Building a Minimal Online Presence
This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.
Titus Brown and Ethan White led a half-hour discussion today of the minimal online presence people in academia ought to have. Notes from the call are below; to make a point-form story even pointier, please make yourself findable and shareable.
Things Titus & Ethan think are important for your (minimally sufficient) online presence
- Motivation: tried to track down info on Software Carpentry associated folk for computational science hires. Had a tough time!
- My opinion: within space of one reasonably-phrased google search, someone should be able to casually find
- Email address, CV in PDF form, research interests, and publication list/citations.
- Personal research writings (grad/post-doc applications, etc.)
- Searcher can then pass on to make a case for hiring/interviewing etc.
- This can be done with github and google scholar fairly easily.
- Don't need to keep everything up to date all the time
- But should update at every important milestone (e.g., changing position, publishing really important paper)
- A PDF form of CV is important for forwarding around... doesn't need to be completely up to date, google scholar can keep that, but important milestones.
- Presentation about automatically maintaining presence: http://www.slideshare.net/c.titus.brown/2014-beacontoolsforscience
- More generally, for social media: this presentation
- CV should contain
- training/position history
- summary of research interests
- funding and paper information
- important things to read
- online links; workshops and training; invitations; professional activities; references
- E.g.:
- Titus's CV
- Greg's summary and CV
Questions:
- Should people include links/mentions for code? If so, what/how? CTB: can't hurt! TH: I give a link to my github account
- convention for order of topics in CV might depend on field? CTB: no fixed conventions AFAIK, EPW: put the stuff that matters most first (& what matters most varies based on what you want to do professionally) SH: reverse chron!
- What if a lot of the code you develop is only viewable within your institution? Most of the code on my github is pretty old
- Should we have an area where folks can post links to their "presence"? As an example.
- We're very happy to include links to personal sites/home pages in the team list
- Please send to Greg, or send pull requests against the 'site' repo
- For a personal website how long/detailed should your research interests be?
- Check out http://greatlabwebsites.tumblr.com/
- For non OA articles, do you link to the journal website (doi), to a pre/post-print, or to the published article (illegally, technically)? (Or in which order of preference)
- CTB: google scholar solves this problem pretty well :). Make sure to the best of your ability that your important papers are available somewhere/somehow. That having been said most professors will have access to most major journals, even if closed access.
- EPW: I use my institutional repository and put post-prints there and link to them (these then get indexed w/the paper in Google Scholar)
- SH: I post illegal links too and wait for publisher to complain
- Personal/lab web sites worth looking at:
- Justin Kitzes (self-hosted, was Wordpress-based, now Pelican)
- Steven Koenig (CSS is so 2006/7 ;))
- Katy Huff: 1 2 , 3 (not proud, really, just interested in feedback!!!)
- Stephen Turner (bootstrap hackjob hosted on gh-pages)
- Rémi Emonet (not so worth :) )
- Pauline Barmby
- Luis Pedro Coelho
- Julia Gustavsen (still working on it...needs research interests)
- Ryan Williams
- Fan Yang (really new...)
- Anna Schneider (a little out of date, using stacey)
- Matt Davis (on wordpress.com)
- Lex Nederbragt (landing page)
- Daniel Hocking (I like Octopress for GitHub sites but haven't been willing to fully switch: here)
- Ted Hart