The aim of this project is to get some new interdisciplinary research projects off the ground at UCL. Many people have fed in different ideas of what they might like to do, but now we’d like to see those ideas being turned into research proposals, funding bids and/or pilot projects.

There are currently two Research council funding streams that might be good places to start thinking about aiming bids towards:

AHRC’s Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities (deadline 10 Jan 2013)

RCUK’s various Digital Economy Funding Opportunities

If you know of other possible funding sources let us know in the comments.

What happens now?

The Steering group are looking for small working groups to take forward ideas for future research projects or research bids. There is a small amount of money (£3000) available for these groups to hire someone to provide assistance in helping them progress these ideas into concrete projects and proposals, for example, desk research/literature reviews or perhaps to run a small workshop if it is needed.

Groups who want to apply for money will need to submit a formal proposal to the Steering Group for funds.

Any other groups can get going as and when they wish but we’d encourage them to stay affiliated with the UCLSMP project, in the interests of networking and collaboration and to avoid any duplication of efforts. Any working groups are also welcome to use this blog as a focal point for collaboration, dissemination and engagement.

Timeframe:

Project proposals for funds to Steering Group – mid-November.

By the end of December 2012 we anticipate that projects will be underway with work towards submitting a larger grant proposal and/or be starting a new pilot project at UCL.

Proposals should also include:

• The proposal should explain the project idea. An output of all proposals must be either a concrete pilot project and/or a funding proposal to a specific funding body for a longer-term interdisciplinary project.
• Names of participants (participants must come from more than one department/centre at UCL)
• An explanation of how the project is interdisciplinary
• A case for any research funds needed to assist in the development of the project/proposal

Please email your proposal to simon.lock@ucl.ac.uk by the end of Oct 31st

After a brief hiatus over the summer we’re forging on with the social media project and ready to get on with doing new things.  Below are the collated results from our kick-off meeting on what areas of new research, and research questions, participants wanted to see being explored at UCL in the future.

• Database management
• Engagement on Wikipedia (case study of health)
• Private companies’ use of growing amount of web/social/public data
• Algorithms and social behavior
• Business innovation and digital technology research
• Doing anthropology/ethnography of social media companies
• Illegal logging evidence
• location mapping as social tools to support communities and inventory of indigenous resources
• social networking amongst scientists (e.g. myexperiment)
• Applied location-based social networks
• Navigability of online networks and cues to relevance of attention
• Information resources for new members
• Digital archives
• The notion of privacy in the area of social networks
• Micropublication in science
• Enterprise social networks
• Presentation of self, digital identities, ‘external’ and ‘internal’ networks
• Using mobile phones for social networks – open source software and CIC funding
• Sentiment analysis of content
• Meshwork vs. networks in social media
• Translocal solidarity on social media
• Developing a way of responding to a suicidal crisis via social media
• Impact of crowdsourced datasets (assembled by the public) on the ‘authority’ f professional academic interpretation/explanation
• Co-creation of content with community groups via social media
• Opinion mining – automatic analysis
• Digital museums and archives and social media
• Student engagement in social media for teaching
• Academic social networking
• Use of social media in UCL
• The language of social media (how they affect the way language is used)

Other questions raised in discussion

• Can UCL gain access to government open data sets?
• How can we we all share data at UCL? Can we catalogue what data already exists?
• The underlying private/corporate ownership of social media
•  The role of the user as a commodity
• What do people understand by privacy?
• How does social media affect the student body? Does it affect campus behaviour?

What do you think? Any other things we might want to research collectively? Please post any comments or thoughts.

Coming up next: let’s get some research working groups going!