I’ve spent the last two days at the 5th annual Discover Academic Research, Training, and Support (DARTS) conference in Devon, where I was an invited speaker. The conference’s focus was on engendering a (digital) research culture, which fit very nicely with my own research.
My talk, titled Personal online reputations: managing what you can’t control, presented an overview of my doctoral research including my literature review and theoretical framework, how I determined my methods of investigation, and some early findings from my Generation X dataset. There was also a short interactive element to encourage conference delegates to think about their own social media use and online information behaviours – as well as their online footprints.
It was a great opportunity for me to talk about my research to an audience of practitioners, whilst also having the chance to talk about the practical, hands-on realities of managing personal reputations online – when in reality, we don’t have that much control over them! It was a bit fun to combine my current “academic self” life along with my “past self” life of working in communications, marketing, and brand management – talk about a mash-up! It did, of course, make me realise even more that I don’t think I could enjoy life without the combination of skills sets. (And of course, from a public engagement viewpoint, this is just what I should be doing!)
Other conference speakers were:
Martin Eve (University of London): “Open Access: The State of Play, or why it should be easy but why it isn’t”
Sian Bayne (University of Edinburgh): “Web essays and digital artefacts: embedding digital research in online teaching”
Annie Maddison Warren (Cranfield University): “Improving the research student experience: a tale of change within change”
Katie Evans (University of Bath): “Library research analytics services: things to make and do with bibliometrics”
Nazlin Bhimani (University College London): “A framework for an online InfoLit course for PhD students”
Elizabeth Gadd (Loughborough University): “Taking the Librarian out of the Library: lessons learned along the way”
As an invited speaker, I was able to attend the entire conference without paying a delegate fee. It was an opportunity that I happily accepted, especially as so many of the topics were relevant to the literature review and theoretical framework for my own research.
The hashtag for the event was #DARTS5. You can review the tweets here.
And, of course, you can view my presentation below!
And if you want the “private Frances” take on the irony of a digitally-focused event being held at a medieval manor house and estate, you can read this post on my personal blog, JustFrances.com.
[Special thanks and acknowledgement to my Director of Studies, Hazel Hall, for recommending me to the conference committee and for blogging about my talk ahead of time!]