Tomorrow I’m presenting a workshop on using social media for impact at the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) 2014 Final Year Conference (hash tag #esrcphd). This takes place at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC), and is hosted by the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science.
Finland experienced a fresh covering of snow last week
I have examined quite a few PhDs over the course of my career, both in English and in French, but until last week I had not had the opportunity to participate in a doctoral defence at a Nordic university. Last week I travelled to Åbo Akademi University in the Finnish city of Turku to serve as the opponent at the PhD defence of a thesis (in English) entitled Social media and public libraries: exploring information activities of library professionals and users.
As a member of the Information Science Pathway of the ESRC Scottish Graduate School of Social Science Doctoral Training Centre (SGS-DTC) Edinburgh Napier University is currently inviting applications for a funded PhD studentship offered through the DTC’s quota competition.
Today I travelled to Perth to attend the first meeting of Information Science Scotland for this academic year. Information Science Scotland is a consortium of the four Scottish Universities that offer courses and conduct research in Information Science. Representatives from departments of each university meet on a regular basis to plan the group’s activities.
The home page of the Thesis Whisperer web site
What do you do when you hear that the Thesis Whisperer, Dr Inger Mewburn, is coming to town? If you’re my colleague Karen Strickland, you do all you can to tempt her onto the Edinburgh Napier University campus to share with colleagues her enthusiasm for social media as a means of marketing academic research.
The Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation (IIDI) is currently advertising a funded PhD place to start in January or March 2014. The full advertisement can be found at jobs.ac.uk and on the Edinburgh Napier University vacancies web site. There is also an associated item about the vacancy on the IIDI news feed. The closing date for applications is Monday 28th October, with interviews expected to take place on Wednesday 27th November.
An unwelcome question
At a party recently another guest kindly asked me how I felt about “returning to work in the autumn” after my “long summer vacation”. I held my breath for a few seconds, then carefully replied that my annual leave entitlement is 27 days plus 14 fixed/public holidays. (This may be fewer than his – I didn’t ask). To get the conversation back on track, I then enthused about my fabulous two-week holiday in the far north west of Scotland in August, and the events that I managed to catch during the Edinburgh Festival and the Fringe. In response he told me about his own summer break. We were both able to enjoy this pleasant, yet insignificant, conversation ending on a happy discussion of the best British summer weather in years.
The four partner universities of the ESRC Scottish Graduate School of Social Science information science pathway hosted iDocQ 2013 in Aberdeen on Monday 24th June. iDocQ is the annual doctoral colloquium for doctoral candidates in information science and other related disciplines.
Tracking scholarly digital footprints
Like many I communicate my scholarly research over multiple platforms in a range of activities that have now become routine for research-active academics. These include, for example:
Screenshot of link listings on Hazel Hall’s About.me page
Dr Robert Irvine
Many congratulations to Dr Robert Irvine, who graduated with his PhD from Edinburgh Napier University on Wednesday at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh.
I co-supervised Robert’s doctoral study entitled Success factors for organisational information systems development projects: a Scottish suppliers’ perspective.
The starting point for Robert’s work was the acknowledgement that organisational information systems development (OISD) projects have long been associated with failure, and the cost of these failures is enormous. Yet, despite numerous previous studies, understanding of real-world projects is limited. In particular, Robert identified that little was known about the way in which various factors affect the success of OISD projects. In addition, Robert’s work concluded that earlier research has generally tended to focus on OISD projects from an in-house or client perspective, with the views of the supplier largely ignored.
Hazel Hall 