Information School News

Dr Elisa Serafinelli presented the AESOP Guidelines for effective communication between Critical Infrastructure operators and members of the public during crisis situations at the IMPROVER project workshop that was held at the Joint Research Centre, in Ispra Italy on the 11th and 12th May 2017. Recommendations included: creating platforms and/or channels of communication that can provide feedback about CI operators’ services before, during and after a major incident. The guidelines was published along with the deliverables for task 4.2. Researchers, operators and the IMPROVER consortium joined forces for two days of presentations, knowledge sharing, and networking. The workshop was also an opportunity to present IMPROVER project activities and results in order to get feedback from critical infrastructures (CI) operators.

Wasim Ahmed , a Doctoral Candidate at the Information School, delivered a talk on communicating science through social media in collaboration with the University of Sheffield. Wasim shared his experiences on how he reached readers in over 136 countries and how he received over 250 thousand page hits across a number of channels within the first two years of his PhD. Wasim noted that the event had an extremely good turnout for a Saturday afternoon, and noted that the atmosphere of the Society of Spanish Researchers in the United Kingdom was very lively and friendly. Wasim would like to thank the organisers and especially Margarita Segovia Roldan and Jacobo Elies Gomez pictured below left and right respectively of Wasim below.

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly is giving an invited research seminar at the Faculty of Media & Communication at Bournemouth University on Wednesday 24th May, 4-5pm. The talk is entitled 'Social media and contentious parades in divided societies: Tweeting the 2014 and 2015 Ardoyne parade disputes.' The abstract for Paul's talk is below: To what extent do social media facilitate debate between Catholics and Protestants about contentious parades and protests in post-conflict Northern Ireland? Do these ‘affective publics’ tend to escalate or de-escalate the tensions caused by these events? This paper addsresses these issues through a qualitative study of how citizens used Twitter in response to contentious Orange Order parades in the Ardoyne district of North Belfast in 2014 and 2015. Twitter provided a platform for ‘affective publics’ who expressed a myriad of sentiments towards the Orange Order, in addition to the residents who opposed the loyalist parade passing the...