HELPING PEOPLE'S

Kandy Woodfield is the Learning and Enterprise Director at NatCen Social Research, and the co-founder of the NSMNSS network. You can reach Kandy on Twitter @jess1ecat. Yesterday the NSMNSS network published its first ebook, a collection of over fifty blogs penned by researchers from around the world who are using social media in their social research. To the best of our knowledge this is the first book of blogs in the social sciences.   It draws on the insights of experienced and well-known commentators on social media research through to the thoughts of researchers new to the field. Why did we choose to publish a book of blogs rather than a textbook or peer-reviewed article?   In my view there is space in the academic publishing world for peer reviewed works and self-published books. We chose to publish a book of blogs rather than a traditional academic tome because we wanted to create something quickly which reflected the concerns and voices of our members. Creating a di...

Kandy Woodfield is the Learning and Enterprise Director at NatCen Social Research, and the co-founder of the NSMNSS network. You can reach Kandy on Twitter @jess1ecat. It started with a tweet, a blog post and a nervous laugh. Three months later I found  myself looking at a book of blogs. How did that happen?! Being involved in the NSMNSS network since its beginning has been an ongoing delight for me. It's full of researchers who aren't afraid to push the boundaries, question established thinking and break down a few silos. When I began my social research career, mobile phones were suitcase-sized and collecting your data meant lugging a tape recorder and tapes around with you. That world is gone, the smartphone most of us carry in our pockets now replaces most of the researcher's kitbag, and one single device is our street atlas, translator, digital recorder, video camera and so much more. Our research world today is a different place from 20 years ago, social media are comm...

Sebastian Stevens is an Associate Lecturer and Research Assistant at Plymouth University. He teaches research methods to social science students specialising in quantitative methods. He is on twitter @sebstevens99 and has a blog site at www.everydaysocialresearch.com.  A key benefit that social media can bring to social science research is through impact and engagement. Demonstrating how a research project will achieve impact and engage the public is a key requirement of most social science research bids today, with many funders looking for more than the traditional conference and journal article as being sufficient. Funders today want to see not only how your research will contribute to the current body of knowledge, but also how your research could impact other areas of academia as well as providing public engagement and economic and societal wide benefits. To promote your research to the widest possible audience, it is often necessary to use a number of Social Medi...

Mark Carrigan is a sociologist and academic technologist and first wrote this blog post for his blog http://markcarrigan.net/ . Contact Mark on Twitter @mark_carrigan Earlier this week, NatCen Social Research hosted a meeting between myself, Chris Gilson ( USApp , @ ChrisHJGilson ), Cristina Costa and Mark Murphy ( Social Theory Applied , @christinacost & @ socialtrampos ), Donna Peach ( PhD Forum ,Donna_Peach) and Kelsey Beninger ( NSMNSS , @KBeninger) to discuss possible collaborations between social science bloggers in the UK and share experiences about developing and sustaining social science blogs over time. We didn’t do as much of the latter as I expected, though I personally found it valuable simply to voice a few concerns I’d had in mind about the direction of academic blogging that I’d heretofore been keeping to myself for a variety of reasons. The manner in which the audience for Sociological Imagination seems to have stopped growing over the las...

It's been a whirlwind summer, full of sport, sunshine, a bit of rain (at least here in the UK) and I hope you've had some memorable holidays... In amongst all that something pretty special has been happening at the #bookofblogs HQ. Over the last nine weeks researchers, practitioners, academics and bloggers have been penning their thoughts on the use of social media for research and sharing them with us. Back in June when I wrote sometimes you have to 'just do it'  and lobbed the idea of a crowd-sourced book of blogs into the Twittersphere, it wasn't without a fair bit of trepidation. Would anyone respond? What would people write about? Would we reach beyond existing bloggers and network members. You know what, people (yes that's you!) really did respond . We've now got 40 uploaded blogs, just ten short of our target and whilst we've lost a few authors along the way (we'll miss you), we've gained others. And in keeping with our goal 'you write...

The World Cup is almost over and the summer holidays are imminent so we thought it would be helpful to update you all on progress with the Book of Blogs. We now have eleven blogs uploaded to the book, 40 people who’ve committed to writing a blog and lots of wider interest. So to those of you who’ve already written and posted your blogs to the Press Books site thank you. For the rest of you we thought it would be helpful to remind you that the instructions for uploading to the Press Books site can be found   here  and general guidance on the book  here . We do need you to sign up formally so if you haven’t already please go to this Google Docs spreadsheet and sign up:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-56cjkafF9efK43P-udLvH5BdFZf_7z9RyACR2Tc-a4/edit?usp=sharing . We’ll remove your email address immediately. Our goal is to have 60% of the content uploaded by the end of this month so please do let us know if you’ve written your blog and are ready to upload it now...

We've been thinking a lot at #NSMNSS about what types of activities the network should support next. One idea we've been ruminating on for a while is creating a volume of crowdsourced blogs on the impact social media are having on social science research methods . (We are also supporting the development of a new Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods which many network members will be contributing to but this is on a longer time-span and will be published in a more traditional way.) We got the idea for this from David De Souza (@dds180) and his hugely successful HR book of blogs Humane, Resourced which topped the best seller nonfiction business charts last year. We want to try and replicate this success and believe it will be a great showcase for network members to share their experiences and views about social media research with a wider audience. The broad idea is to reach 100+ pages of content collected from a  multitude of contributors from across the social scie...