How to host a successful chat on Twitter

4 June 2019 by 7 Comments

Helen KaraDr Helen Kara has been an independent researcher since 1999 and writes and teaches on research methods.

She is the author of Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide (Policy Press, 2015). She is not, and never has been, an academic, though she has learned to speak the language.

In 2015, Helen was the first fully independent researcher to be conferred as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the UK’s National Centre for Research Methods. Her latest book is Research Ethics in the Real World: Euro-Western and Indigenous Perspectives (Policy Press, 2018).

Helen’s website is helenkara.com and she tweets at @DrHelenKara. You can support her work on Patreon. Her ORCID is 0000-0001-7348-0963.

Image by Marc Wathieu | flickr.com

Image by Marc Wathieu | flickr.com

I have hosted and co-hosted a number of chats on Twitter under existing hashtags, and last month I set up my own Twitter chat on creative research methods.

In case you’re new to all this, a hashtag is a way of keeping track of topics and content on Twitter. For example, if you want to know what people are saying about marmalade, you can search Twitter for #marmalade (pro tip: then click ‘latest’ for most recent content) and you’ll find that marmalade is not only a foodstuff but a popular name for pets. You can use hashtags, follow hashtags and invent hashtags. They’re a great tool for reducing bazillions of apparently random tweets to a string of tweets that you actually want to read.

I write about creative research methods. It’s a topic that holds great interest for me and I know for a number of others too. So I decided to set up a monthly chat on Twitter. I played around with a few ideas for hashtags. The obvious #creativeresearchmethods and #creativeresearchmethodschat were too long and cumbersome. In the end I settled for #crmethods (for discussion in between the monthly chats) and #crmethodschat (for the chats themselves). To my delight, neither of those hashtags were in use on Twitter. It’s always worth checking that before you make a final decision. I remember going to a conference where the event’s hashtag was also being used by a European music festival with some quite, er, liberated practices, which meant the conference Twitterfeed was entertaining in rather more ways than the organisers had intended! Read more of this post

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

The ethics of conference speakers

30 October 2018 by 4 Comments

Helen KaraDr Helen Kara has been an independent researcher since 1999 and writes and teaches on research methods.

She is the author of Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide (Policy Press, 2015). She is not, and never has been, an academic, though she has learned to speak the language.

In 2015, Helen was the first fully independent researcher to be conferred as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the UK’s National Centre for Research Methods. Her latest book is Research Ethics in the Real World: Euro-Western and Indigenous Perspectives (Policy Press, 2018).

Helen’s webiste is helenkara.com and she tweets at @DrHelenKara. Her ORCID is 0000-0001-7348-0963. 

Photo by Luke Michael | unsplash.com

Photo by Luke Michael | unsplash.com

In March 2018 Stanford University in California held a two-day conference in applied history. There were 30 speakers. Every single one was male and white.

Like most academic fields, applied history is dominated by white men. However, there are also many women and people of colour who work and study within the discipline. No doubt there are also queer historians and historians with disabilities. To be fair to Stanford, three female historians had been invited to take part in the conference, but each of them declined due to previous commitments. To be fair to women, I’m sure that more than 10% of historians are female. Stanford inadvertently made history itself by ending up with the biggest manel ever. (For those who haven’t heard the term before, a manel is a panel comprised entirely of men.)

Of course the media, as usual, reported this event as though gender is binary. While there is some point in prioritising women, who still face structural discrimination in professional life, this also risks further marginalising trans and non-binary people. Their voices are equally important, as are those of people from different sexual orientations, belief systems, and so on. Read more of this post

Filed under Networking, Research culture Tagged with , , , ,

Writing the second edition

25 April 2017 by 1 Comment

Helen KaraHelen Kara’s main interest is in research methods, which she writes about and teaches to practitioners and postgraduate students. She also self-publishes short e-books for doctoral students. She tweets at @DrHelenKara.

This post is timed to coincide with the official publication of the second edition of her first research methods book, Research and Evaluation for Busy Students and Practitioners: A Time-Saving Guide, by Policy Press. (Not that official dates mean much nowadays. The official publication date is tomorrow, but copies have been available for the last two weeks.)

A detail from the cover of the book, showing Helen's name and the words 'Second Edition'. The cover design shows different jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting together.

A detail from Helen’s new edition.

If you’ve written a textbook or monograph, you should be thinking about a second edition.

Readers who love your book can have an up-to-date version, and you can bring out a new book for a lot less work than writing an actual new book. Win-win!

I’ve just been through the process of preparing a second edition and, as so often with my writing, this is the post I wish I’d been able to read at the outset.

When I decided it might be time for a second edition, I looked around online for advice, but there wasn’t much information available. I needed some clues. My lovely editor was helpful. ‘We’re not just going to tweak a few things and slap a new cover on,’ she said (which was fine by me). She offered to ask a couple of people who had been using the book for teaching to give suggestions of changes they would like to see, which I thought was a great idea. One person sent a couple of paragraphs of comments, the other sent two and a half pages; they didn’t always agree with each other, but their feedback was usefully thought-provoking.

Then I had to do a proposal for my publisher. It’s similar to a new book proposal, and in fact I was able to copy-and-paste several sections from the original proposal in 2011, but I needed to provide a rationale for the new edition. Read more of this post

Filed under Be strategic, Building your track-record Tagged with , , ,

A dream collaboration: Self-publishing for academics

17 May 2016 by 6 Comments

Helen KaraHelen Kara‘s main interest is in research methods, which she writes about and teaches to practitioners and postgraduate students. Her most recent full-length book is Creative Research Methods for the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide (Policy Press, 2015). She also self-publishes short e-books for doctoral students. Her last Research Whisperer post was The Knife of Never Letting Go. She tweets at @DrHelenKara.

Nathan RyderNathan Ryder‘s main interests are in helping postgraduate researchers prepare for their viva, practice creativity, collaboration, productivity and personal effectiveness. He produces the Viva Survivors Podcast, where he interviews PhD graduates about their research and viva. He is the author of two e-books on viva preparation. He tweets at @DrRyder.

Together, they have just written Self-Publishing For Academics. This is their story.

We met, as happens increasingly in our lives, on Twitter.

After chatting there for a while, Nathan recruited Helen to take part in his Viva Survivors Podcast. He recorded and published her episode via Skype in January 2015. Then they went back to chatting on Twitter.

Eight months later, in September 2015, Helen had a Bright Idea. She does this a lot. Mostly, it’s not dangerous.

Helen knew that Nathan had self-published two short e-books to help doctoral students prepare for their vivas, and she herself was in the process of self-publishing a series of six short e-books for doctoral students. So, she thought maybe she and Nathan could collaborate on a short e-book to help academics who were thinking about self-publishing.

Helen suggested this to Nathan by email.

He was keen, but they were both too busy to do more than declare a common interest and agree to discuss it further in the New Year.

In mid-January 2016, Helen learned from publishing industry insiders that academic self-publishing was expected to take off any minute. So, she emailed Nathan again, and they had a chat on Skype, put their heads together and came up with a plan of action.

Less than four months, later we launched our new e-book, Self-Publishing For Academics.

Read more of this post

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The knife of never letting go

11 November 2014 by 2 Comments

Dr Helen KaraDr Helen Kara has been an independent social researcher in social care and health since 1999, and is also Associate Research Fellow at the Third Sector Research Centre, University of Birmingham. 

She is on the Board of the UK’s Social Research Association, with lead responsibility for research ethics.  She teaches research methods to practitioners and students, writes on research methods, and is author of the best-selling Research and Evaluation for Busy Practitioners (Policy Press 2012). 

Her next book, Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences, is due for publication in April 2015. 

You can find her on Twitter at @DrHelenKara. Her ORCID is 0000-0001-7348-0963. Her blogpost title owes thanks to Patrick Ness. 

I finished writing my latest book last month.

...and in last place (Photo by Tim Norris | www.flickr.com/photos/tim_norris)

…and in last place (Photo by Tim Norris | http://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_norris)

Two or three weeks before I actually finished, I realised I was dawdling.

I usually speed up towards the end of a writing project in a one-woman race for the finish line. Not this time. I was fiddling and faffing, not quite procrastinating, but taking ages to think about minor points where I’d usually make quick decisions. What was going on? I did my Belbin Team Inventory years ago and I know I’m a ‘completer finisher’, i.e. someone who likes to get things done, dusted, ticked off the list. So, why was I finding it hard to let go now?

That was the problem. I’ve written a number of non-fiction and fiction books (some have even been published) and numerous articles and short stories. I’ve never had trouble letting go of a writing project, but this time I did. I didn’t want to part with my precious typescript. I wanted to go on fiddling and faffing forever.

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