Information School News

The University of Sheffield has opened its annual competition for PhD scholarships. If you have an idea for some high impact research this could be your route to get funding to do a PhD at the Information School. At the forefront of developments in the information field for more than fifty years, the Information School is a stimulating and exciting place to do your research. We were top in our category for the quality of research environment in the government evaluation of research quality, the REF. To succeed in the scholarship competition you will need a strong academic track record and a great research idea. It is recommended that you work with a member of staff in the Information School to develop your proposal to maximise your chances of being successful in the scholarship competition. Our expertise encompasses the range of information work including data science, digital societies, health informatics, information, knowledge & innovation management, information retrieval, inf...

My name is Catherine Hoodless, and I am a first year PhD student in the Information School. After only a month into my PhD studies, the Relationship Management Group for HE Libraries were inviting LIS students and early career professionals to apply for funded places to attend their 2nd Relationship Management Conference at Lancaster University. After looking at the conference programme and realising just how many of the presentations taking place related to my research into the use of functional vs subject teams in HE libraries, I had to apply, and I was delighted to be informed that I had been awarded a place. This conference is relatively small and new (the first having taken place at the University of Stirling two years earlier) but it had a very friendly atmosphere, was extremely will organised and was crammed with interesting presentations and workshops. The key theme of the conference was set out in the opening session where delegates were asked to discuss and share their ch...

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly's CascEff research report on the role of social and traditional media in crisis communication has been cited in the UK Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology POSTnote 564: Communicating Risk. Dr Reilly was also one of several UK academics to be an invited reviewer of this publication. It can be downloaded here .

Online Information Review, the international, ISI listed journal edited by Jo Bates, Andrew Cox, Robert Jäschke and Angela Lin from the Information School has just announced three Calls For Papers for Special issues on: Social Media Mining for Journalism http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/news_story.htm?id=7570 Lifelogging Behaviour and Practice http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm?id=7544 Open-access mega-journals: Continuity and innovation in scholarly communication http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm?id=7545

Information School Lecturer Dr Jo Bates has been invited to join the editorial board of Big Data and Society, the leading journal in the field of data studies. BD&S is published by SAGE and Dr Bates' term on the board is three years in duration. You can access the journal here .

My name is Wasim Ahmed , and I am a doctoral student at the Information School. I recently attended the launch of the Information School research magazine Inform . This blog post highlights my key take-homes from the launch of the research magazine. Information is all around us and due to technological developments information is more readily available at speed. Our research at the Information School focuses on understanding the power of information and how it affects people, organisations, and society. The new research magazine Inform provides a cross-section of the research within the school, stories about our research, impact, recent successes, facts and figures, research culture and environment, and provides an overview of staff and students within the school. The event highlighted the international reputation of the department for world-class research. It was wonderful to see the range of multi-disciplinary areas of research which the school undertakes. The event a...

The library and information association, CILIP, have recently launched a new publication for members of their organisation, entitled 'Information Professional'. Information School lecturers Dr Jo Bates and Paula Goodale and PhD student Penny Andrews are featured in the publication in an article about their research project 'The Secret Life of a Weather Datum'. The project aimed to pilot a new approach for better understanding and communicating how values and practice influence the transformation of weather data on its journey from production through various contexts of big data reuse. You can read the article here.

Last week, Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly, along with Dr Tina McGuiness from the Management School, ran an event for local schools entitled 'Could social media help you during a disaster?', as part of the 2017 ESRC Festival of Social Science. The description of the event was: Can social media help build disaster resilience in Sheffield? What role, if any, should social media users, and young people in particular, play in efforts to mitigate the effects of these incidents in their communities and help keep themselves and others safe? Recent research has suggested that social media can help emergency services during human made and natural disasters through the ‘push and pull’ of crisis information. The eyewitness perspectives shared by citizens on social media can help first responders build situational awareness and identify those areas most in need of assistance. At the same time, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can provide emotional and material support to those affec...

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly has been appointed Associate Editor for Palgrave Communication s, a fully open-access, online journal publishing peer-reviewed academic research across the full spectrum of the humanities and social science. Dr Reilly will be working with colleagues within the Editorial Boards for Communication, Film, Culture & Media, and Political Science and International Relations. Congratulations to Dr Reilly for this new appointment!

Dr Paul Reilly and Dr Elisa Serafinelli presented the AESOP guidelines at the 5th International Crisis Communication Conference that took place in Lisbon, Portugal between 19-21 October, 2017. The list guidelines for effective crisis communication has been developed within the Horizon 2020 funded EU project IMPROVER . The paper discussed how critical infrastructure resilience can be enhanced through the communication practices of critical infrastructure operators. In its conclusion,the paper proposed a set of guidelines (AESOP) for critical infrastructure operators to implement in order to increase critical infrastructure resilience through the use of both traditional and digital media.

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly is currently looking for a full-time Research Associate (fixed term for 22 months, to start as soon as possible with provisional end date of 30 May 2018, and probable extension to 31 August 2018) for the EC Horizon 2020 project IMPROVER: Improved risk evaluation and implementation of resilience concepts to critical infrastructure.’ The closing date for applications is 22 November 2017 and further details on the role can be found here If you have any questions about the role please contact Paul at: P.J.Reilly@sheffield.ac.uk