The Personal Research Portal

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Many people ask "why do you blog" and, even if they are consummate blog readers, the reasons to maintain an academic blog never seem to be that clear to spend those amounts of time (?) with the geeky tool.

Because... there are rational reasons behind, aren't they?

Goal of the session: reflect on the possibilities of the Internet to help dooing and diffusing one's research. Focus on practice or in theory/philosophy/reflection depending on participants' interest.

  • This is great. I am also interested in looking at the potential drawbacks of research blogging, if there is any. -- Cindy



Just to warm engines, some of the old copy-and-paste thing:

Intro

One of the main problems that junior researchers face is invisibility. This invisibility causes, at least, two major consequences:

  • Minimum awareness and recognition of their findings, fields of work, interests and even existence - hence, difficulty to build one's scientific network
  • Difficult access to mainstream publishing circuits, in part due to the former point

Enhanced digital exposure should give further information on the following aspects:

  • who am I
  • what do I do / what does interest me
  • what have I done / what do I know
  • where am I

Goals of the PRP

  • Host a repository for personal production, with public aim, with past and present (work in progress) information and documentation, being everything interlinked
  • Gather digital resources, news, general information and materials on the same platform, accessible from each and every computer
  • Self-archive and self-publish research results, as far as the ongoing research, including reflections, doubts, findings – avoiding waits and delays
  • Let know what one knows and that one knows

Theoretical Issues

Digital Identity
  • The live “CV”
  • Internet positioning
  • Content as identity wrapper
  • Content as identity shaper: Synthesis - Abstraction
Read / be informed
  • Subscription to more relevant sources
  • Personal board about current news
Knowledge Management, Open Access, Open Science
  • e-Portfolio
  • Self-Archiving
  • Self-Publishing
  • Open Licensing
  • Readings
  • Notes, Reflections
  • Learning Materials
  • Found Objects
Network Building
  • Presence in relevant places
  • “place in the world”
  • Participation in projects
  • Invitation to evaluate articles and communications
  • Invitation to impart conferences and seminars

Shape/Prototype of a PRP

  • A static web site with personal and professional information, drawing the researcher profile
  • A blog, where to note news, reflections and, actually, most flow knowledge arising from readings, research results and hypotheses
  • A blogroll, understood as both a live reader for the researcher and a live bibliography of bookmarks for the community
  • A wiki, where stock knowledge is stored but allowing it to evolve along time and with the collaboration of third parties
  • A bibliographic manager, with online access to all or most records
  • A personal repository to both self-archive already published papers and self-publish preprints, working papers, presentations, syllabuses, etc.
  • Other devices the like of social bookmarking tools, file stores (image, sound, video), etc.
  • RSS feeds for each and every dynamic page

Resources

Peña-López, I. (2006). The Personal Research Portal. Presentation given in Castelldefels, November 2nd, 2006 in the research seminar organized by the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute PDF, 12.8Mb

Bibliography

Bibliography for an article (forthcoming) on a closely related issue

Reconstruction 6.4 (2006) Theories/Practices of Blogging