Information School News

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly has published a piece for Democratic Audit UK on the role of social media in the Kingsmill bread video row, which culminated in the resignation of Sinn Fein MP Barry McElduff last week. Dr Reilly argues that this incident illustrates how hybrid media logics operate in Northern Ireland, with professional journalists increasingly using social media such as Twitter not only to source stories, but also to hold politicians to account for what they post online. The post can be found here

Dr Ioanna Tantanasi has joined the Information School as a Research Associate. She will work with Work Package leader Dr Paul Reilly on the EU Horizon 2020 project 'IMPROVER.' Ioanna will help develop educational resources for the project and will also be responsible for co-authoring peer-reviewed outputs. We would like to welcome her to the Information School and look forward to working with her over the next nine months.

In 2017 the London School of Economics and Political Sciences Impact Blog received a total of 1,412,929 page views. PhD student Wasim Ahmed built on his 2015 post, which was also ranked among the top read, with a follow up post in 2017. The post was titled: Using Twitter as a data source: an overview of social media research tools (updated for 2017) . The post was ranked amongst most viewed in 2017 as well as being featured in the round up of top posts about communicating research with social media . In 2017 Wasim Ahmed represented the Information School at an expert panel at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) on the importance of promoting research beyond academia. Wasim Ahmed noted that engaging with blog led to increased page views, citations, and interest inside and outside academia related to Wasim’s PhD.

We caught up with some of our talented graduates at our Winter Graduation reception on 10 January to find out how they’ve been getting on since their courses finished. Priya Mehta MA Library and Information Services Management Priya was awarded an Information School prize for best overall performance in modules across the MA Library and Information Services Management (distance learning) programme in 2016/17. “The skills I’ve learned on the course have helped me for my future career” “I did my undergraduate degree here as well - I really like Sheffield. “I studied part time on a distance learning basis for my MA so I’m proud of how I managed to balance everything successfully, like working alongside studying (the MA Library and Information Services Management is geared towards people with information-related practical work experience, so they might already work in the field before starting their course). “It’s been great because actually, my work experience has helped me with m...

This week, Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly will be presenting two papers at the MeCCSA conference , which will be held at London South Bank University (10-12 January). The first one builds on Dr Reilly's research on social media and contentious politics in Northern Ireland, with the second based on data collected as part of the Horizon 2020 project IMPROVER . The programme for the conference can be found here and the abstracts of Dr Reilly's two talks can be found below: 1) Reilly, P. Loyalists against Democracy: Assessing the role of social media parody accounts in contentious Northern Irish politics Abstract: Parody accounts on social media have emerged as one of the key focal points for the debate of contentious political issues in Northern Ireland over the past five years. Some commentators have praised these accounts for providing a voice for the ‘silent majority,’ while others have condemned what they view as their crude stereotyping of working-class loyalist communitie...