At universities, social media enjoy great popularity as tools to connect privately and informally with friends and colleagues. In addition, these tools offer features that allow users to promote and highlight their professional or academic work, to follow the work of others, and even to engage in new types of collaborative research.
This symposium will focus on the impact of new information technology on scholarship, and on scholarly networks. It will highlight the ways in which individuals and institutions can harness the power of social media, look at examples and data, and provide an overview of Georgetown’s policies and initiatives.
Following the symposium, participants will have the opportunity to explore Academia.edu, in an introductory session offered by its CEO and founder, Richard Price.
Panelists
Rachel Pugh
Representing GU Office of Communications - Social Media Group, is a front liner for Georgetown University’s communications with the world. She fields questions on a huge variety of issues, including stolen clock hands, controversial speakers, and complaints from neighbors. She is also part of the GU Social Media Group, which develops policies and best practices for media use at Georgetown.
Richard Price
CEO, Academia.edu, graduated with a D.Phil. in philosophy from Oxford University, where he was a Prize Fellow at All Souls College. His doctoral research was on the philosophy of perception, and, in particular, on how to draw the line between visible and non-visible properties. Parallel to his doctoral research, he worked on founding a few startups, including a Facebook app. He launched Academia.edu in 2008, as a platform where academics can share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. According to the website 1,793,973 academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 1,531,693 papers and 537,356 research interests. Academia.edu attracts over 3.9 million unique visitors a month.
David Ribes
Georgetown University, holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Science Studies (STS) from the University of California San Diego (UCSD - 2006), and did a postdoc at the University of Michigan School of Information. He has been a faculty member in Georgetown University’s Communications, Culture and Technology Program (CCT) since 2008. His research focuses on the sociotechnical facets of cyberinfrastructure (i.e., networked information technologies for the support of science) and how it is transforming the practice and organization of contemporary knowledge production. As principal investigator on National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, he currently studies the consequences of novel information technologies on the activities of scientists and users, and exploring new patterns of distributed collaboration.
Guest of Honor and Moderator
Neeru Paharia
McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, a graduate of Harvard Business School, where she obtained a doctorate in business administration. She continued to work at Harvard as Research Director at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, before joining the McDonough School of Business in the fall of this year. Prior to her career in academia, Neeru was an Associate Consultant at McKinsey and Company, the Executive Director of Creative Commons, and has co-founded a number of different community-oriented social media projects such as ccMixter.org (a social music remixing website), acawiki.org (Wikipedia for academics), and p2pu.org (peer-based online learning).