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.
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.
The Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation (IIDI) is currently advertising a funded PhD place to start in September 2013. The full advertisement can be found at 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 1st July 2013, with interviews expected to take place on Wednesday 24th July 2013.
Last month I blogged that the Centre for Social Informatics had been successful in winning a grant from the AHRC to be led by my colleague Dr Alistair Duff, and that soon we would be advertising two positions associated with this new project to start in May 2013 or soon after. The details of the first of these – a three year fully-funded PhD studentship in census informatics, ethics and policy – are now available.
Viva in progress
My last work duty of 2012 has been to travel to the iSchool at the University of Sheffield to examine a PhD entitled The use of Actor-Network Theory and a Practice-Based Approach to understand online community participation. The viva went well and I’m pleased that the student will be awarded his PhD subject to minor corrections to the thesis. I was particularly interested in this work because it has parallels with my own doctoral study. In my work I analysed actor-networks that had developed around a knowledge management implementation within a large, distributed organisation to reveal the role of a corporate intranet in knowledge and information sharing.
Hazel Hall 