Ian Bartlett, Head of UCL Publications & Marketing Services, reports on the recent alumni professional networking event.

What is the secret for a successful career in the world of digital media? What degree should you take? How do you stay on top in this fast-moving environment?

These questions and many more were addressed by the discussion panel of UCL alumni as they spoke and during the following Q & A sessions, the event being chaired by Professor Claire Warwick (@clhw1) from the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.

From a personal angle, I wanted to learn more about the paths taken by panel members to reach the positions that they now hold.

From the perspective of my role as UCL’s Head of Publications and Marketing Services (PAMS), I wanted to know:
1) Were the UCL degrees taken by each of the panel members integral to their success?
2) Where did panel members see digital media heading next?
3) How does an organisation cope with the fast-changing developments in digital marketing?

(more…)

Professor Claire Warwick held the packed audience of the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, as well as the online live streaming audience, captive with her unusual approach to the inaugural lecture by asking: The monologue in a crowdsourced world: have digital resources rendered the inaugural lecture obsolete?

Instead of discussing the highlights of her research into users of digital resources in the humanities, Claire took techniques that are used in user studies and applied them to the phenomenon of the Inaugural lecture as a case study.

Claire slowly deconstructed the assumptions behind the inaugural lecture by using the affordance strength model and its use in context to assess whether the inaugural lecture is fit for purpose, and then compared that to the digital alternative.

(more…)