A presentation used in workshops to teach academics about how to use social media and other digital media for professional purposes. Includes discussion of Academia.edu, LinkedIn, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, institutional e-repositories, Storify, SlideShare, Pinterest and more.

1. THE DIGITAL ACADEMIC:
SOCIALAND OTHER DIGITALMEDIAFOR
ACADEMICS
Deborah Lupton
Department of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Sydney

2. Why use social media?
• Connect with other academics
• Engage with the public – get out from behind paywalls
• Share your research
• Increase citations to your work
• Access others’ research
• Respond to current events
• Curate online material
• Conduct research
• Use for teaching
• Create and manage your on-line presence

3. Academia.edu
• Create your academic profile
• Follow other academics or interest groups (and they can follow
you)
• Upload papers or links to published work
• Informs you when you are Googled

4. LinkedIn
• Professional work contacts
• Provide details of your current and previous employment
• Share news about your research
• Join interest groups

5. Google Scholar
• Creates a personal profile that lists your total publications and
citations, both for each year and career total
• Creates an h-index and an i10-index
• Lists each publication in order (by year or number of citations)
with citations for each one shown

6. Blogs
• Write about your or others’ research
• Write about current events
• Have full control over your content
• Receive and respond to comments
• Publish instantaneously
• Egs: WordPress, Tumblr
• My blog: This Sociological Life

7. Wikipedia
• Create your own entries or edit others’ entries

8. Twitter
• Make connections
• Post links
• ‘Curate your own academic department’
• Chat with other tweeters in real time
• Live tweeting from conferences
• Follow interesting people
• My Twitter handle: @DALupton

9. Pinterest
• Curate images
• Use for research
• Use for teaching
• Publicise your own research
My Pinterest boards: http://pinterest.com/dalupton/boards

10. Storify
• Collect material from the web: tweets, websites, images, blog
posts
• Make a ‘story’ using this material in a narrative format
My Storifies: http://storify.com/DALupton#stories

11. Facebook
• Create your own pages around topics of interest
• Post interesting news items, blog posts and journal abstracts
• Make comments
• One of my Facebook pages: Digital Sociology

12. Podcasts or YouTube videos
• Present videos of research content for public access
• Upload interviews with other researchers or yourself talking
about your research
• Use visual material related to your research or teaching

13. Content curation and book marking tools
• Use to find, save and collect interesting material from the web
• Can be arranged around topics and shared with others
• Eg: Delicious, Bundlr, Scoop.it, Pearltrees, StumbleUpon
• One of my Scoop.it collections: The Digital Self

14. Quora
• Use to ask questions or answer others’ questions

15. SlideShare
• Use to upload and share your Powerpoint or Prezi
presentations on the web

16. Content aggregator tools
• Use to organise and save the latest material from your
favourite websites and blogs
• Streams in content automatically
• A way to find content easily that is in your interest area
• Eg. Prismatic, RSS feeds, Paper.li

17. Referencing tools
• Collect your references and PDFs under topics
• Create private groups to share PDFs among each other
• You can make your topic reference collections available to be
accessed by others (reference details or open access material
only, not PDFs because of copyright restrictions)
• Can be used for automatic reference formatting of your
documents
• Eg: Mendeley, Zotero, CiteULike

18. University e-repositories
• Upload copies of your articles (post-print or pre-
print), conference/seminar presentations or working papers
• A great way to digitally publish material that otherwise would
not be available on the web (eg a conference paper or working
paper) or has not yet been published in a journal (post-print or
pre-print)
• These can then be accessed on the web and downloaded and
are searchable and citable by Google Scholar etc
• Check copyright issues first

19. How to maximise your digital research
profile
Publish a book/journal
article/chapter/working paper/conference
paper
Publicise on
Twitter, Facebook, Academia.edu, LinkedIn
, Research Gate etc. – make sure you
provide a hyperlink
Write a blog about the piece and embed
the hyperlink
Publicise the blog on Twitter, Facebook,
Academia.edu, LinkedIn etc.

20. Issues to be aware of
• Maintaining a professional persona
• Decide how much personal detail you want to include
• Never say on social media what you would not say face-to-face
• Ensure you don’t breach copyright agreements with journal
and book publishers

21. Useful links
• The A to Z of social media for academia
• LSE Impact of the Social Sciences website
• ‘Social media for academia: some things I have learnt’ (one of
my blog posts)