I attended the International Data and Information Management Conference in Loughborough (England) this week along with some of my colleagues from Edinburgh Napier University. The conference was a great opportunity to meet with other information science researchers and to present my own research.

It was also a fantastic opportunity for winning! There were four potential prizes for the conference: Best paper, best poster, best 5-minute madness presentation, and a dinner quiz. And Team Napier won them all! In fact, three of the four were won by me! (I didn’t submit for the fourth, so I’m not bitter about not winning that one.)

In order of prize announcement, here’s how the awards went down:

Dinner Quiz
I was on a team with my officemate, John Mowbray. Our team (Winners or Losers, Delete As Appropriate) won by half a point. Another officemate (Iris Buunk) and my PhD supervisor (Hazel Hall) were on the second-place team.

Best 5-minute madness presentation (open to PhD students)
I took this prize (which came with a £25 Amazon gift certificate) for my presentation on my PhD research. It was a quick overview of my research themes, methods, and progress to date. The winner was selected by the conference programme committee at the conference, and I was a bit surprised to have won.

Best poster (open to all)
Iris Buunk took this well-deserved prize for her poster “Easier, better, faster”. The winner was selected by a delegate vote at the conference. The poster was very well designed with clear, easy to understand text. It was clearly the winner! (And as I didn’t have a poster, I am not at all bitter about not winning!)

Best paper (open to all)
Much to my surprise (and excitement), the best paper award went to me (and to the paper co-authors Peter Cruickshank, Hazel Hall, and Alistair Lawson). The paper was titled “Personal online reputation: the development of an approach to investigate how personal reputation is evaluated and managed in online environments“.

The winner for this category was decided by anonymous peer review of all papers refereed before the conference. That means that the award was based on the text and the text alone. Not me as a person; not my presentation of the work. And that is such a great boost for my confidence!

ABSTRACT:
The main theme of the paper is the development of a framework to investigate how online information is used in the creation, building, and evaluation of personal reputations. (Here the term “personal reputation” refers to the reputation of private individuals rather than corporate identity and brand.) An overview of prior research into the evaluation of reputation from online sources sets the context for the discussion of possible methods for exploring the role of online information in reputation building. The development of a research approach to be implemented in practice is then presented.

Download and read the full paper here.

Cite: Ryan, F., Cruickshank, P., Hall, H., & Lawson, A. (2016). Personal online reputation: the development of an approach to investigate how personal reputation is evaluated and managed in online environments. In IDIMC 2016: Exploring our digital shadow – from data to intelligence, (98-108)

As I said, it was a winning conference. And all that winning has done wonders for my self-confidence and self-esteem. If I can keep this energy up, I’ll be back on track with my PhD submission before I know it!

Also: It really must be said that these great honours would not have happened without the guidance (and co-authorship) of my supervisors. So to them, I extend my absolute gratitude!

[Photo credits to Hazel Hall]

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