
Centre for Social Informatics colleagues Frances Ryan, Hazel Hall, Iris Buunk, Brian Detlor, David Jarman (Business School), Bruce Ryan, Peter Cruickshank, Lyndsey Jenkins and Lynn Killick at the Edinburgh Napier Research Conference 2017 (Photo credit Bill Buchanan)
It’s currently conference season in academia and over the past couple of weeks the staff and research students from my research group have participated in a number of events, both in Edinburgh and beyond. Indeed PhD student Alicja Pawluczuk is still on the road this week, flying the flag for the Centre for Social Informatics at the 2017 British HCI Conference, organised by the HCI research groups at the University of Sunderland and Edinburgh Napier University in conjunction with the Interaction Specialist Group of BCS.
The first event that brought us together last month was the 2017 Edinburgh Napier University Research conference. We very much enjoyed participating at this event last year (and winning a few prizes along the way), so were pleased when our submissions for 2017 were all accepted for presentation. We were also grateful that the programme included plenty of time for networking, with others from our School and across the University.
Individuals from the Centre for Social Informatics contributed to four types of session at the conference:
- Laura Muir spoke about eye movement tracking research in the staff presentation session. Gemma Webster also gave a presentation in this session in which she outlined her project Portraits of care. Our colleague Ella Taylor-Smith was a presenter in this session too – on the theme of survey-fatigued students. (Abstracts these presentations and all the others in this session are available from the conference web site.)
- We made five presentations during the poster session: (1) Brian Detlor – Digital storytelling and city cultural organizations; (2) Lyndsey Jenkins – Factor influencing innovation across Europe: analysis of the Community Innovation Survey; (3) Alicja Pawluczuk – Young people as co-creators of digital culture: measuring the social impact; (4) Todd Richter – Getting unstuck: information problem solving in high school STEM students and evidence of metacognitive knowledge; (5) Frances Ryan – Building identities online.
- Alicja Pawluczuk also took part in the afternoon’s 3 Minute Thesis competition, a described in a recent post on her blog My PhD Adventures.
- At the end of the day Bruce Ryan and I hosted displays on staff research within the group in the Research Showcase session.
At the end of the showcase the names of the winners of the University research prizes were announced. Although members of my group did not pick up any this year – it was our turn in 2016 😉 – we were delighted that four went to our colleagues in the School of Computing:
- Cedric Perret for the best poster
- Neil Urquhart for the best contribution to the Information Society research theme
- Emma Hart for the best contribution to the Sustainable Communities research theme
- Bill Buchanan for the best contribution to knowledge exchange