I sense an initiative that to a research fellows innocence project and I will let them do their work.
I found and I said that to you back in the kind of these guys is it's incredibly impressive
and not something that I would ever be able to do and then create something a lot better.
You. All right.
Thank you, everyone, for being here. You and I are delighted to have this opportunity to share some of the work
that we've been doing with border criminology and our associated social media.
As you'll be hearing about as a means to engage with the public, to share our research and the research of our network partners,
and also to advance professional visibility as we are early career researchers.
I'm. So as you can see, social media is increasingly taking a place or having a role in our day to day work.
And this lovely group of people are good at joking about it.
So we do want to draw attention to the fact that it does occur.
And hopefully with our presentation we can show how to maybe rein that in.
So we're not looking at cat videos and other things.
So what we'd like to do today is to tell you a bit more about border criminology, what we do there.
Well, then spend some time talking about blogging for academic researchers.
And inasmuch as we will be speaking about developing an online research researcher presence using social media.
So what I'd like to start by talking about is the ways in which and the presentations by Rachel and as well as Ian and Ben and Chris have really shown
that this notion of public engagement or impact the various words used to describe it is really becoming a part of the funding body requirements.
This is the case for Professor Mary Bosworth's, European Research Council starting grant that is the funder of water terminologies and that's the
project and under which we are funded and we work and so we drill bar criminologist since March 2013,
largely as a way to help build a field of the terminology of mobility or water terminologies within the sort of broader discipline of terminology.
And so we use the blog, website and social media as a way to help share some of our work, research and progress,
as a way to stimulate discussion and also to advance ideas both within and beyond the academy.
So what we've done is to create an interdisciplinary research network to build to break down, sorry,
regional divisions that might separate us from the global north of the global south,
as people call it, and also to break down disciplinary boundaries.
So from from analogy we've got is our anthropology star and we've got brought some other people in that work in different fields,
some really in sociology looking at policing, others from migration studies,
some from the humanities, really as a way to kind of bring people together to look at,
you know, things that interest us that we have in common, which generally is border control.
And the Border Chronologies Research Network also helps to make our own research as well as the
know the research of network members available to the public at large in a more accessible format.
And we also are trying to draw in visual images and other ways of communication that might break down sort of,
you know, get us away from the normal, more slow process research articles or book publications.
And importantly, the network brings together researchers as well as practitioners.
Policymakers and those with direct experiences of border controls are trying to do this in a variety of ways.
Some have been more successful than others. But, you know,
having an online forum and other ways that we can get diverse groups together to start generating discussion and dialogue and maybe the places that,
you know, areas we need to understand better or the the gains that we made in improving knowledge in certain areas.
So just a little bit about border chronologies. The core team is here at the University of Oxford, comprised of Mary Bosworth, who is the PI.
There's myself and, you know, Schwarzenberg.
So together we along with Adria, Annie Feeley, who's located in Greece at the moment, and we basically run this research network.
And at present, we have 26 academic researchers who are part of it.
Eight postgraduate research students.
We have a 14 member international advisory body that represents academic government as well as non-governmental sectors,
to help give guidance on the ways in which the research network is developing in ways that could be perhaps, you know, we could better it in 2014.
Our blog was viewed approximately 60,000 times with more than 1000 unique visitors per week.
And we currently have 300 people subscribed to the blog, so they would get emails each time we publish something.
Border criminology also promotes our research and related work through our Twitter accounts and Facebook page.
So at present, we have just over 2800 Twitter followers and about 900 likes on Facebook.
So we check into a thousand, not that we pay attention to these things.
So yeah.
So, you know, if you're thinking why would you blog or why would you use social media as an academic or someone that's interested in criminology?
So I think today if you work in academia, we know that what we do is increasingly measured in terms of our impact.
We've heard words again today engagement, knowledge, exchange, public outreach, which are kind of new buzzwords that we hear a lot about.
And what we'd like to do today is build on some of the previous presentations, which have already addressed many of these themes,
to focus more specifically on blogging for researchers and social media with regards not just to the importance of establishing an online presence,
but also in terms of research impact. So in relation to blogging and this is really a joke.
Blogging does not, of course, replace academic, you know, peer reviewed articles, books of things we normally do.
But blogging does provide a way to more quickly share what we're doing and maybe generate some interest in our work and make connections with others.
That may have a more quickly then a journal article that will come out maybe next year.
So in terms of blogs, the Faculty of Law Alone hosted a series of great research web pages.
We have our own criminology at Oxford Page, and that's been good at sharing what alumni have been up to,
as well as people commenting on current events, including the death penalty and things that have been happening in that area.
We have ourselves for chronologies, which we will plug because that's what we're talking about.
And our blog and not only blog for the Web page itself also has resources around teaching
open access publications and ways that people can sort of join in and participate,
as well as our events.
And the Oxford Trinity Transitional Justice Research Group at Oxford also has a blog in which it shares its great work and the universities in laws.
Oxford Human Rights Hub has a very active blog and is really great at speaking to current events and
showing excellent commentary by researchers in the various fields related to law and human rights.
Of course, we have Rachel's Alison to Parent Violence Project in which she can also share various things that are happening on her projects and keep,
you know, connections to policymakers and other people that she's working with.
So sorry. So these just are examples.
These are specialised blogs that address a particular field of study, as you can tell.
The exception here would be the blog for the Centre for Criminology,
which focuses on matters of criminology more broadly and as well as promotes the work that's done within the centre.
These blogs also have, as you can see, associated social media.
So Twitter and Facebook, several have their own blogs, as I mentioned, particularly for criminology.
Some of these pages have links to publications, podcasts, events and other things, including course delivered syllabi.
In case you're interested in what type of courses are available in this field, either to attend or to teach.
And for using Twitter and Facebook. It's not just enough to have accounts.
It's important to link them to your blog or your website.
So for here, for technology, you can see we have the you don't have your point or do you look anywhere?
You have the Twitter streams there. And that kind of gives you a sense of what the blog, what else we're doing currently in Twitter.
And then the human rights hub has a Facebook stream.
Feel very bantamweight. King Henry has. All right. Which that is very useful.
So some tips for blogging. And it's important here to keep in mind that if you are setting up a research Web page or a blog to make it successful,
it's important to keep the blog alive. So this means adding new content at least twice per week.
It helps invite other security themed weeks or special series.
We've done that if anyone's noticing. Four Technologies.
We've teamed up with campus at Oxford to do a themed week one, a series that on every Friday we focus on gender and migration.
It's important to work collaboratively and democratically, both within and beyond your immediate institutional discipline.
This helps build relationships with people working in your area but might not be located where you are.
It's important to be methodologically creative, so having different sorts of posts that focus on different kinds of research.
We try to include as much as possible visual research resources and different kinds of blog posts.
Again, so it's not just a standard format but can change it up as per different interests.
It's important to make sure that you're promoting your post wisely. So if you do make a blog post that you share it through your social media
contacts on Twitter and Facebook and hope that they get retweeted or reposted.
It helps to engage in current debates and world news. And for criminologists as an example, for events that have had a lot of media attention,
such as the recent exquisite crisis in the Mediterranean with numbers of drownings.
We've had some of the blog posts we've posted on those topics have really generated a lot of interest and a lot of traffic.
It also helps to invite a diverse range of people to contribute to the blog,
to infuses new ideas and perspectives, and not just sort of within what we do.
But again, as I mentioned before, trying to break down the disciplinary barriers that might, you know.
What do criminology learn from, say, anthropologists or others in migration studies?
Try to make sure that the web page of your blog is user friendly and that the information you have and your resources are easy to find.
And keep your resources and events list updated so you're not, you know,
so I wasn't coming to visit it and the last entry was in 2013 or something like that.
And whenever possible, if you can podcast events that you're holding.
To share knowledge and reach out to those who are in different locations that may not be able to attend Oxford but can then listen after the fact.
So we're not recommending that you go on now and set up your own research page or
your blog in order to in order for these types of things to work successfully.
It means to bring something new, and it also demands a lot of work and attention.
So managing this type of site is very time consuming.
So at border criminologists, like I mentioned, we've got four of us as our core team that works on the blog and the wider project website,
and this excludes our I.T. dude who also does a lot of work.
So we'd advise instead to start contributing with blog posts to already well established blogs and web pages to start out.
So some that might be of interest to criminologists or ones like The Conversation,
which is a really great source for a variety of different posts on many topics by academics.
openDemocracy The London School of Economics has a great section on its policy, politics and policy blog.
Interested in book reviews? LCA review of books is a great place to start.
In relation to, you know, tips on how to do things.
This blog writing for research is a really great resource that does help give some ideas on
how to translate maybe academic work and writing into something that's more accessible.
It also provides some ideas on how to write a blog post from your journal article.
So say you do have something you've recently published or is about to come out.
These are some tips that you can translate it from a more obviously the academic format into something that might be of greater interest as a way to
share the information without someone necessarily that might not be interested
in the full article to get a sense of what kind of research you're doing.
This is just one example of a blog post from a Journal Journal article that was published
by two women lecturers in Spain that are writing on foreign national female prisoners.
So I turn it over. Now, just want to briefly highlight the importance of having an online presence.
So we've been talking about themes of impact, knowledge, exchange, engagement and public outreach.
If people are interested in your work and what you're doing, it's important for them to be able to find you.
And having an online presence does enable you to have more reach in terms of a global audience.
It allows you to promote your work as well as your skills.
It also makes your work available, especially when you can post open access articles, things that haven't quite come to print or works in progress.
It also helps make yourself accessible.
And a recent workshop held by the Social Sciences Department here at the university with two people work from the BBC,
were talking about the importance of being having an online presence so that, you know,
if there's a topic on adolescent violence, they can quickly find the expert in the area.
And often they're looking at people's Facebook pages because not all institutional profiles are updated.
So if you do have something that's really quick and hits, you know, they might come to you rather than someone else,
if that's the way you're hoping to help market yourself and your research.
It also helps to expand your networks by having an online presence or connecting through some platforms that it knows will talk about.
You do learn about the work of other people, often in other countries and other institutions,
and that might be a good way to, you know, generate interest and potential collaborations in the future.
So. Turned out that actually met. Okay.
So I'm going to sort of build on what Sarah has been talking about and the other presentations.
But I'm going to take us a few steps back and pretty much going to take this back to basics.
So in terms of establishing an online presence, I'm going to speak a little bit more about Twitter and Facebook.
But I first want to have just to say that the first step has to be an online profile.
I mean, blogging will give you visibility,
but if you don't have an online profile to attach to sort of or link through to your blog or your blogging activity,
it doesn't really expand much beyond that.
So the first step released to establish an online presence is to have a professional web profile.
I mean, ideally, this would be an institutional profile and this is mine, sorry,
just a bit of self-promotion, but we felt weird about putting other people's profiles there.
And I mean, you see it has Centre for Criminology and the University of Oxford, it has all these logos which kind of gives it credibility.
So if you do have access to your institutional web space, it's excellent to have an online profile within the institutional web website, web page.
Of course, this is not available to all students or to everyone,
but it's not a problem because if you can't, there's many professional networks such as academia do.
I don't know if you know it, but there's my profile again. So academia.
Dot edu again. It's free.
It's you can put your research interests, you put all your publications, but also you can follow through people and people can follow you.
And you can also follow research interests, which means that if someone just so publishes a paper in my case that is tagged by prisons or ethnography,
I do get a notice saying new paper by prison or ethnography or the people that I follow.
If they put a new paper or a book chapter or whatever.
Again, I receive a notice saying that there's something new out there that might interest me.
And of course, there's also LinkedIn, and so you don't get tired of me.
I've put in Sarah's profile again, LinkedIn is free.
Everyone can set up their own online profile. You can put everything from your education degrees, from your work experience, your publications.
I mean, you can pretty much every information there. And it also works as a network.
So you can follow people, people can follow you, etc. So the reason that we're sort of making a point about online profiles is that two years ago,
one of the first events that we've done with of criminology was a one day workshop on foreign national prisoners.
And we wanted at first we sort of just inviting people instead of opening a call for papers.
And it was extremely difficult to find people working on foreign national prisoners to find who is actually doing work in this subject.
And there were a lot of people who only had profiles in strange languages and by strange languages and everything other than English.
And but even those profiles, a lot of people don't have enough information and they're not updated.
And if you want to be, you know, invited to seminars or to express interest in bids or to be aware of particular job vacancies,
if you want people to be able to contact you and to reach you,
then you do need to have you know, you need to be visible to be findable, if that's a word.
So in India and we did for this workshop,
we did an open call for papers and we received a vast amount of contributions and the majority of those were from PhD students,
none of which had online profiles. So it would have been impossible for us to know what they were working on.
So this is a first step. It's an online prison.
Then there's Twitter. Now Twitter is a great social media tool.
It's short, it's fast, it reaches vast amounts of people and institution.
There's already a very wide criminology community, community on Twitter, which not only circulates news and information,
but also, as Sarah was mentioned ago, often engages engages in current debates.
So like the Mediterranean crisis or a few months ago, the whole issue with the ban on books for prisoners or more recently,
the Baltimore riots, well, there's a lot of information out there.
And Twitter reduces it to 140 characters.
I mean, how great is that? But again, there are things to consider when you set up or when you have an account on Twitter.
So this is a Twitter profile from Board of Criminology. And what I want us to focus on is this little bit of the profile now,
this small information that says border criminologist brings together researchers in criminology.
But what about this is of vital importance for people to find you and to know who you are and what you're doing.
And also, you will notice that we have these hashtags on criminology and border control and border,
which kind of means that everyone that goes on Twitter.
And is looking for criminology accounts and puts out that criminology will find us.
So we'll find a profile and we'll know that we're there. So there are things to consider about your profile.
And one of the things is there are many, many people out there with the same name.
So often you're trying to find someone on Twitter and you come across 20 married passwords, for instance.
And you need to know which one is the married was worth that you want to follow or that you want to tag,
but also because you want people with similar professional interests who don't know you or who don't know your work to be able to find you.
So I set up a case study in search of Ben Crewe. So this is an example.
If you search for Ben Crewe and Twitter, you get all these.
And I mean, this is only like a third of the page. The page goes on and on and on.
So there's a whole bunch of people under the name of Ben Crewe on Twitter.
So which one is the one that I know or that I want to follow or that I want to use?
Now, Ben has a great it's simple, great profile, simple and to the straight.
So I know Prison Research Centre, University of Cambridge. This is the guy that I want.
So it's simple and it's easy. If Ben didn't have those few lines and believe me, a lot of people don't have those few lines,
then it becomes very difficult if you don't actually know the person.
I mean, you might have the photograph, but if you don't know the person and it becomes very difficult to follow the person.
So again, my Twitter profile, I'm sorry about this. So consider what images you will choose.
I mean, images with beachwear or, you know, just bungee jumping are usually not very adequate.
I mean, this photograph is actually not the most eloquent either.
I will need to change it, but also describe their professional interests.
I mean, I start my Twitter profile with anthropology, migration and criminology, which are the three main disciplinary areas that I work in.
So again, anyone who tags on Twitter for criminology, migration or anthropology will find my profile.
And then I just have a few sentences on what exactly I'm doing research on.
And I also tagged the Centre for Criminology.
So at Oxford, Crim is the Twitter account of the Centre for Criminology, which is the institution that I work for,
and you will notice that I also include my Centre for Criminology Online Web page.
So all of these things are important if you want people to find you and then who to follow.
I mean, Twitter is supposed to expand your networks and to engage in conversation.
So you want to follow your colleagues and people that have the same professional interests and not necessarily your friends.
And there's a lot of good criminology Twitter accounts there.
I mean, if your main interest is criminology, you can follow a whole bunch of criminology journals, criminology, publishers, departments.
I mean, Sara has showed you we have a wonderful Twitter account for the Centre for Criminology,
Criminology, criminal justice institutions, legal practitioners,
activists, NGOs, but also think strategically like if you want to work in a place like Rand where Chris works,
you might want to follow their Twitter account.
Or if you're thinking later on, you might want to work for the UN, then follow their Twitter accounts to be up to date with what they're doing.
Tag them in your own tweets, make them hear you and make make yourself visible.
So these are just examples of a few criminology Twitter accounts, which are based in London, Australia and New York.
I mean, there's plenty of more. This is just a few examples. Also, how to follow when you follow someone or an institution,
make sure that you also retweet one or two of their last tweets because you do want to follow people, but you also want people to follow you back.
Otherwise, you're just hearing the conversation, but you're not part of the conversation because if no one is following you,
you can tweet as much as you want, but no one is listening. So you want people to follow you back.
And these are just a couple of tricks to make people follow you back.
So you can just do the sort of quick, fast way of just click on follow and a bunch of people.
But if you actually go and look at their profiles and retweet one or two, one or two of their tweets,
this will enhance the chances that they will actually want to follow you back.
Another good thing, and this is the greatest thing, but it's more time consuming, is to make your own tweet about it and tag and attack that person.
So I have this confinement network tweet, which works out very well to kind of show this.
So check out this web page on pages of confinement and border zones by photographer Sarah Christiana.
And then you have the URL and again, the hash tag photography.
So it has. Yeah, we're done. Yeah. Just very quickly.
Are we done then? Got in two more minutes.
Okay, I'll just go on and say that Facebook is really great and a lot of people have a lot of issues with Facebook and have closed their accounts.
But you can see the Facebook because it is a great professional tool and I'm not going to go much into it.
These are just a few of the things.
Also, Oxford has a lot of resources for if you want to continue and expand your knowledge on social media.
So courses about online presence, Twitter for academia and security.
This is very important, especially with Facebook making blogs, but also it has all these other all these other resources that I find very useful.
And I'm not going to go much into this, but we have the Web page assistant once.
So final words keep your professional social media separated from your personal one, because at the end of the day,
your colleagues don't want to know about your cats or about your weekend of boules in Brighton.
And also you probably don't want your professional contacts to see photographs of your children or yourself at parties.
So another very important point don't ignore negative comments.
Remember that social media is about engagement, so find ways to respond to criticism or at the very least to acknowledge it.
If you don't want to respond it, just retweet whatever critical tweet you got, but acknowledge that you are.
You took that into consideration. Invest a few minutes a day in social media and be patient.
It takes time to develop the good network and to establish a reputation and to have an audience.
But it's worth it. Sorry. We took a bit more time. I mean, any questions?