With the last few tasks of this series we’re getting into territory that I’m almost entirely unfamiliar with, and I’m excited for the challenge.
Thing 19: Altmetrics
As a student rather than fully-educated researcher and in a fairly obscure and past-bound area at that I had not come across Altmetrics, but it seems like a really fascinating idea. Reading up in it, I appreciate how easy it is to find out how a score is counted and that one is reminded that there is to distinction between positive and negative attention. The latter was one of the immediate shortcomings that popped into my head. Something I hadn’t thought about was the different sized of fields, as they mention that a high score for one journal paper might be just a low one for another. Which makes it not very surprising that when I tried a few articles none came up with any shares – it seems not too many people are interested in Fossil Folklore in the Liber Monstrorum, Beowulf, and Medieval Scholarship. I did note though that on the Taylor & Francis Online website I was accessing it through, Altmetrics for individual articles can be found in a Metrics tab together with citations etc., so I wouldn’t even have needed the bookmarklet.
So instead I went through the back door, found a website with medieval news and traced one of their bigger news stories back to a paper, about Early Medieval Muslim Graves in France. There’s certain to be more than a little connection to the current political state, but even so the article accrues a very decent score and makes it into the top 5% of all research output. Looking into the details of it, I have to admit that for example the twitter demographics are shiny, but the designation “scientist” for one group might make things complicated when talking about a field even deeper in the Humanities than Archaeology. I don’t know if an alternative like “scholar” would be more appropriate, but the lack of designated “scientists” and as such experts in a field might skew a result (not that a slightly differing total makes much of a difference,m but it is a drawback). I also couldn’t find much information of who counts as a scientist on the Altmetrics website. Scrolling through twitter mentions, it would also be interesting to know if and how Altmetrics distinguishes between humans and bots in their score.
All in all, it seems like an interesting tool to see the spread of information, but mainly for topics that are either already relatively mainstream or relevant to current affairs; those that generally only attract scholarly attention tend to stay invisible to the public. Not that articles such as the highest ranking ones on Altmetrics are accessible beyond an abstract without payment, but naturally emotional manipulation through facebook will be more relevant and shareable than Beowulf.
Fun Find: While looking for an interesting news story I came across this discovery of a medieval city in the Cambodian jungle, which could have been the capital of a large, until now unknown empire.
Thing 20: Professional Social Networks
LinkedIn and academia.edu were briefly mentioned in one of the examples of tracing one’s digital footprint months ago, but that was most of my contact with them. Knowing that I’m not aiming for a full-time academia/research career, I knew I’d only ever be using a platform like academia.edu or ResearchGate for reading and potentially networking rather than putting research out, and reading through the articles provided those are potentially not their strong points. So LinkedIn it is, although exploring the website and trying to see example pages to find out whether people in my field actually use the service enough for it to be of use to me turned out to be difficult without already opening an account.
I do think it will be a good network for me to join, if only as an exercise in how to build and maintain a personal brand, but that is a somewhat bigger (or just more long-term) project than 23 Things, and since it’s so late in the list (and I took a while to work my way through it) I’ll work on a personal reflection date in the future to see whether it has proven to be a useful tool, and blog about it if possible.
oddforaliving 