I am going to present a paper and a poster at the Methods Fair 2012 at University of Manchester 10 October 2012. It’s a great event for PGR students across the social sciences from any UK institutions. To book a place and see the program: ttp://www.methods.manchester.ac.uk/events/2012-10-10/
My poster is about my PhD project ‘Are the new forms of scholarly communication the pathway to open science’.
I attended the PGR student conference in School of Education, organised by Methods Manchester today. Although I’m a Sociology PhD student, there are many interesting workshops and talks that could benefit my research. I was very impressed by Elizabeth Wiredu and her Nvivo 10 training session. It was fun and easy to understand how Nvivo was used to code and analyse qualitative data. Moreover, the new version of Nvivo 10 has added the function of generating social media data by clicking ‘NCapture’. It is a new tool in Nvivo 10 that can capture data from Twitter (such as search of # theme), YouTube and so on. If you are social media researchers like me, who are still trying out all those fancy tools out there that may make our life a lot easier, try Nvivo 10. They have a free trial of 30 days. My university said they have bought the software and are looking into this, and hopefully will install in all university computers soon! Fingers crossed!
There other tool I know which can analyse Twitter and YouTube data is NodeXL. For Twitter, it generates the nodes of users (by search a particular user or a hashtag that have been tweeted) and can visualize the network of users. On the other hand, Nvivo 10 captures all the conversation by searching a topic and generates text based qualitative data.
The University of Manchester have regular training courses for Nvivo (organised by Methods Manchester) and NodeXL (by CCSR) if anyone is interested!
It has been two weeks since I presented my paper at the ‘Co-production of Knowledge: Social media, STS and…’ conference in the University of York. I have met a lot of interesting people who are doing similar research and I could possibly collaborate with in the future.
I presented my pilot study in the big theatre with 23 audiences, which was quite good attendance considering it was the afternoon of the last day of the 3 day conferences. Among the audience, we did a little survey and found about 1/4-1/3 of them had academic blogs. Some questions were raised, such as whether I’d analyse online content rather than interviewing people, whether there is a difference between blogs for research and for teaching students. These are good questions that I can reflect upon and consider in my future research.
Some presentations were very relevant to my research area and I also enjoyed meeting their presenters, such as Dominika Czerniawska with her Open Access paper, Mark Dang-Anh with his Twitter Algorithms paper. I missed Rene Konig’s presentation as it was at the same time as mine, but his research sounded really interesting and I’d love to learn more about it.
The downside of this trip to York was that I got food allergy and ended up in hospital emergency department on the first night. Staying in the York University campus and being so remote to city centre and all the resources didn’t help when I had problem at night time. Luckily I recovered quickly the next day and everything ran smoothly afterwards including my presentation on the last day. So the lesson is bringing all kinds of medication that might be needed and being careful next time—don’t get too tired! Conference could be very exhausting and stressful, especially when you are a PhD student with nerves!
Looking forward to my next conference trip though! 🙂
Scholarly Communication and Open Science 