Digital Identity: legitimising the time investment

Investing in creating a digital identity and experimenting with social media takes time. Time to learn the practical skills of the new technology, then time to develop softer skills of new e-communication and interaction skills and then time to keep a digital identity updated. As a young researcher starting out, with numerous other time pressures and attention focused on recognised research outcomes such a published papers, grant applications, citations, how does one currently legitimise this time investment required to undertake these digital activities?

Following last night's blog post which was inspired by intrigue of attending the digital researcher workshop later today, several further thoughts about constructing your digital identity returned from the discussions at the JISC-funded 'Digital Scholarship' event at the OU last week.

Professor Martin Weller identified a number of barriers to starting to create a digital research identity as well as the time investment. These included: recognition, IP rights, plagiarism, skill development, quality and depth, sustainability and exposure (writing in the public left you open for criticism). I wanted to expand the discussion around his point of recognition for the time spent on developing your digital identity. Will your digital research ouputs be recognised? Professor Martin Weller and his group at the OU have recently launched DISCO, a portal for OU staff interested in learning about digital scholarship, in response to the question of how do you get digital output to be recognised in academia.

The OU have also very recently revised official promotion policy to include a formal recognition structure for digital outputs. This in my opinion is revolutionary. Traditionally, and still the case at the majority of higher education institutions, researchers are evaluated on metrics such as number of successful grants, research papers published, citations etc. Martin's focus, however, has been looking into the issue of what constitutes a 'good' blog or digital output. If someone has only published a couple papers but has a widely followed and revered blog in their subject area, why is this not recognised? So considering that digital outputs require such a time investment, how should they be recognised and validated?

The OU's DISCO site is a pilot response to this. Often digital scholarship or digital activity is distribute and the team are currently experimenting bring together all one's digital outputs to create a centralised 'digital identity' as well as looking at the impact of using different metrics to determine what is 'good' digital content, particular blog posts These metrics included number of visits, in-coming links to the content etc and over the next months the team is looking to evaluate how good these metrics are as a proxi. But one of points raised by Martin to be vary of, was the age old problem that adding metrics causes behaviour to adapt to fulfil that metric.

The audience discussion centred around the peer review process, but that this process has its own problems; a large problem being the timeliness of the academic publishing cycle. An paper must first be peer reviewed and then if accepted, the most appropriate opportunity to insert it into a journal must be found, which in total can mean that it literally can take years for an article to be published in print. Arguably this diminishes the value of the content and it may be outdated by the time it reaches press, especially when reporting on rapidly changing fields such as digital media (as highlighted in by Dr Pearce and commented in my previous post). But a valid point raised by a representative of the British Library highlighted that the impact of this timely cycle will be different for different subjects. Does it matter if papers take years to undergo peer review in ancient history? Another audience member commented on the fact that also different subject areas are also at different stages of embracing the digital. For example within Physic researchers are encouraged to post up digitally pre-publication for comments.

Then there are also tools which I am only just coming across such as researchblogging.org where we researchers commenting on peer-reviewed research within their own blog are brought together into a useful searchable sphere so that serious posts about academic research can be found more easily.

Not only is the idea of what constitutes a good blog important for recognition but in a world, as Martin Weller describes, of 'abundance' of digital content, how do we filter this massive amount of content when our personal time and attention is still a scare resource? In a traditional teaching world we look towards our tutors or supervisors to act as our filter and within research we rely on the publishing peer-review process as our filter. Martin points to the importance of our social networks to be our filter for the information overload in a digital world, off- and on-line networks. He believes that higher education institutions have a role in providing teaching and advice on 'networking' as a key skill development. Not just the practical skills of how to network but more importantly the subtle skills of how to establish relationships, but also how to maintain relationships and contribute. So as the first digital workshop I am aware of I am off to London, intrigue by what lies in store today.........

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