Furnishing our corners of the internet

16 July 2019 by Leave a comment

Photo by Brande Jackson | www.instagram.com/brandejackson

Photo by Brande Jackson | http://www.instagram.com/brandejackson

Things in my life have been a little heavy and stressful lately so I thought it would be good for my heart and soul to write a post focused on the fun and ridiculous elements of the academic internets and beyond.

Working on Research Whisperer through the years, I’ve been more aware of the ways in which the higher education research sector is broken and the bad behaviours and structures that propagate inequity and career crises. It can feel bleak.

I can’t fix these things alone, and it’s easy to get quite down about any number of these issues and their seemingly unchanging (or very-slow-to-change) nature.

For me, retaining perspective on what is meaningful and pleasurable in life can disperse anxieties and enable me to concentrate on things that make me happy and where I feel I can do effective work that’s valued. This post features a bunch of sites and comics that I regularly read. A good way for me to recalibrate my world-view is through engaging with satire and the absurd, by participating in both the consumption and production of such cultural texts.  Read more of this post

Filed under Miscellany, Research culture Tagged with , ,

Things it has taken me 8 years to learn

19 June 2019 by Leave a comment

Photo by Daniel Cheung | unsplash.com

Our good buddy The Thesis Whisperer wrote a fab post on ‘how to run a blog for 8 years and not go insane‘ in 2018. It is a cracker of a post and gives excellent insight into how TW has managed to maintain such quality and longevity!

At the time it was published, I read it with great interest, hoping that I’d be able to implement some of the strategies and not be writing things at 11pm the night before our weekly publication slot…

Alas, dear readers, Tseen did not implement any strategies.

Is she sitting on her sofa right now writing this post at 10:36pm? Indeed, she is.

The Research Whisperer celebrated its 8th birthday recently, and we posted this on our Facebook page:

Today, we have published 383 posts, have almost 42,000 followers on Twitter, over 6400 subscribers to the blog, and over 9200 followers on our Facebook page.

It was heartening to think about the community that surrounds RW these days, and the wonderful allies and friends we’ve made. For me, it has been a career transformative time. Just before we hatched RW, I was at a low, low career point. Working with Jonathan has been a delight, and I would never have thought that we’d have travelled this far down the road with our blog, being led by doing what we thought was fun. Read more of this post

Filed under Miscellany, Networking, Research communication Tagged with , , ,

Goodbye 2018 / Hello 2019

11 December 2018 by 8 Comments

Where are we going? [Credit: Noly, on Pixabay]

Where are we going? [Credit: Noly, on Pixabay]

2018 has ended with a rush for both of us. This is always a busy time of the year, but it seems extra hectic this year.

For Jonathan, he’s driving towards a 19 Dec deadline for a big bid application. For Tseen, she’s just finished convening 3 full days of researcher development for ECRs and MCRs and is now contemplating the work back-log.

Each year, we try to take a bit of time to think about what has happened and what might happen in the next year. We think it’s important to know where we’ve travelled, and where we are going – it helps us to keep track of where we are right now.

So, that’s what we are doing in this post. Looking back at where we’ve been over the last year, thinking about where we might wander next year, then reflecting on where we are right now.

Read more of this post

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Ethics in an age of data breaches

6 November 2018 by 2 Comments

This post began as a comment on a blog post, The Ethics of Research on Leaked Data: Ashley Madison, by Neurosceptic on their Discover Magazine’s blog, 14 July 2018.

I’ve expanded it here to provide context and background.

Photo by Oumaima Ben Chebtit | unsplash.com

Photo by Oumaima Ben Chebtit | unsplash.com

In August 2015, a hacking group released data from AshleyMadison.com, a website designed to attract funds from men seeking an extramarital affair.

Before the year was out, academics were drawing on the Ashley Madison breach data.

I’ve found five journal articles or scholarly papers that draw on the data.

  • Grieser, William, Rachel Li, and Andrei Simonov. ‘Integrity, Creativity, and Corporate Culture’. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 19 April 2017. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2741049.

Grieser, Li and Simonov (all based in the USA) used email domain names to compare the proportion of staff in the Ashley Madison breach data with occurrences of corporate fraud.

  • Griffin, John M., Samuel Kruger, and Gonzalo Maturana. ‘Do Personal Ethics Influence Corporate Ethics?’ SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 26 July 2017. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2745062.

Griffin, Kruger and Maturana (all based in the USA) identified Chief Executive Officers and Chief Financial Officers in the Ashley Madison breach data and compared that data with corporate infraction data.

  • Chohaney, Michael L., and Kimberly A. Panozzo. ‘Infidelity and the Internet: The Geography of Ashley Madison Usership in the United States’. Geographical Review 108, no. 1 (1 January 2018): 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/gere.12225.

Chohaney and Panozzo (based in the USA) grouped Ashley Madison breach data by US Metropolitan Statistical Area (roughly analogous to large cities) and related this to patterns of affluence and other aspects of those areas. Read more of this post

Filed under Miscellany, Research culture, research methods Tagged with , , , , , ,

What’s worrying us about 2018

19 December 2017 by 10 Comments

Photo by Markus Spiske | unsplash.com

Photo by Markus Spiske | unsplash.com

Here at the Research Whisperer, we believe in embracing the full gamut of higher education experiences – the wonderful, heinous, sad, and celebratory aspects, and the many grey areas and contradictory combinations. We’re here in the academic sector for a reason, and there’s much we love about our universities and colleagues. This doesn’t mean that we don’t get scared and anxious on occasion, about small as well as big things.

So, for this end-of-year post, we’re sharing what worries us most about 2018. You should feel free to share your worries in the comments. Studies have shown (!) that sharing your anxieties can help reduce them!  Read more of this post

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This wasn’t always me

28 November 2017 by 4 Comments

Photo by Tseen Khoo

Photo by Tseen Khoo

There’s a post I tend to share when major grant round results are announced.

It’s ‘Picking up the pieces‘. In it, I emphasise that “I can say that I truly understand how you feel. I threw my hat in the major grants and fellowship rings many times; very few times was I successful.”

I always thought those sentences failed to convey the howling disappointment, derailment of career, and emptying out of all confidence that these results can bring.

It is hard, after all, to capture the sound of your professional self decomposing in half a second after realising you’re not a named awardee.

This post, below, was originally published on my personal blog at the end of 2010, seven years ago. It felt like my lowest point, career-wise. I was not in a good place.

I wanted to re-publish it to the Research Whisperer audience as a collegial artefact, to share my thinking about academic identity and scholarly life at a very raw time. Read more of this post

Filed under funding, Miscellany Tagged with , , ,

Re-skilling

8 August 2017 by 3 Comments

Rusty horse (Photo by Marcus Schwan) | flickr.com

Rusty horse (Photo by Marcus Schwan) | flickr.com

I was reminded recently of how much you need to keep exercising some skills as a scholar.

What you learn in academia isn’t like ‘riding a bike’ and there are skills that can be forgotten. In my case, I should probably confess that I don’t even know how to ride a bike so we’re talking about being way behind the 8-ball here.

The skills I’m talking about are those involved in editing a special issue journal.

The setting was as amenable as it could be for a good outcome. I was co-editing the issue with one of my best academic buddies. We had worked together on different projects before, including co-authoring a piece of writing, and we knew we could work together.

The journal was one I was very familiar with and had published with a couple of times before. It was a publication friendly to our particular focus and range of topics.

The general editor of the journal was also a good academic friend so, really, it was as collegial an environment as it could be.

I have previously edited six special issue journals, across a range of publications and with different co-editors or solo. Even so, I hadn’t edited a special issue for a few years and I felt rusty. Read more of this post

Filed under Building your track-record, Miscellany Tagged with , , , , ,

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