An introduction to digital life.

1. Introduction to
Digital Life
Kimberley R. Barker, MLIS
Librarian for Digital Life
@KR_Barker
Kimberley@virginia.edu

2. Learning Objectives
• Learn to define digital life
• Learn about digital identity
• Learn about how Google works
• Learn about reputation management
• Learn about digital privacy & security
• Learn about altmetrics

3. Digital Life
“A personal, professional, financial, and social
inhabitation of the digital world via
investments of time, talent, and money.”
- Kimberley R. Barker
Image credit: Microsoft

4. Digital life: how did it become
possible and popular?
• The Internet
• Cost of technology lowered
• Home computers; records put online; databases created
• Smartphones
• Music, calendar, GPS, apps (banking, etc)
• The Internet of Things
• Fitbits; smart refrigerators; heartrate-monitoring clothes
 generating massive amounts of data

5. Your own habits
• How many of you Google the following?
• Job candidates
• Potential employers
• Dates
• Children’s friends/counselors/teachers
• Healthcare Providers
• Products
• Hotels
• Restaurants
• How much are you influenced by what you find?

6. Digital Identity
• Property values
• Current & past addresses
• Your alma mater
• Place of employment (past & present)
• Charitable contributions

7. Digital Identity
• Information about your family
• Endorsements
• Obituaries
• Anything you’ve not protected on social
media

8. Digital Identity: What’s yours?
• What would people find if they Googled you?
• Have you Googled yourself?
• If so, did anything surprise you?
• Were you happy with what you found?
• What do your search results say about you?
• What could your worst enemy do with those
results?

9. Digital Life
Reputation Management

10. Reputation Management
•Understanding the reputation
economy
•Understanding how Google works
•Understanding how to establish,
monitor, and maintain your online
reputation

11. “The reputation economy”
• Refers to the way in which the standing
of a product/person/institution/business
is shaped by the contributions of
customers
• Review sites (RateMD, Angie’s List)
• News coverage
• Social media platforms

12. Why
?

13. Google is
(and has
been) King

14. Why Google?
• If you understand how it, you will understand how
to:
• Positively increase your online presence
• Monitor your reputation
• Formulate a basic reputation restoration plan
• Understand when you need to seek
professional help

15. How Google works
• Google is comprised of three distinct parts
• Googlebot
• Indexer
• Query processor
• Each part has its own specific and unique
function.

16. How Google works

17. How Google works: PageRank

18. Hummingbird
• Google replaced its algorithm in August 2013
• Hummingbird is semantic
• Conversational search technology
• Uses Google’s Knowledge Graph
• Google is looking towards future
• 60% of Americans access Internet on mobile
device
• Spoken searches

19. Mobile-Friendly Update
• April 21, 2015
• Mobile-friendliness
• Tappable buttons
• Easy to navigate from a
small screen
• Important information
front & center
• Mobile speed
• Desktop speed

20. Why should you care about
reputation management?

21. Pew Internet & American Life’s
Internet & Health Report 2013
http://www.pewinternet.org/Infographics/2013
/Health-and-Internet-2012.aspx

22. Social Media &
Online Reputation matter

23. Professional Social Networks
for Clinicians & Researchers
• SERMO
• Doximity
• QuantiaMD
• Figure1
• OrthoMind
• Student Doctors Network
• MomMD
• *ORCID ID

24. Googling among employers
is on the rise
• 60 % of employers use social networking sites
to research job candidates
• 41 % of employers say they use social
networking sites to research current employees
• 32 % use search engines to check up on current
employees
• 26 % have found content online that has
caused them to reprimand or fire an employee.

25. No one is caring
about it for you.

26. Safeguarding
your Digital Life:
Privacy & Security

27. Safeguarding your Digital Life:
privacy
•Privacy describes “the way in which we
gather, store, use, share, and delete
data… helps us to understand what is
permissible and inappropriate with
regards to our usage of data. ”

28. Safeguarding your Digital Life :
security
Information security relates to “the
confidentiality, integrity and access to data.
Information security is born from the
technological and procedural controls that
we place around our data to achieve these
goals.”

29. Varying levels
of privacy AND
security

30. Keep in mind…
• Free wifi isn’t free- you’re paying with your
personal information
• Frequently review your privacy settings on all social
media platforms
• Build strong passwords; change them regularly
• Consider a password manager

31. Altmetrics
the movement
the tools
the implications

32. Defining altmetrics
• J. Priem (@jasonpriem), I like the term
#articlelevelmetrics, but it fails to imply *diversity*
of measures. Lately, I'm liking #altmetrics., 4:28 AM
- 29 Sep 10, Tweet
• “…the creation and study of new metrics based on
the Social Web for analyzing, and informing
scholarship.”
• http://altmetrics.org/about/
*Metrics that supplement or complement
traditional metrics

33. From metrics to altmetrics
Measures
Traditional New
Research
Products
Traditional
- Article
- Chapter
- Books
Times Cited
Impact Factor
+ Rank
H-index
Page Views
News stories
Blog mentions
Tweets
New
- Datasets
- Blog post
- More
None News stories
Blog mentions
Tweets

34. Additional scholarly contributions
• Blogs
• Invited Interviews
• Twitter
• Facebook postings
• Reddit
• Datasets
• Patents
• Software
• Copyrights

35. Examples of “altmeasuring”
• Downloads and page views
• Track-backs
• Tweets and retweets
• Links from review services (e.g. Facultyof1000)
• Sharing, social bookmarking
• News media

36. New metrics for traditional products

37. Newer metrics for traditional products
Br J Sports Med doi:10.1136/bjsports-2013-092417

38. New metrics for new products

39. Other influences
NSF “Publications” broadened to
“Products of Research” (Jan 2013)
•“citable and accessible including but
not limited to publications, data sets,
software, patents, and copyrights.“

40. Other influences
NIH Biosketch new format (Jan 2015)
• other non-publication research products, including
audio or video products; patents; data and
research materials; databases; educational aids or
curricula; instruments or equipment; models;
protocols; and software or netware…

41. And yet another influence…

42. Tools

43. Early altmetric tools
•Measure web views and downloads
•Google Analytics
•Bit.ly
•Measure views and reads of articles
•Google Profiles
•ResearchGate

44. Journal-level tools
•Each publisher does it a slightly
different way

45. Newer Tools
• ImpactStory
• Altmetric.com
• PlumX

46. Impactstory
• Create an online profile
• Discover and share how your research is read, cited,
tweeted, bookmarked, and more
• Help colleagues find and read your preprints,
articles, slides and other work by uploading
research products straight your profile
• Jason Priem and Heather Piwowar
• Free for 30 days, then $60 a year.

47. Altmetric.com
• London-based start-up
• Funding from Digital Science (LabGuru, FigShare)

48. Altmetric.com’s widget
(“doughnut”)
• Used by publishers/journals
• Nature Publishing
• Cell Press
• Wiley
• BioMed Central
• BMJ Specialty journals

49. What sources does Altmetric.com
track?
News outlets
• Over 1,300 sites
• Manually curated list
• Text mining
• Global coverage
Social media
and blogs
• Twitter, Facebook,
Google+, Sina Weibo
• Public posts only
• Manually curated list
Reference
managers
• Mendeley, CiteULike
• Reader counts
• Don’t count towards the
Altmetric score
Other sources
• Wikipedia
• YouTube
• Reddit
• F1000
• Pinterest
• Q&A
Post-publication
peer review
• Publons
• PubPeer
Policy documents
• NICE Evidence
• Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change
• Many more…

50. Altmetric Score
Volume Sources Authors
The score for an article
rises as more people
mention it.
Each source category
contributes a different base
amount to the final score.
How often the author of
each mention talks about
scholarly articles influences
the contribution of the
mention.
The Altmetric score provides an indicator of the
attention surrounding a research output.
It represents a weighted approximation of all the
attention picked up for a research output and is
calculated according to three facets:

51. Cochrane Library paper investigated use of probiotics to
treat eczema: There is not enough evidence to recommend
using probiotics for the treatment of eczema.
The paper has a relatively low score of attention but
received mentions across policy documents and
Wikipedia:
• Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health -
Allergy Care Pathways for Children: core
competency for health professionals treating
children with eczema
Discovering policy references

52. Altmetric Bookmarklet
• Free
• Reading a paper and
want to find out its
Altmetric details?
• Install the
bookmarklet in your
browser
• When viewing the
paper, “Altmetric it”

53. Altmetric Bookmarklet

54. Altmetric Bookmarklet

55. Plum Analytics
• PlumX is an institutional “impact dashboard”
that provides information on how research
output is being utilized, interacted with, and
talked about around the world
• Gathers metrics (altmetrics) about research from
more than thirty sources including PLOS, PubMed
and YouTube, and categorizes them

56. However…

57. •Standards aren’t fully defined
• Definitions, calculations, etc.
• NISO effort
•Are altmetrics important for
discovery? For evaluation? Both?
Issues

58. Issues
•Impact vs. attention
• David C.’s Improbable Science… “Why
you should ignore altmetrics and other
bibliometric nightmares”
http://www.dcscience.net/?p=6369
•Popularity
• Popular topics get higher counts,
quickly, but then fade. How does this
reflect quality?

59. Issues
• Too much concern with metrics (“culture
of measurement”; “yelpification”)
• Does social media help promote good
science? Or not? (e.g. anti-vaccine)

60. Altmetrics: where to start?
Altmetrics for Researchers (Duke University Medical Library)

61. What are your products?
•Paper, chapter, book?
•A clinical protocol?
•Software code?
•Conference poster?
•Teaching material?
•White paper?
•Data set

62. Where are your products?
•A repository?
•Website?
•Profile?
Are they well-described (findable)?
Are they accessible by others?
Are they citable?
Are they downloadable?
Are there metrics to tell you?

63. What metrics match those
products?
Product Metric
Clinical protocol Adoption
Software code Downloads or forks
Conference poster Views
Teaching materials Adoption/adaptation
White paper Views, Tweets

64. What systems or tools can
provide those metrics?
•Journal’s website
•Views, downloads, comparisons
•Repository
•Views, downloads
•Altmetric.com; Impactstory

65. How will you explain these
metrics?
•Contextualize
• “This paper was in the top 10% of all papers
downloaded in 2015.”
•Describe “broader impact”
• “This work was picked up by over 100
news sources.”

66. Thank You!
Kimberley R. Barker
kimberley@virginia.edu