Maximizing the impact of academic research. Maximising the impact of academic research Facebook Facebook Twitter Twitter RSS RSS Share this: Recent posts The key elements of a research story – Top Posts of 2015: Academic Writing Top Posts of 2015: Social Media and Digital Scholarship.
If you don’t have social media, you are no one: How social media enriches conferences for some but risks isolating others. 13,000 tweets, 430 photos and over 2,000 video views later, Dr Lisa Harris and Nicole Beale have plenty of data to investigate how social networking can change the conversation at an academic conference.
Here, they report that while social media opens a new dimension to academic discussion, there are still challenges that must be addressed with its use. The impact of social networking activity on an intended ‘real world’ outcome has been difficult to measure, but one of our Social Media in Supporting Live Events (SMiLE) action project objectives is to investigate how recent developments in social network visualisation and analysis can enable valuable insights to be generated for the benefit of event organisers and community developers.
We monitored the use of a range of established and experimental social media tools to track how they were utilised by both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ delegates before, during and after an event. So how did it go? “But who is going to read 12,000 tweets?!” How researchers can collect and share relevant social media content at conferences. Using social media to communicate at conferences allows more space and time for attendees to join discussions and network.
But are these conversational tweets of any use once the drinks reception begins? Nicole Beale and Lisa Harris hope that archiving and visualizing the data will spark new research routes. In our previous post, we introduced the SMiLE project and the ways that we had implemented the use of social media at the CAA2012 conference to test the extent to which we could use the tools to support the following: