of if you combine a sufficiently diverse range of elements, whereas my uses have merely been reconstructing conversations on one medium that I was actively involved in. The most impressive uses I’ve seen have tended to revolve around covering events either retrospectively or live.
2. Bundlr is my personal favourite and I can’t recommend it enough. As with the others, you use a browser button to ‘bundle’ content. When you’re on a web page which you want to curate, press the button and either choose an existing bundle or make a new one. What’s most impressive about Bundlr is how it combines the ability to handle many types of content (e.g. youtube videos, images, tweets, presentations, web pages) with effortlessly making the finished product look aesthetically appealing. With their latest update this became particularly true of embedding bundles in webpages. It’s also incredibly easy to pick up. Within a few hours of signing up to Bundlr I had multiple bundles which had collectively received hundreds of hits. I honestly don’t understand how I kept track of things I wrote and read online prior to using the service.
3. Scoop.It  allows you to publish ‘magazines’ based on content you scoop through a browser bookmark. Whereas some of the other tools focus more on collating items, Scoop.It offers more room for curation : it gives you more opportunity than the other tools to control what aspects of your ‘scooped’ items are highlighted and what commentary you offer about them. It also has an interesting, though in my experience not quite perfected, tool which offers you ideas about things to ‘scoop’. One feature I particularly like about Scoop.It is that it lets you tweet whenever you scoop a new item. In this way it integrates the curation process with managing twitter accounts. Though this might not be appealing to everyone, it’s a potentially invaluable time saver for those who manage multi-author blogs and multiple social media accounts. I like Scoop.It a lot and, if I had more time, I’d use this. Although I’d qualify this by saying I’d use it in my capacity as a social media manager rather than as an academic researcher.
4. Pearl Trees is perhaps the most intriguing and yet, in my experience, the least practical. It takes a mind-mapping approach to curation, enabling you to collect ‘pearls’ (webpages, text notes or photos) and arrange them into hierarchical structures. I found it fascinating to explore and the interface is very different to anything else I’d come across. Nonetheless, I just didn’t ‘get’ it, beyond my abstract curiosity. It’s worth trying though and, even if your reaction is the same as mine, it’s definitely one to watch. When researching this article, I discovered that since I last used Pearl Trees they’ve introduced ‘bi-directional’ synchronization with social media. So rather than just auto tweeting when you add an item to your Pearl Tree, it can also add a pearl whenever you tweet a link. In practice I suspect this might not work as it should but, nonetheless, it has certainly induced me to give Pearl Trees another go.

Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics.

 

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Producing papers for a growing number of journals with an ever shrinking audience risks diminishing the potential of the impact of academic work. Pat Lockley and Mark Carrigan consider the incentives of the current system of academic publishing and call for a new definition.

Cite or site? Citation, or the seeking of capital via academic publishing, is obviously unavoidable for anyone involved in academic research while ‘site’ – as in to publish content via social media, would perhaps seem a marginal alternative, perhaps an indulgence, when considered in terms of the intense structural pressures all researchers are under to ‘publish or perish’. After all, isn’t it basically a form of self-publishing, a shiny technological alternative to the vanity presses of old?

Sites, which we use as a synonym for academics utilising social alternatives to journals for research dissemination, create the possibility of engaging more widely, as well as more productively, with broader audiences. However the differences between social media and ‘traditional’ publishing are both quantitative and qualitative. The phrase “academic publishing” now defines how an academic is published, not how an academic could publish. Antipathy towards the idea of online dissemination within academia comes from the assumption, perhaps unacknowledged, that the former impacts negatively on the latter: that the capacity to reach so many more people through alternative publishing risks the academic value of the material being published, as if ‘publishing’ is but a single, individual action, and not a series of different, distinct events.

One such difference is between writing for an academic audience and for a general audience. Some of the features of academic writing deemed to be negative, such an excessive reliance on technical jargon are, at least in part, a reflection of the properties of their traditional medium. If you find yourself writing for a renowned high-impact journal, only the most intellectually self-confident, particularly when the author is a grad student or post-doc, would not feel any temptation to throw in a bit of additional academic jargon as a means to, consciously or otherwise, foreground the technical sophistication and conceptual rigor of their argumentation. If you find yourself writing for a relatively specialised journal, perhaps in a very narrow field, it’s natural to assume a great deal of knowledge (of theoretical perspectives, historical disputes, methodological controversies etc) because these are so personally familiar and, given the relatively niche interests of such a journal, chances are they will be to other readers.

However, some journals explicitly ask that such writing be avoided as part of their editorial policies such, as for instance, the British Sociological Association’s flagship journal, ‘Sociology’, which states that “jargon or unnecessary technical language should be avoided, as should the use of abbreviations”. Presumably such policies are motivated by a desire, at least in part, to open up the journal to a wider readership. Yet such policies run up against the brute empirical fact that, given what an academic journal is in the present setting, no one outside of academic sociology is likely to have even heard of the journal, let alone chosen to read it.

Acknowledging this brute fact isn’t an anti-intellectual attack on long-standing practices within the academy. Nor does it entail the suggestion that traditional mediums of academic publishing, as well as traditional forms of academic expression, lack value. Nothing could be further from the truth. But at present the academy suffers from a pervasive crisis of over-production: ever more intellectual energy goes into producing papers for an ever wide array of journals which even fewer people read. In doing so, academic publishing is tending to inverse economies of scale. Publishing in this sense tends towards the opposite of it’s own meaning (‘to make public’) but also into smaller and smaller communities where impact becomes ever diminshed.

The social structures of both the modern university and of commercial publishing have combined to crystalise a structure of perverse incentives. The need to publish, the need to differentiate oneself and raise one’s profile – ultimately the need to make oneself ‘valuable’ in terms of the ludicrously narrow quantitative auditing of the REF – have led us to objectively perpetuate, though subjectively disavow, a system which eviscerates academic values (with ‘salami slicing’ being perhaps the most egregious ensuing practice).

We need to have an ongoing and honest conversation about what academic publishing is, what it could be and what it should be. At present, academic publishing remains in meaning being published in a journal, and as such is not a meaning to which the word academic confers only the source of the content, and possibly the nature of the potential consumer. Within the phrase is no inference, or limitation of the platforms used or usable. So how did its meaning become so limited and/or specific, and how can those limitations be overcome?

Pat Lockely and Mark Carrigan will write again shortly on the changing context within which academic research takes place, the structural pressures researchers are subject to and the cultural environment which stands ready to receive the products of that research.

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Academics are discovering that twitter is much, much more than a space on which to talk about the latest reality show. Mark Carrigan outlines what academics can get out of the social media service and why the academic twittersphere really is the most no different from presenting to an audience.

 

What’s the point of Twitter?

Twitter has an image problem. It first penetrated the public consciousness in a way which has left it defined by celebrities and, particularly for academics, this is unattractive. However the academic twittersphere (for lack of a better term) is a relatively self-enclosed ecosystem. While you’ll undoubtedly find a bit of celebrity gossip and X-Factor chat, this is strikingly absent in comparison to Twitter more broadly. In fact, academics are using Twitter in all manner of creative and useful ways. These are some of the responses I received when I posed the question “why do you find Twitter useful as an academic?” to my followers on the service:

• Quick answers to questions on things like … where do I find this tool or that tool ..  (@rjhogue)
• We discuss concepts (@Annlytical)
• There are people who are practicing what I’m researching academically and give me a reality check (@Annlytical)
• Twitter is brilliant for keeping up with things, networking, finding new ideas, people’s blogs and publications (@BenGuilbaud)
• meeting new people (in all disciplines), academic support, public engagement, increased visibility, filtered news (@Martin_Eve)
• What Martin said. I think you already saw this but it’s the Prezi I made for grad students http://bit.ly/uK05VM (@qui_oui)
• Also, I’ve found Twitter useful for augmenting F2F academic conferences, extending the conversations (@JessieNYC)
• Twitter is incredibly useful 2 me as an academic 4 many reasons, perhaps chiefly curating the ideal academic dept  (@JessieNYC)
• Twitter’s unique advantage is that very quickly allows me to spread word of my work to non-academic audiences (@elebelfiore)
• Keeps me up-to-the-minute with news in my field ie; policy issues, and connects me to conferences/other academics (@DonnaBramwell)
• connects me to other delegates at conferences, allows me to interact with students in lectures, keeps me uptodate (@timpaa)
• We trade references for research (@annlytical)
• great source of information & resources wouldn’t have found otherwise (@nicklebygirl)
• Twitter makes it possible for me to engage with global community even though I now live in Australia & am #altac (@katrinafee)
• a PhD can be very isolated so I think twitter is a great way to meet people who can help and give advice (@CET47)

It’s difficult to convey the point of Twitter. Partly this is a result of the inadequacy of ‘micro-blogging’ as a concept: it doesn’t get across what such a service is, how it can be used or what value these uses have. Twitter is a profoundly practical service and yet it is difficult to convey this because much of the terminology, interface and minutiae of Twitter are inherently confusing until you have engaged with the service. Furthermore, the somewhat steep learning curve isn’t a very attractive proposition to time-poor academics.

So why should you make the leap? The only reason I can give is that people just like you are finding the service astoundingly useful. The reasons cited above represent a small fraction of the uses to which academics are already putting Twitter and, at present, academic usage of the service is still in its infancy. Why not give it a go? All the evidence suggests you’ll find at least some uses for it.

The LSE Impact Blog has created a list of active academic tweeters.If you want to see for yourself what all the fuss is about, sign up and follow all the people you can find in these lists who work in your area, as well as any others who look interesting. Say hello, post some links to your work and explore a bit. It’s possible that you’ll find Twitter simply isn’t for you. In which case, what have you lost? However it’s much more likely that you’ll joint the ever-growing numbers who are finding that Twitter is the most natural social networking service for academics.

How academics should use Twitter

The fact Twitter offers no real tools to control who follows you is a source of concern for some academics. In part this might be a function of a broader reticence towards online publishing. However I think it also stems from how Twitter is conceived as a medium. If you are presenting at a conference, you wouldn’t obsess about the identity of each person in the audience. There might be a variety of reasons why you are presenting: sharing your ideas, promoting your work, connecting with others in your field. At any conference, these motives only partially overlap. The reasons for each individual being there varies but nonetheless everyone is working within the same constraints of how the sessions are organised within a physical venue.

Twitter is no different. It’s a spot on the internet that’s staked out as yours. What you do with it is up to you. Some people choose to wander over to their podium every now and again, make an announcement and then wander off. Some people give their presentation at the podium and then leave, only returning when they want to give another. Some do their presentation but thrive on the Q&A afterwards. Some might not like the feel of the podium and eschew a formal presentation to go and chat more directly with their audience. Likewise some people just want to listen and ask questions of other speakers. Others would rather ditch the conference and go straight to relaxing at the pub.

Most academic users of Twitter fall into one or more of these categories. Likewise people move between categories. But the interpersonal dimensions of it are fundamentally no different to a conference. It’s just that the form of communication is so dramatically concise, as well as lacking any direct parallel other than the text message, that until you’ve been using it for a long time, it’s difficult to see quite how much like everyday life it is. So don’t be anxious about it. If you want to use it to draw attention to your work then stop worrying about who follows you and just restrict your tweets to topics you would discuss in a formal work setting. If you want to connect with other people who have similar interests then just tweet about the things that interest you and respond when others do the same, just as you would in any other setting. If you want to get drunk and gossip then go ahead, just remember that people might overhear you and that, on twitter, what you’ve said echoes in the room for a little while before it dissipates.

The same rules of interaction apply on Twitter as they do offline. If someone habitually goes over time for their talk, monologuing at an increasingly bored audience then people in the audience will eventually leave and new audience members won’t stay for long. If someone gives a good talk but obviously resents the Q&A afterwards, people might sit in the audience because of intellectual interest but they’ll think the speaker is a bit rude. If someone turns up, loudly and briefly announces their new book/paper/insight and then leaves the conference, people won’t pay much attention, unless they’re a globe trotting academic superstar. While the norms of interaction which apply to Twitter as a medium are still in their infancy, the nature of that interaction isn’t radically new.

 

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