Gender and Digital Identity

 

In a way this is slightly off-topic in that it isn't about libraries, but in more ways it's on-topic because this blog is often about new technology, and social media, and higher education. In particular I think we as information professionals should be sharing our expertise in social media with the academic community - I do this via workshops, and one question I get asked in more than half the sessions I do, is, how do you deal with the unpleasant attention online which you (inevitably) get if you are both prominent and female?

When I was first asked this I really didn't know how to answer it very well - the second and subsequent times I'd looked into it a bit and felt better prepared, but there still doesn't really seem to be a good answer (outside of: Fix Society - which I'm not holding my breath for). With this in mind, I went along to a session called Female public intellectuals - the risk of exposure as part of the University of York's Intellectual Integrity conference. The panel discussion was revealing, fascinating, and depressing - I was going to say in equal parts but that's glib; it was basically mostly depressing. Here are some thoughts around this whole issue, for what they're worth.

The problem

I'm sure we're all familiar with the problem but let me set it out explicitly here: the problem is that as soon as you gain an amount of exposure, you open yourself to abuse. I think this is true across the board, because among every X number of people, a small percentage of them are bound to be fecking idiots: the higher the number X, the more idiots are in that number. However the problem of abuse is exacerbated by the internet in general (it allows disconnected contact in a fashion which allows cowards to flourish), social media in particular (it allows direct access and potentially even the feeling that you 'know' someone and so are entitled to comment on their appearance, etc) and is much much worse if you're female, gay, or in an ethnic minority.

Increasingly vital to researchers and academics is the need to have impact, and to have impact you need to be seen. To be seen is to open yourself to abuse, so how do you do your job in such conditions?

One of the panel spoke about how she appeared on the BBC for around 2 minutes - TWO MINUTES - and within hours had several emails from people either saying how sexually UNattractive they found her, or how sexually attractive they found her and what they wanted to do about it. Males on the same programme got emails too - about their arguments. But she just basically got abuse - and keep in mind, this is a BBC1 audience who had to Google her and find out her email, and took the time to do so.

The two things that really hit home for me attending this talk (and keep in mind I'm a social-media-workshop-teaching, feminist-lefty-leaning Guardian-reading, already-interested and somewhat-read-up-on-this librarian...) were A: how little exposure women need to get abuse (I naively thought it didn't happen until you'd been on TV, but people with 2,000 Twitter followers are finding that enough to warrant emails detailing sexual fantasies) and B: how there's no real preparation for dealing with it. It's not really discussed much. There's a tendency to laugh it off or, worse, to feel misplaced guilt about it - maybe I inadvertently led them on? So it doesn't get shared, and you don't get the relief and understanding that comes from realising other people are getting this abuse too, and it's not your fault.

We're not talking about a tiny number of 'sick' people abusing women online anymore. It's really, really common.

It's no longer about anonymity

For ages I thought the problem with the internet was anonymity. If you want to see how people act when they're unaccountable, go look at the comments section of ANYTHING - YouTube, the Guardian, heaven forbid the Mail - and check your faith in humanity at the door.  People say awful things, all the time, because they don't have to take responsibility for them - they can hide behind a random username.

But I don't think that's even the main issue anymore. Take a moment to look at this tumblr post from Feminist Frequency - she had the audacity to tweet a mild comment about lack of female lead characters in computer games, and got back an unfathomable stream of abuse. The abuse is not from people hiding behind the anonymity of the net. It is from people with their name and photo on their twitter account.

Another attendee at the session today mentioned the 'coarsening of society' - we are generally getting more unpleasant, more mysognistic all the time. I agree with that, but I think social media can make this a lot worse because of its unique ability to connect like-minded people.

Social media, tribes, and 'finding your (similarly repulsive) people'

I love social media. I love most how it can help you find your people - you can reach all the other Twitter users who happen to have your exact outlook on life, or taste in music, or professional interests, or whatever it might be. It gives us all the chance to deepen and enrich our experiences through sharing them with the like-minded. The old saying about how you can't choose your family, but at least you can choose your friends - that needs updating. Because even your friends are chosen partly based on logistics such as geography, place of work etc. Online you can find people just like you!

However... There's a darker side to this, which is that all the really repulsive people can find all the other really repulsive people. And what they do (this is my pet theory; others may have explored this with proper intellectual rigour) is form their own ersatz society, which comes with different standards of behaviour. It seems to me that a depressingly high percentage of humans really have no private morality at all - the only reason they aren't unpleasant to women (for example) all the time is because society's norms dictate that they can't. Hence, the original problem of anonymity and the net - if you're not accountable to society's norms you can finally act however you like (which for lots of people seems to be: Really Unpleasant!). But now that all these people can find their tribes online, they effectively create a new society where the norms ARE to be unpleasant and misogynistic - so they think nothing of abusing prominent women under their own name and their own image.

God it's depressing.

A project to tackle this

I'd like to see Higher Education Institutions tackling this by preparing academics and researchers (both male and female) for what will happen if they become prominent. I'd like to see students being taught about the scale of the problem as soon as they engage with the online world. Clearly this is a far bigger problem than just an academic one, but we can't all leave it for someone else to fix society. But even tackling this problem head-on is fraught with difficulty - as someone on the panel pointed out, this has the feeling of acceptance: getting abuse is part of being a successful female, so here's some coping strategies, off you go.

Anyhow there is work being done in this area, and I particularly wanted to highlight what Sara Perry, one of the panelists, is doing at the moment. She's collecting data about people's online experiences, and there's been around 200 responses to her survey so far (which is great as it's brand new) - including people saying how they deal with this and offering SOLUTIONS or at least ways of getting through the problem for individuals. That's a great thing, and I can't wait to see what Sara and her team publish at the end of it. (From a purely selfish point of view, I'd like to be able to better advise people who ask me about this in social media workshops about how to deal with it.) So please consider taking the survey - the details and the link are on Sara's blog. Sara is speaking up about really problematic issues here in the hope that it can help others who have endured similar incidents to those she's experienced, which is vital.

If anyone has anything they'd like to add to this in the comments, whether it's general discussion or advice on how to deal with online abuse, please leave a comment below. And if you've made it this far, thanks for reading!

Becoming a Networked Researcher: a suite useful of presentations

Web 2.0 tools have finally moved firmly beyond the 'potential fad' stage, to gaining widespread acceptance as valuable weapons in the Researcher's arsenal. Statistics about social media are almost meaningless because a: there's so many of them and b: the information becomes outdated quickly, but at the time of writing it's thought that around 70% of academics use social media for personal use, and in my view we've most definitely reached the tipping point where social media's utility for professional use is properly understood. This is directly linked to the 'impact agenda' - the research shows that blogging about and tweeting about research results in more citations for that research, and pretty much everyone wants more citations. But becoming a networked researcher is about more than the REF-related bottom line, it's about being part of a mutually beneficial, supportive, and intellectually engaging community.

With all that in mind, I ran a suite of hands-on workshops at my institution, the University of York, on behalf of the Researcher Development Team. The suite was entitled 'Becoming a Networked Researcher' and it covered firstly blogs and blogging, then collaboration and dissemination, and finally Twitter. Rather than divide these up into three blog posts I thought the most useful thing to do would be to have them all here - so below you'll find various links to, or embedded versions of, presentations and handouts for the course. I've tried to make it so they work without me there to talk over the top of them...

The workshops themselves were really enjoyable and the researchers themselves very enthusiastic and engaged - a whole bunch of blogs and twitter accounts have already sprang up since they ran!  But I'd like to improve them for next time around (we'll be running them twice a year from now on); whether you're a Masters / PhD researcher, an academic, or an information professional reading this, I'd be interested in your views on how useful these materials are, and any advice or tips or, particularly, examples, I should be referring to in future sessions.

The workshop materials

The three parts of the suite were designed to work together and separately - if you're only interested in one aspect of becoming a networked researcher, you don't need to look at the materials from the other sessions.

Part 1: Blogs and Blogging

Blogs and Blogging was the most successful session. The advice here is slightly York-centric in that we all have Google accounts, so we all automatically have Blogger blogs; if you're reading this at another insitution it's definitely worth considering Wordpress.com as your blogging platform. Better still, Wordpress.org, although that requires some technical knowledge.

Here's the Prezi presentation:

And here's the handout which goes with it:

Blogs for researchers: workshop handout by University of York Information

Part 2: Dissemination and Collaboration

I've decided against embedding the materials for this one - there was a lot more group and collaborative work and the session was slightly shorter, so my presentation doesn't cover as much ground. But you can view the Dissemination and Collaboration Prezi here (the handout doesn't really add anything); it covers LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Prezi itself, and Slideshare.

Interestingly, I really struggled to convince people as to the value of LinkedIn. I'm suspect of the value of LinkedIn myself, but I've heard countless researchers talk about how important it is, so I flagged it up as a key resource anyway...

Part 3: Twitter for Researchers

I really enjoyed this as I think Twitter is such a vital tool for modern scholarship and communication - you can see the Slides from the session here:

Twitter for Researchers from Ned Potter

And the handout is here:

Twitter for academics: workshop handout by University of York Information

Any questions, comments or queries, leave them below.

A brief guide to the best sites for finding freely available images online

Reblogged from the Library Marketing Toolkit I'm currently running a 23 Things self-directed learning programme at my University. One of the Things we just covered is Creative Commons images, and the best places to find them. I have a whole bunch of useful sites I draw people's attentions to in the Presentations Skills course I run, so shared them all via the 23 Things blog - it got a lot of RTs when I tweeted about it, so as people found it so useful I thought I'd share it here. Finding good quality images is absolutely critical to pretty much all forms of marketing, after all!

Creative Commons Licences allow people to freely and legally re-use artistic works, as long as they credit the creator of those works. This can apply to any media but it's most often associated with pictures, and there are literally hundred of millions of images online of very high quality, which we can use in posters, brochures, presentations, websites, handbooks, blogposts - whatever we like, as long as we abide by the conditions of  the Creative Commons (CC) licence under which they're made available.

A CC image from Flickr, courtesy of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, no less!  Find it at http://www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05/7637356614

 So where do you find these fantastic pictures?

• Flickr Creative Commons (http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/) - Flickr is the big online picture sharing site, and it has the largest single supply of Creative Commons images (that I know of), tens of millions of them. It has plenty of non-licenced images to - which is to say, they're subject to normal copyright so we couldn't use them ourselves - but the link about takes you to CC part. 
• Compfight (http://compfight.com/) - Compfight searches Flickr better than Flickr searches itself. It does all the different CC licences at once, which is useful, and somehow (I have no idea how) it seems to sort the wheat from the chaff and bring back the more useful pictures. When you run a search on Compfight, click Creative Commons from the menu down the left next to the results - from then on, every image you search for you can use.
• Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images) has over 15 million CC images and, unlike pretty much all the other sources listed here, the images are categorised (by date, location, format, style etc) so you're not reliant on keyword searches to find what you need 
• Iconfinder (http://www.iconfinder.com/) does what it sounds like it does - finds icons which are available for re-use. So not photographs like the other sites we're talking about, but small graphics and images which can be very useful in presentations. All the pictures in this University of York Library slide-deck are from Iconfinder, for example. 
• Stock Xchange (http://www.sxc.hu/) is the equivalent of iStock Photo except the images are free to use with attribution. It is particularly useful for finding pictures on a plain white background, for use in PPTs. 
• Morguefile (http://www.morguefile.com/) is similar to StockXchange, perhaps not as good (and not as comprehensive) - but the images are even licensed for commercial use, so you can use them to advertise things. 
• Blue Mountains (http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/flickrCC/) For the completists, a site called Blue Mountains does roughly what Compfight does. Try searching for a keyword but also putting BW in the search box (e.g. bw clocks) - it'll bring back very stylish black and white photos, often with a one-off splash of colour somewhere within them. 
• TinEye MultiColor Search Lab (http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr) is my favourite image search engine (thank you to Katie Birkwood for pointing it out to me). You can't search by keyword - instead you search by colour, up to five colours in fact... How cool is that?  It means you can find fabulous CC images that exactly match your branding! Marketing win.

#EdTech: 9 useful online tools to share with the academic community

A while back I blogged about a session I'd run for academics on the academic skills and digital literacy we teach at York. The point of blogging was to say that what the academics were really interested in was not what we taught the students, but how they themselves could become digitally literate. With that in mind I decided to put on a session for academics on exactly that. It was to be a taster menu on 9 different EdTech tools that they might find useful in the Higher Education environment, for engaging students, boosting reputation, and their own research.

Importantly it wasn't to be a library session - I wanted people to actually show up, after all... I asked the central Learning & Teaching Forum if I could deliver it as part of their workshop schedule - it just happened to be delivered by a librarian. Recent experiences suggested York was completely ready for this sort of thing (and indeed we had to move the room to a bigger venue as nearly 60 academics signed up for the session) - if you don't read any more of this post my message would be, if you think you could run a Web 2.0 type session for lecturers and / or researchers, do it! They're really enthusiastic about it - it's no longer seen as a fad or a waste of time.

Anyhow, here's the presentation I used:

For anyone really enthusiastic, the full hour and a half session was recorded too; here's where you can watch the presentation and hear my talk at the same time.

So, how did it go? The answer is really well - the group were very enthusiastic, and the feedback forms were extremely positive with only one exception. One lecturer I really like actually left the room almost in a daze, backing away saying 'Ned, I think you've solved something I've been trying to sort for ages, one of these tools is what we need...' and ran off to investigate there and then! :)

What worked

• The focus was on tools that helped solve existing problems - some Web 2.0 stuff seems to create its own problems which it then solves... This was based on tools that already fitted into the fabric of academic life
• It wasn't a hands-on session but I encouraged as much discussion as possible, questions and sharing of experiences, so that it wasn't just me banging on about stuff at the front
• The What, Why, How, Tips type format I use in a lot of my training also worked well here - it's really important to tell people why they'd find a tool useful BEFORE you tell them how to use it
• It was the right thing at the right time - lots of the feedback comments were things like 'This is exactly what I wanted!' - had I tried to do this when I first got to York 2 years ago, for example, I'm not sure that would have been the case
• It was matter of fact and practical. One academic said they'd been attracted by the lack of 'platitudes and concepts' which he said dominated most courses and workshops they were offered... The whole point of the session was to give people things they could DO right away which helped them in their actual real lives .

What didn't

• I think 9 was probably too many tools for the time. I should have done 7 perhaps - I felt like I was really galloping through everything. It was meant to be a taster-menu, but still
• As with every training session ever, a couple of people found some of it too simplistic and a couple of other people found some of it too complicated - I'm not sure there's a silver bullet for this issue, really, I'd love to know if anyone's cracked it
• A couple of people commented that they found Part 2 more useful than Part 1, but Part 1 was the more substantial section. If I run it again (and I probably will) I'll try and put greater emphasis on the teaching tools rather than the social media side of things
• I should have used more academic examples. (I told myself I'd be using loads of examples in the Becoming a Networked Researcher hands-on workshops I'm running at the moment - but much of the audience is different for these, so it's really not relevant to tell myself that!) .

Incidentally, there was a really interesting conversation (which I didn't feel qualified to contribute much to) about the nonsense female academics have to put up with online; or indeed any prominent females have to endure. It seems that as soon as your level of exposure reaches a certain point - my unscientific guess is, when you've been on TV just once - there will be some idiots who will take advantage of the net's relative anonymity to say unpleasant or creepy things. If this is a subject you're interested in, I'd highly recommend reading about Sara Perry's Gender and Digital Culture project, which is looking to tackle the issue.

So as you can probably guess by now, I'm really pleased that we've reached a tipping point and there's enthusiasm in the academic community for the potential applications of Web 2.0 tools. This is an area lots of librarians are interested in, so I really think it's a great time to offer up your knowledge and expertise to a grateful audience in HE. There are a few institutions doing this, and it seems to be working for all of us.

The only way we will definitely be screwed is if we screw CILIP

 

CILIP have been getting flak from the Library community since before I became aware of its existence. I gave out some of the flak myself – my post on CILIP and its lack of media presence remains one of the most commented-upon post this blog has ever had. I spoke up to try and constructively catalyse change – whether by coincidence (almost certainly) or not (it’s a nice thought) CILIP has since addressed the issue and it a much more vocal presence in the media.

The trouble I have with some of the criticism it gets is the level of at best dismissiveness and at worst, bile (or perhaps scorn) that doesn’t seem to be accompanied by much that could be considered constructive. Lots of people are happy to express the opinion that the rebranding process needs halting, but fewer have suggested what we should then do about the fact that CILIP still needs rebranding and (almost certainly) have entered into a legally binding contract with a consultancy firm.

People seem to imagine CILIP is an abstract entity which is perhaps ignorant of or indifferent to the needs of libraries, librarians and information professionals. What CILIP actually is, of course, is a group of individual human beings who care very much about libraries, librarians and information professionals and are doing their best to support all of them. To say otherwise is ignorant. I’ve met a lot of CILIP people and never once have any of them given me even an inkling that they didn’t care, or weren’t working hard, or were not qualified to do their jobs.

CILIP is a big unwieldy company with a royal charter, and it has a lot of armchair critics. A lot of people who’ve never led a massive charity-registered organisation appear to think they’d be awesome at it if given the chance; a chance 99% of them would not take if it actually came down to it, of course. Perhaps because smaller groups have achieved amazing things online, people expect CILIP to be able to do the same – but it has responsibilities and processes which prevent it from being so agile. Rowing a boat is not the same as running a big old paddle-steamer with thousands of paying customers. I know of no big organisations with massive budgetary constraints that consistently do everything right.

Traditionally I’ve supported CILIP. Recently I’ve lazily drifted into the camp of taking easy shots at them, and I was horrified at the thought of £35k (if that figure is indeed correct) being spent on the rebrand. I didn’t renew my membership right away when it lapsed. One of the reasons is that people I respect have tried to work with CILIP and found it untenable.

But I’m a member now and will continue to be one. This is partly because certain individuals previously or currently at CILIP (particularly Kathy Ennis, Biddy Fisher and Phil Bradley) have been really supportive of me and given me confidence and valuable opportunities. It’s partly because the Career Development Group helped me develop my career – in fact they’ve helped me develop my career to a stage where I no longer need them anymore. But it seems a bit callous to just say ‘okay thanks, bye!’ and no longer put any money into the organisation. If CILIP has helped you get just ONE pay-grade higher, then that’s more than a decade’s worth of annual subscriptions in extra salary you earn every year – it only seems fair to reinvest a fraction in the organisation.

But the third reason I’ll continue to support CILIP – even when they do things I don’t agree with – is because the only way we’ll be completely screwed is if we screw CILIP. By supporting them and letting them speak for us, we might be screwed – they might get it wrong. Just doing one’s best is not a guarantee of success. But by withdrawing our support, dismissing them, being scornful of them, bringing up absurd conspiracy theories online – that way we’re definitely screwed. Because like it or not CILIP speaks for the profession in this country – that’s precisely why they’re going through the controversial rebranding in the first place, because they feel (and most of us have felt for a long time) that ‘CILIP’ and 'Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals' are not working for their role as mouthpiece. The way some people talk on social media, you’d think CILIP are quite enjoying this complicated process, and are just doing it as a way to thumb their nose at the members.

I think there’s an undercurrent to all this of ‘If we don’t renew our membership and say how much we hate what CILIP doing, that’ll show them – they’ll HAVE to change then’. But know this – if the personnel at CILIP changes, we’ll be replacing one set of hard-working people doing their best for the profession with (hopefully) another set of hard-working people doing their best for the profession, and they may not make choices you like any better. We are, after all, talking about very difficult choices here. Have you tried trying to change and adapt, move forward without leaving people behind, maintain the responsibilities of being a registered charity and having the royal charter, and trying to include everyone and yet speak with one clear and unambiguous voice, and all that at a time when there’s a hostile government, a public mostly indifferent or steeped in happy but irrelevant nostalgia, and unprecedented threats to the very existence and value of libraries? ME EITHER. I imagine that’s quite hard to do. It is not through lack of effort that these controversial decisions are being arrived at.

By all means criticise CILIP. By all means make your voice heard. But support the organisation at the same time. Criticism and support are NOT mutually exclusive. Make suggestions. (By suggestions I don’t mean ‘stop what you’re doing I hate it I hate it’, I mean suggestions which work towards addressing the problems which CILIP are dealing with in ways not currently to your liking). If half as much energy was put into helping CILIP as was put into slagging it off, it could get a lot more done.

Remember that running a big chartered institute is nothing like running a social media campaign or a pressure group. And above all remember that CILIP is a bunch of humans working all day on our behalf, on the really very tricky problems we face as an industry and a profession.

Libraries are in a bit of a state. I don't want a professional body that keeps everybody happy, I just want a professional body which gets shit done. CILIP can get more done with us, than without us.