Impact Challenge: Day 3 – Social media and academia?

Welcome to day 3! Today we ask you to investigate the academic side of social media.

Most of you are already on some kind of social media, but what we would like to find out today is whether these tools are useful in academia. Social media can be incredibly different from one another and their usage varies even from country to country, so are they worth the effort?

Below we are asking you to focus on Twitter and micro-blogging to see if it fits your needs, in two small steps. For sure you know the basics: you follow people and institutions so that you see their tweets in the main feed; you tweet a text (max. 280 characters), with links and photos or videos, if you wish, or you can retweet other people’s tweets.

Step 1, observation: how do other academics do it?

If you would like to join or start conversations on Twitter, the best way to see how it works is to observe somebody else’s profile. Today we suggest to look at the profiles of some EUI researchers and professors and notice how they share either their thoughts and their own research, or something interesting they’ve heard at a conference:

Tom Ashby (HEC researcher)

Melanie Sauter (SPS researcher)

Margherita Melillo (LAW researcher)

Jean-Michel Glachant (Florence School of Regulation)

Brigid Laffan (Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies)

Richard Bellamy (Max Weber Programme)

Anna Triandafyllidou (Migration Policy Centre)

Richard McNeil-Willson (Research Associate, Global Governance Programme)

Step 2, more observation: serendipity

If you prefer just quiet observation, that’s fine too: by following relevant institutions (the Library has an account too!) and people in your field, you’ll have a constant stream of information coming your way. Find the hashtags that research communities use to tag their content to see what it’s going on. Here’s a list for EUI related topics

#twitterstorians #earlymoderntwitter

#polsci #polisci #migration #soctwitter #SociologyMatters

#eulaw #HumanRights #IntLaw #EULaw #ComparativeLaw #LegalTheory

#EconTwitter #econhist #statstwitter #data #academicdata

#openaccess #openscience #opendata

A final fun tip:have a look at  #phdlife.

Academic analysis of social media

Are you intrigued? Carry on the quest by reading the article Twitter as Method: Using Twitter as a Tool to Conduct Research by Bonnie Stuart or browse through these Library books on social media and research.

BONUS CHALLENGE

Are you an expert on academic social media? Do you have any other tip?

Let us know on… our social media!

Facebook: EUI Library

Twitter: @euilib

Instagram: euilibrary