public engagement – Frances Ryan, PhD

Artefacts from a rewarding PhD experience

Frances Ryan/ 22 August 20192 September 2019

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I cleared out my PhD office ahead of my holidays to The Homeland. And now that I am back in my Heartland of Scotland, I have finally cleared through (most of) the bags and boxes of stuff I brought home.

Whilst I recycled or passed on quite a bit of my PhD office’s contents, I brought home the things I would need in my academic career (books, notebooks, and office supplies*). I also brought home things that won’t move with me to my next academic office, but things that serve as invaluable artefacts from my rewarding PhD experience (certificates, awards, and name badges).

These artefacts were collected over my time as a PhD student from various conferences, seminars, training events, and speaking engagements. For example, there are name badges from:

My first SICSA PhD conference, where my poster was shortlisted for an award (St Andrews, Scotland)
My first public presentation at the Fringe Festival (Edinburgh, Scotland)
My first (and only!) conference that I attended wearing a cast (Zadar, Croatia)
My first ASIST conference, which I travelled to with a grant from the John Campbell Trust (Copenhagen, Denmark)
My last conference as a PhD student, where I presented my last paper written as a PhD student (Ljubljana, Slovenia)

There are also awards that I won for my academic work as well as my various roles on committees and activities that I undertook during my studies. For example:

Best Paper and Best 5-Minute Madness presentation at the International Data and Information Management Conference (Loughborough, England)
First Place for 3rd-year Presentation at the School of Computing PhD Conference (Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland)
Principal’s Excellence Award for Outstanding Contribution to University Life by a Research Student (Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland)

There were also other awards for which I don’t have certificates. For example, I was awarded a membership to ASIST as well as a travel grant from the John Campbell Trust. I was also awarded a handful of grants to carry out research projects and events. These things didn’t provide me with physical artefacts, but they certainly added to my overall PhD experience.

I don’t know if my collection is on par with what other PhD students would acquire over the course of their studies, but for my personal situation, I feel that I have amassed a decent little haul. Each little piece of the collection tells a big part of my PhD story, and each carries with it a treasured memory from my student life.

It would not have been possible to have such a collection without support from Edinburgh Napier University’s School of Computing and Centre for Social Informatics. My top-notch PhD supervisors, Professor Hazel Hall, Alistair Lawson, and Peter Cruickshank, were also instrumental in my ability to build this collection.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do my PhD at an institution that recognised the importance of supporting students in not only their studies but in their wider development as budding academics. These experiences have helped me to become a more capable and confident researcher and have provided me with the skills I need to succeed in my academic life.

Of course, now I have to figure out what to do with all of these wonderful artefacts!

* For the record: I only brought home the office supplies that I purchased myself, and not those that were from the school’s supplies. I am quite picky about my office supplies, and would rather spend my own money on my preferred stationery supplies and tools. Yes, I am a stationery geek!

Accepted for conference: “Building identity in online environments: an Information Science perspective” at #ASIST2017

Frances Ryan/ 10 October 201723 October 2017

I have been accepted to present a poster at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology. This year’s event will be held in Washington, DC. It will be my second time attending the conference, and my first time presenting at it.

The poster is based on the findings from one of my four research questions, “How do individuals use information to build identities for themselves online?” It is co-authored with my PhD supervisors, Peter Cruickshank, Professor Hazel Hall, and Alistair Lawson.

Building identity in online environments: an Information Science perspective

Abstract: The research presented in this poster is concerned with the ways in which people use information to build identities for themselves online with reference to the themes of personal reputation management. To date these two themes have been under-explored together in the research literature, both in general, and from an Information Science perspective. The poster content shares findings related to three areas of identity building: (1) the creation and use of online personas and identities; (2) the use of anonymity and pseudonyms through information sharing – or concealment – practices; and (3) the ways in which the blurring or merging together of participants’ private and professional selves. This study used participant diaries and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 45 UK-based participants. The main finding presented here is that individuals present elements of their online persona or personality using online information, but that they do not do so with the intention of building identity. The findings explored in this presentation are contextualised with reference to identity building in the more formal setting of academic reputation management, i.e. through the use of citations.

Download the full abstract on Edinburgh Napier University’s repository here.

I will share a digital version of the poster and handouts before the conference poster session. I will also be tweeting during the whole of the event, so be sure to follow me on Twitter (@FrancesRyanPhD).

If you’re interested in learning more about this poster, or my PhD as a whole, please contact me!

My new “academic” Twitter: @FrancesRyanPhD

Frances Ryan/ 10 September 2017

I have recently started a new Twitter account that is dedicated to my professional or “academic” self (@FrancesRyanPhD). It wasn’t something I was desperate to do, and it isn’t something I’m completely happy about. However, it is something that I felt I should do.

The decision to start a new account was not taken lightly. Because I started my @CleverFrances account as a personal space, my followers reflect my personal interest. But as I began tweeting more and more about my PhD, I started to gain more academic followers—especially when I attended conferences where I was tweeting quite a bit with the conference hashtag.

However, I noticed that my increased academic following was making me feel unsure about what or how to post. I feared that people were following me based on a series of research-related posts at a conference and that they might feel cheated or conned when I started tweeting about whisky and running the following week. Because, if I’m honest, I tweet more personal stuff than research stuff.

The uncertainty soon led me to lose a bit of joy when I was tweeting. I felt obligated to my academic followers to be more academic. But I also felt that I needed to be true to myself and the original intent of my Twitter account, which meant I had to continue tweeting rubbish.

And so, I’ve decided that I have to maintain two accounts: One, @CleverFrances, to represent the full-on Frances and one, @FrancesRyanPhD, to represent the academic Frances.

I will continue to tweet at least some academic stuff from my personal account because my PhD is part of the whole me. However, I will stick to academic tweets on my academic account. I may even find that I am tweeting more academic stuff on that account than I have in the past as I won’t worry about inundating my non-academic followers with academic stuff.

And so:

If you are on Twitter and want to follow my academic journey there, please do find me @FrancesRyanPhD.

If you want to follow the full-on crazy version of my life (which includes academics), you can find me @CleverFrances.

(And please feel free to follow both if you wish. I’ve nothing to hide. Or at least I wouldn’t dare tweet about something I wanted to hide!)

Connecting people, connecting ideas: Keeping the conversations going beyond #CPCINapier

Frances Ryan/ 26 June 201723 October 2017

Last week I ran a one-day research symposium at Edinburgh Napier University, along with Professor Hazel Hall. The symposium, “Connecting people, connecting ideas” (CPCI), focused on research priorities in Information Science as related to everyday life information seeking and information behaviours in online environments. This event was held at our Craiglockhart campus and was geared towards UK academics, with an emphasis on ECR and 3rd-year PhD student participation.

The symposium was an opportunity for participants to consider how to prioritise themes, and develop ideas for, their future research projects. This was done in three stages as explained below.

The first stage took place prior to the symposium. Here, delegates were provided with an opportunity to share key themes that they felt should be priorities within the field using Well Sorted. Before the symposium, those themes were categorised to create working groups for the day of the event.

The second stage was implemented during the morning session where delegates broke into groups related to the categories determined by the Well Sorted exercise. During the morning session, groups determined the key themes that should be priorities from the larger categories. The morning session also helped us to further concentrate our work, leaving us with just three working groups in the afternoon session.

The final of the three stages took place in the afternoon session. At this point, the delegates discussed the key themes they had previously identified to further develop the ideas with an aim towards future research. Groups worked through potential next-steps that would be needed to bring the ideas to reality.

It is hoped that the knowledge and inspiration gained from the day’s outcomes will be used in a range of future activities including grant proposals, future publications or conference papers, and calls for participation in conferences and seminars. Participants will also be able to continue the relationships they establish with other researchers at the event, which could potentially lead to future research collaborations.

Over the next few days, I will work to format the day’s artefacts into a format that will allow all of the CPCI delegates to access them and interact with them—and interact with other delegates. Whilst I am not able to facilitate these conversations, nor am I able to “force” others to continue the conversations, I am hopeful that these post-symposium tasks will help to encourage others to keep moving forward with the ideas generated during the day.

I know that others are working to share their learnings from the day’s event on other social media channels, so I will share another update sometime in July with links to those posts. In the meantime, you can review the day’s Twitter hashtag (#CPCINapier) to see what people had to say on the day.

Online identity at #NapRes17

Frances Ryan/ 22 June 201723 June 2017

Yesterday was the Edinburgh Napier University’s Research Conference. Based at our Craiglockhart campus, the conference was designed to bring together research active staff and research degree students from across the university. (Read up about the event on the Twitter hashtag #NapRes17.)

My contribution to the conference was an academic poster (full-size version). The poster was part of my larger doctoral study that investigates how online information is used in the management and evaluation of personal reputations. This work follows the tradition of research into everyday life information seeking (ELIS). My doctoral investigation considers four research questions (below). This poster addressed the first of these questions “How do individuals use information to build identities for themselves online?”.

Research Questions:

RQ1: How do individuals use information to build identities for themselves online?

RQ2: How do individuals use online information to build and manage their reputations?

RQ3: How do individuals evaluate the identities and reputations of others based on the information available to them online?

RQ4: To what extent do individuals actively practise identity and reputation building and evaluation online?

The findings consider three areas of identity building. The first is related to the creation and use of online personas and identities. This includes an examination of three broad information behaviours that participants use for the portrayal of online identities. The second area investigates the use of anonymity and pseudonyms through information sharing – or concealment – practices, as well as some of the motivations behind these behaviours. The third and final area presents the ways in which the blurring or merging together of participants’ private and professional selves, as well as their online and offline environments, are used for building identity online.

I provided handouts to the people who engaged with me during the poster session. I was also very pleased that even more people approached me after the session to speak about my research. (They were provided with a copy of the handout, too.)

Whilst my poster was only showcasing a small snapshot of a small part of my thesis, the conversations the poster prompted were wide-reaching. I spoke with other conference-goers about my larger doctoral investigation, online reputation and management practices in general terms, and the idea of altmetrics—which I’ve given two talks about in recent weeks. My poster also served as a conversation starter about my post-PhD plans (still in flux), potential public engagement activities, and even possible grant opportunities.

Personally, I feel that these wider conversations are one of the best reasons to present an academic poster. Yes, it’s about the actual research presented in the visual artefact. But it is also about the conversations and connections that visual artefact creates in a wider sense. And for me, this one little poster made the conference a huge success—because I connected with others.

The rest of the conference was very interesting, too. It included a selection of staff and student presentations, breakout working groups, networking, and a research showcase at the end of the day. Sadly, I didn’t win any amazing prizes (as I did last year) but I did win a bit of confidence about my PhD research and my academic future.

I’ll end there as I have just finished delivering a research symposium and I’m a bit tired after the excitement of the day. But I’ll share a post about that shortly… followed by tales from next week’s conference in Aberdeen.

But if you would like to ask any questions about my poster or my larger doctoral investigation, please feel free to comment below or contact me privately.

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Building identity in online environments: an Information Science perspective

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