Information School News

Pictures shared on Twitter around the death and funeral of Margaret Thatcher will be examined as part of the world’s first academic research project studying the explosion of images now shared across different social media platforms and apps, led by Dr Farida Vis of the Information School. Thanks to smartphones, most people now carry a camera with them at all times and use it to document different aspects of their lives – sharing more than 750 million social media images daily. For the Thatcher research, academics have so far collected nearly 150,000 tweets containing images directly shared on Twitter and have downloaded 17,000 different images.  This research can shed light on how a range of different types of images are used on Twitter to express opinions, discuss news and collectively remember well-known people and events. The ‘Picturing the Social’ project is the first to explore the impact images of this kind have on society. This includes images taken during breaking

Dr Alex Peng of the Information School has been invited to speak on his smart cities research at BIT’s 3 rd Annual World Congress of Emerging InfoTech 2014 at the Dalian World Expo Centre in China. He will speak about the ‘Socio-technical Challenges in Building Future Smart Cities’ on Friday 20 June and will also deliver a speech on ‘Benefits and Challenges for Migrating ERP Systems to the Cloud’ .

Today Barbara Sen and Robert Villa of the Information School are presenting the results of a European Association of Health Information and Libraries project at the EAHIL Conference in Rome. A full report of the project can be found on White Rose Research Online .

With the recent announcement by HEFCE regarding the post-2014 REF the issue of open access is more important than ever. Open Access (OA) means the free, online access to peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers and research reports. Open access material is freely available for any users to download, copy, print or link to the full text without restriction, as long as the authors are properly acknowledged and cited. The University of Sheffield supports OA through its online repository, White Rose Research Online , which is shared with the Universities of Leeds and York. The repository aims to provide a long term home for research outputs as well as to promote the impact of this research along with disseminating it to new audiences, inside and outside academia. The incentives for OA are clear. OA can lead to new and innovative ways of using research through increased visibility and accessibility as White Rose Research Online is indexed by search engines such as Google.