At conferences we all bring our laptop, smartphone and/or tablet nowadays, but still we have to look at a screen behind or next to the presenter. Simultaneously, when seeing an interesting slide on this screen we have to take a picture of it or write some notes really fast, since you are never sure whether the presentation will be shared.

Swipe overcomes these issues. Swipe allows you to build and deliver web-based presentations in a new way. No apps or installations are necessary. The website broadcasts a presentation live for anyone to see, no matter where they are. The opportunities that Swipe creates are immense. A presenter is able to show the presentation simultaneously on the big screen and on every participant’s own screen. Participants are able to make screenshots of interesting slides and – even more interesting – to interact in the presentation with the presenter.

Currently, Swipe is in beta only, but one might already register to test the application or to stay updated about it. You can sign up for beta here.

Watch an introduction video here. Click here to watch an example presentation.

At the beginning of your (PhD) research, you will most probably start off with an embryonic idea of what you would like to investigate and perhaps you might even have some literature from which you have gotten your inspiration. The challenge is now – how can I turn my ideas into literature? One important step in this process is to get a short and structured overview of what has already been done in the applicable field of research. In other words, you are likely to start your research project with a literature review, which requires a certain degree of information literacy. Already in 1989 the ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy (Washington, D.C) stated that “Ultimately, information literate people are those who have learned how to learn. They know how to learn because they know how knowledge is organized, how to find information, and how to use information in such a way that others can learn from them. They are people prepared for lifelong learning, because they can always find the information needed for any task or decision at hand.” (http://www.ala.org/acrl/issues/infolit/overview/intro)

What I would like to provide you with in the following are two short screen recordings that have been produced on the topic of:

1. Searching for Literature
   Here, we would like to provide you with a sketch of how you could use your initial idea, together with possibly a first set of literature, to build-up a bibliography and to undertake a review of the literature that you can base your further work on.

<<< click here to watch the video >>>

2.       Keywords and Key Phrases

In this short video, we will briefly touch upon the use of keywords for search, as well as the thesaurus view of key-words and key-phrases: Used For terms, Broader Terms, Narrower Terms, and Related Terms.

<<< click here to watch the video >>>

In research you often have to distribute information, for example to patients or health care professionals. Why are you not using a digital system which looks very professional and is quite quickly to make: a flipbook! Moreover, it saves a lot of paper.

What is a flipbook? A flipbook is a digital magazine in which videos, sound files and links to websites can be integrated. Click on the link for an example of a flipbook: the Lephie Manual. A flipbook can be made by using the program 3D Issue . This is a program that you will have to buy. You can get a license for one computer or for more computers. Before you buy the program ask the webmaster for advice with respect to the license and the possibilities to upload the flipbook to a website.

The use of the program 3D Issues is quite simple. I advise you to watch all tutorial videos before starting. The procedure in short: You have to prepare slides in for example PowerPoint. You save the file as a PDF which you upload in the program 3D Issue. In the program you must add the extras: videos, sound and so forth. These media files should be saved on your computer beforehand. In the program you have to make a link to these media files. When you are ready you can ‘build’ the flipbook.

The complete flipbook (includes different files) must be handed over to the webmaster. This might be a disadvantage. Once you made the flipbook you cannot adjust it online. You have to adjust it in the program itself and send all files to the webmaster again. An advantage is that the layout will not change. You can open the flipbook on your IPAD without any problems, which is another advantage.

With the current interest for viral media and viral marketing in academic research it can be helpful to be able to locate and analyse trends or hypes online. You might wonder, for example, when a certain video, image, or slogan became popular, when it reached its peak, and how long it took before the hype settled down again. In such a case, Google Trends can be a helpful tool to visually represent the course of a hype in the form of a graph.

In order to use Google Trends, simply visit the web page (http://www.google.com/trends/?hl=en), fill in a search term or phrase, and the program will show you the popularity of that term in the course of years and months. The graph shows ‘time’ (in the horizontal axis) and the ‘popularity of a search term’ (in the vertical axis). The number 100 represents the peak of its popularity. The number 0 refers to the moment when the popularity was at its lowest point. Below the graph you can see exactly where in the world the term or phrase was popular.

Sometimes Google Trends also provides links to news articles or blogs that can help further explain a sudden rise or fall in interest. Google Trends does not provide exact numbers. It does not show how many people exactly looked for a certain term or phrase in a certain period. It does show however clearly the ebb and flow of a search query’s popularity in relative terms and it can be a very useful tool to get a more general understanding of the trajectory of a hype. In my own research, I use Google Trends mainly to see when, and for how long, certain pop songs were popular online. With help of the program it becomes clear, for example, that ‘Gangnam Style’ (a song originally released in July 2012), suddenly picked up popularity as a search term in Google in September 2012, reached its peak in October 2012, and then lost popularity quickly in the weeks and months after. This can then be compared to official pop charts (Billboard) and video view counts (YouTube) to get a better understanding of the hype.

Google Trends can also be a helpful tool to look at trends which are not represented in regular charts, such as internet memes (popular online fads) or specific words or ‘slang’ in different parts of the world (such as the now famous ‘YOLO’, You Only Live Once). Sometimes it is suggested Google Trends can also be used to predict future events (such as an outbreak of the flu or a stock market crash), but these methods are still very much contested. It is difficult to say, for example, if a sudden trend is already at the peak of its popularity or if it will continue to rise in the future. As such it might be better to stick to using Google Trends mainly as a way of analysing the past or, at best, the present.

Websites can provide a lot of useful data for researchers but they can also be troublesome to rely on. An earlier post already explained how you can archive websites that you want to use in your research or refer to. But what if you want to know what a website looked like before you first visited it?

This is where the Wayback Machine comes in. The tool is very simple: you go to the Internet Archive (archive.org) and you enter the URL of the website that you want to see. You click on ‘take me back’, and, voila, you can see what the website looked like at various moments in the past.

The lay-out is really accessible. The top of the page shows you a time-line, indicating moments when a back-up was made. By clicking on the blue dots in the calendar you directly go to the website as it was on that day.

This is obviously a great feature for internet historians but it is also useful for other researchers. For instance I am interested in the governance of nanotechnology in South Africa. An important organization here is a lobby group called the South African Nanotechnology initiative (SANi). Say that I am interested in the leaders of this group. Currently their website shows that Martin Ntwaeaborwa is the president of this organization but there is no information on who was his predecessor. A quick glance on their website from 2010, however, learns that his predecessor was Leskey Cele. When I go back a bit further it shows that he, in turn, succeeded Ndumiso Cingo.

But its usefulness is not limited to such simple facts. For instance, the Internet Archive can also help to see whether organizations have changed the description of themselves and their mission, or I can check the list of members and see that in the early days the lobby group mainly consisted of scientists from universities but that throughout time more scientists from industry became a member. The Wayback Machine allows me to retrieve this useful information with very little effort.

There is an obvious limit to this. Archive.org is a non-profit organization and their resources are limited, so the Internet Archive does not make a back-up of every website every day. But usually you can find a couple of back-ups for every year that the website has been in existence and sometimes you can even find documents.

Since I discovered SlideRocket, I kept on recommending it to my peer-colleagues, who do not use Latex, Prezi, or Mac for fancy presentations, but instead use the standard Power Point slide presentations.

There are few clear advantages of using this tool to present your work at a conference:

• illustrative up-to-date graphic design of the tables and graphs;
• electronic sharing, editing and comfortable comments windows; networking with other sliderocket users;
• up to 50 people can host a meeting to view a presentation at the same time;

The disadvantages are:

• it is not well known, that is why your co-workers might be resistant to edit your presentation;
• in case the presentation is not converted in .pdf-format and is used online, some conference centers might not have internet access (even if less likely), which could hamper your presentation;
• for advanced features of the presentation, a yearly fee needs to be paid

Microsoft Word^® and PowerPoint^® are the most commonly used typesetting products around. And while using them offers a lot of advantages, everyone knows that formatting the layout of a document can be time consuming and quite a hassle. If you are frustrated with Microsoft Word^® and PowerPoint^® and you are running out of patience you may be interested in switching to LaTeX.

LaTeX is a typesetting language that allows you to create well-structured and attractive documents that, in terms of style, clarity and readability, have often been proclaimed as looking ‘more professional’ than the output of standard products. LaTeX allows you to design and construct a wide variability of documents, ranging from letters, articles and (technical) reports, to books, dissertations, and presentation slides.

To me the most prominent advantages of using LaTeX can be summarized by the following list:

• free of charge (you can download via this link)
• compatible with other software
• graphs look nice
• tables look nice
• no need to tinker with the document layout; only commands needed
• easy to typeset complex math formulas
• easy to make formatting changes
• easy to change document style
• allows one to focus on the content rather than the appearance of the document
• facilitates consistent presentation of the document
• easy to integrate different documents
• professional quality

However, as you can surely imagine… these benefits also come at a cost. More specifically, LaTeX has often been criticized for its lack of a user-friendly interface. Constructing tables may be time consuming and debugging can be tricky. And while there are tools to help you with this (e.g. the integrated environment TeXnicCentre or even Scientific WorkPlace), you will still face a steep learning curve when getting started. As such, it is recommendable to get started using LaTex when you have time (for example, when you are in the first year of your PhD). Despite these challenges, won’t need a template to get started. The Wikipedia page on LaTeX has all the information you will need. Also, LaTeX has a vivid community of practice where you can find help for (almost) all types of issues.

Keeping up to date with the newest literature in your field can be tough. You may have subscribed to mail lists, publishers’ guides or maybe you just browse the catalogues on your favourite key words over and over again. However, in a time where output is valued, and new journal titles pop up in abundance, new ways of surfing the net are vital.

Some ways of navigating cyberspace are quite easy and don’t demand much effort. I shall demonstrate one; the alert function on Google Scholar. The past years Google Scholar has advanced immensely and chances are that you already use it frequently. Still, the regular search function draws attention to the most popular texts rather than the newest ones. However, there’s a tiny button on the left that can help you.

Choose your alert wisely before you are flooded with e-mails. Any type of specific search or concept will do. In my case, “fandom” is a good call as the academic concept that describes the media audiences that I work on. Whether you work on “transnationalism” “peer to peer networks” “collective intelligence” or “asperger syndrome”, anything goes! The perks of this alert are that you get notified of any publications in journal titles that you would not normally browse for, as well as calls for papers, internal publications and conference papers. All you need to do is demarcate your field well and break it down. If you’re interested in a method, refrain from much broad methods like “ethnography”, but rather list researchers acquainted with the method that you use or sub-genres or combine key words such as “auto-ethnography; internet use”.

New publications will be e-mailed to you in short lists of ten results. And presto, you get a good overview of how scholars have been using the concept or method, what they’ve published so far. By glancing at the abstracts, and reading the most interesting texts, you can stay updated in a jiffy.

Nowadays, a lot of research draws on online sources, be it in the form of websites or documents that are available on the WWW. Although there are standard ways of citing online sources in academic articles, there is the practical problem of ‘dead links’. A researcher visits a particular website and makes a reference of it at time A, but articles (referring to the website) are only published at time B. When a reader wants to eventually check the reference at time C, the website might have been altered, moved or shutdown all together.

WebCite ® offers a free and simple solution to this problem. All you have to do is fill in the URL on a web form. WebCite ® archives a static copy of the submitted URL. This copy is available to all and can be used in citations. Let me give an example, to illustrate how the tool works. In my research, I study scientific debates on the risks involved in underground CO2 storage, a practice which is supposed to limit climate change. Part of this debate is played out online, as researchers comment on each other’s work in blog posts. The general manager of the influential ‘IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme’ responded for example to a controversial academic paper. He claimed that the broader geosciences community was “not in accord” with the conclusion of the article. I decided that I might want to refer to this blog post in a future article, so I submitted the original URL (http://www.iea-coal.org/site/2010/blog-section/blog-posts/ccs-and-earthquakes-not-as-likely-as-some-may-suggest) and my email address to WebCite ®. In turn, a copy of the URL was archived under: http://www.webcitation.org/68hpIGbZ9. This short, static URL can be used in citations.

The advantage of WebCite ® is its simplicity. No registration is required. Your email address is (for as far as I can tell…) only used to send a confirmation email when the submitted source is successfully archived. The downside is that it yields longer citations. In the example above, the final reference would be (using APA guidelines): Law, J. (2012). CCS and earthquakes: Not as likely as some may suggest…. IEA Clean Coal Centre. Retrieved June 26, 2012 from http://www.iea-coal.org/site/2010/blog-section/blog-posts/ccs-and-earthquakes-not-as-likely-as-some-may-suggest, archived under http://www.webcitation.org/68hpIGbZ9.

You might have experienced tasteless presentations made up of alphabet soup, Greek characters and verb-less phrases with ample bullet points, served in square-sized slides.  None of us want to see the audience dozing off while we are still in the “motivation” slide of our presentation! You might have heard of “death by bullet points”, a modern IT era causality particularly common in academic fields!

When we want to present something, be it a research finding, report or idea, it makes sense to illustrate it as a story, a mode of communication that is more familiar to the human kind than bullet points. However, the most common tool for presentation, Powerpoint, is not well suited for a human-friendly story telling.  If you think those who work with quantitative data are less concerned with presentation method and deficiencies of PowerPoint, take a look at a book called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within“, written by Dr. Tufte, a statistician at Yale University.

A new approach is increasingly  being increasingly welcomed by many presenters and audiences alike. The tools that use this new approach are generally referred to as Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) and the most popular one at the moment is Prezi, with more than 10 million users. Unlike PowerPoint, with a presentation tool like Prezi you do not need to chop up the information to fit uniformly sized slides. Instead, text, images and even videos are placed on a single, limitless canvas-like surface. Then the presenter decides how to position the items on the “canvas” to illustrate his/her points best. The items can be viewed at whatever size that suits best, zoomed out for big picture or up close for details. Once the items are placed, one can connect the dots in the story, i.e deciding how the presentation “flows” from one point to another. Another advantage of Prezi is that it liberates presenters from a predetermined deck of slides, which makes it difficult to remember the sequence. With Prezi, one can “fly” over the canvas, relying on spatial memory to access information when it is needed. Other advantages of Prezi is ease of sharing the presentation (and still controlling who you want to share with), it also gives you a glimpse of how many times your presentations have been viewed. One can choose to join the open community of Prezi users and benefit from the presentations others have chosen to share publicly.

Old habits die hard, same with the bullet point presentation habit. It takes some time to get used to working with Zoomable User Interface. At the beginning one might feel lost in zooming in and out and navigating the canvas, but one soon gets used to the new environment. To make transition to Prezi easier, you can import your existing ppt files (actually it is a good way to start). If you invest one hour or two to play around with Prezi, you would probably find it worth.

To start with Prezi, as with any web-based service  you need to open an account. The good news is that those with an academic email address one can benefit from the free academic account features, including more web-space and the possibility of storing private presentations. The default choice for showing Prezi is on the web.  However, if needed, Prezi presentations can be stored as file and be shown in offline mode too, e.g in places where there is no internet access. .

A number of videos and interactive guides are available at Prezi website that step-by-step illustrate step-by-step how to work with Prezi and build up your “Prezination” skills. Also here is a Prezi guide made in Prezi, that gives a glimpse on its main features.

Make peace with Prezi, don’t kill with bullet points!  ;-)