Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to a special Lives & Letters mailing, which is concerned with two matters of WWW business. The first is that some prizes are being offered for answers to 2 questions about WWW website usage. The second is to distribute a DRAFT report on the use and impact of WWW project research, circulated for information purposes.
A. PRIZES OFFERED!
Two prizes in the form of copies of Liz Stanley’s recently published The Racialising Process, concerned with what the WWW research adds up to analytically, are being offered to the people who provide the best responses to one or other of the two questions below:
Question 1. Tell us what you think is the best bit of the WWW website and why. This can be a whole section, it can also be a specific item, it’s up to you to explain your choice.
Question 2. Tell us what feature you would most like added to the WWW website and why. Please provide some detail on this and if possible examples of good practice elsewhere.
Please send your responses by email and an attached word processing file, in not less than 300 words and not more than 800 words, and which can be accompanied by up to 5 screenshots if these would be appropriate to what you say. We are interested in substantial responses which will help in an enhancing current provision and planning new areas and tools that will be of use to people. Please make sure your name and email address is in your word processing file; if you are one of the two winners, we will contact you to ask for your postal address.
If you already have a copy of the book, despair not! Either a copy can be sent to a third party of your nomination, or else an alternative prize found.
Entries should be received by 1 October 2017 at the latest. The submissions will be reviewed by a committee of three, consisting of Liz Stanley, Emilia Sereva and one of the other people involved in project research over the last few years. Please send them to emilia.sereva@ed.ac.uk.
B. WWW RESEARCH USE & IMPACT
Draft Use & Impact report available here [PDF]
In the UK it has become standard practice to submit funding applications together with an impact strategy plan, and very oddly in the UK instance academic impact is not taken into account under this heading. Then when research is completed, both the impact strategy and also what happened in practice is taken into account in assessing the research and its reach and significance.
A draft document providing an overview of the use of WWW research and different aspects of its (non-academic) impact is attached. It is a companion to the Google Analytics on website use that we have regularly reported on. Following some likely revisions, it will later once finalised be archived in The Hub section of the website along with the Google Analytics Reports.
Best wishes
Liz (typed by my Dragon, please excuse any mistakes)
Prof Liz Stanley FAcSS, Professor of Sociology & ESRC Professorial Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh, UK. Most recent book (2017) The Racialising Process: Whites Writing Whiteness in Letters, South Africa 1770s-1970s (https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/embed?asin=B071W94HG1&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_reRnzbHF53852). For the Olive Schreiner Letters Online see www.oliveschreiner.org and for the Whites Writing Whiteness project go to www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk
Last updated: 19 September 2017
