A presentation for academics at the University of Cape Town on issues of online presence and visibility, risks, and how to take control of one's digital footprint.

1. Academics’ online visibility
Laura Czerniewicz
OpenUCT Initiative (OUI)
Shihaam Donnelly, Travis Noakes, Eve Gray

2. Still true?
• On the Internet, nobody knows
you're a dog
• Peter Steiner, New Yorker 1993
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/be
n_lawson/155595430/
• Insert licence Some rights
reserved

3. IDC Report: The 2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos, June 2011
http://www.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/emc-digital-universe-2011/index.htm

5. Digital Footprints

8. Take control
• Digital footprint- the content you create
• Digital shadow- content created about you
– The amount of information that individuals create
themselves (digital footprint) is far less than the
amount being generated about them (digital
shadow)
• Separate your personal and your professional
profiles online

9. Keep track
• Regular searches
• Ongoing Google alerts of your name
• Spezify
• Measure your digital footprint

10. Keep track

11. Keep track
• To calculate the size of your own
digital footprint, download a copy
of the Personal Digital Footprint
Calculator at
http://www.emc.com/digital_universe/do
wnloads/web/personal-ticker.htm

12. Ways of thinking
about online visibility & participation

13. Building Blocks
PRESENCE
Extent to which
of the
you as the
scholar are
Networked
SHARING
visible to others
online CONNECTIONS Scholar
Extent to which The relevance • The honeycomb of building
you allow users blocks can be used to assess
and appeal of
your level of online
to exchange and your work to connectivity as a scholar.
distribute your IDENTITY others
information • They are not exclusive and
The extent to neither need all be present.
which others can
identify you • They are constructs that allow
online as a us to make sense of different
CONVERSATIONS REPUTATION aspects of a networked
scholar scholar.
Extent to which Your online
others engage standing and the ADAPTED FROM
with you and extent to which
you with others GROUPS you influence Social media? Get serious!
others Understanding the functional
The extent of building blocks of social media
your Jan H. Kietzmann, Kristopher
engagement Hermkens, Ian P. McCarthy,
Bruno S. Silvestre
with
Business Horizons (2011) 54,
communities 241—251
*Read the article here*

14. Scholarly primitives & the open
researcher
• “…basic functions
common to scholarly
Discovering Annotating Comparing activity across disciplines,
over time, and
independent of
theoretical orientation.”
Referring Sampling Illustrating • John Unsworth. "Scholarly Primitives: What
Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have
in Common and How Might Our Tools
Reflect This?" "Humanities Computing,
Formal Methods, Experimental Practice"
Symposium, Kings College, London, May
Representing
13, 2000.
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/K
ings.5-00/primitives.html

15. Brainstorm/
Edit images
generate ideas
Find Research Take Notes/
Compare
Materials Annotate
Resources
Resources
Discovering Annotating Comparing
Referring Sampling Illustrating
Manage Make a dynamic
bibliographic map
information
Representing
Blogging Twitter

16. Clusters of tools & activities: the C’s
• Creation: create a mashup; compare resources; edit images; find
research materials; make a dynamic map; make a screencast; take
notes/annotate resources and transcribe handwritten or spoken
texts.
• Curation: manage digital content; build and share collections;
manage bibliographic information; organize research materials.
• Collaboration: collaborate and communicate with colleagues
formally and informally; write collaboratively; network with other
researchers; share bookmarks
• Communication: blog; present data visually, present multimedia
and interactive presentations, use social software for
communication of scholarly activities including disseminating
research results.

17. https://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com

18. Sharing – the defining concept
• Opening scholarship through sharing
• Sharing as multiplying, not dividing
• Sharing used to mean exchange, now means
exchange AND distribution
• Forms of sharing (Latour)
– Intermediaries transport messages (content, code,
meaning) with-out transforming them.
– Mediators transform, translate, distort, and
modify the meaning or the elements they carry
Wittel, A (2011) Qualities of Sharing and their Transformations in the Digital Age in
International Review of Information Ethics Vol. 15 (09/2011)

19. What to do -
minimum time & effort
Collect & share what you find useful
Use Twitter for work!

20. Social bookmarking
Store your bookmarks on the web & share
• Delicious
• CiteUlike
• Diigo
• 2collab
• Connate
• Mendeley

21. Delicious

22. “Curation”
• http://socialcompare.com/en/comparison/curation-platforms-amplify-knowledge-plaza-storify Other curation tools

23. Get going on Twitter

24. Some Twitter guidelines
• Get into a routine
• It is legit to retweet your tweets especially if
rephrased
• Provide updates from special events
• Use hashtags
• Follow others / reciprocate
• Promote your Twitter profile through your email
signature, business card, blog posts etc.
• Being careful with Twitter
• Tweet about each new publication, website update or new
blog that the project completes.
• Ask for feedback
• Link to a URL of publication, presentation, podcast etc
• Tweet about new developments of interest
• Retweet interesting material
• Use Twitter for ‘crowd sourcing’ research activities
Mollet, A; Moran, D and Dunleavy, P (2011) Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities, LSE Research Online

25. What to do -
more time and effort
Develop a voice – blog
Get your stuff online
Maximise discoverability

26. Blogging as a scholarly activity
• Create a blog
– Wordpress, Livejournal, Blogger, Typepad
• Find a blog
– Google Blog Search, Blogcatalogue, technorati
• Blog aggregators
– Research blogging

28. http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8733sci3.html

29. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/26/blogging-to-print/

30. Go as open as you can
• Put everything you can online
– Check out Sherpa Romeo for publisher archiving
policies
• Archive
– in repositories
– In subject portals and aggregators
• Publish in open access journals

32. Slideshare

37. Open access & increased citations
• Open access publishing increases visibility,
the opportunity for use and the possibility of
impact.
• Majority of studies have shown an increase in
citations arising from open access.
• Of the 35 studies surveyed, 27 have shown a
citations advantage (the % increase ranges
from 45% increase to as high as 600%), with
only 4 showing no advantage
Swan A (2010) The Open Access Citation Advantage: Studies and Results to Date. Available at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/

38. Maximise discoverability
Take metadata seriously
“Well said! "metadata is a
love note to the future"
from @textfiles talk
via @nypl_labs & @kissa
ne http://t.co/FjvCLVUZ

39. Improving searchability
• Blogs and websites can be submitted to
these top search engine directories for free
– Dmoz at http://www.dmoz.org/;
– Hit Web Directory at
http://www.hitwebdirectory.com/;
– Search Site at
– http://www.the-search-site.com/ and
– Jayde at http://www.jayde.com/submit.html.

40. Broaden impact

41. Thanks
Laura.czerniewicz@uct.ac.za