Visiting Scholars at the ScholCommLab
The ScholCommLab is pleased to welcome three visiting scholars to Ottawa this fall: Kate Williams, Enrique Orduña Malea, and Rodrigo Costas. Each of these visitors will spend a short stay at the lab, working with the team on a research project of their choosing. The hope is that these partnerships will pave the way for future collaborations, and interesting research in the long term.
“Collaborative research is always better,” says Stefanie Haustein, co-director of the ScholCommLab. “From my own experiences, I’ve learned that research stays are an ideal way to get new projects started.” That’s why we initiated the Visiting Scholar Program, which invites academics from all over the world to join the lab for a collaborative research stay.
“It’s easier to collaborate on a research project after an initial connection has been made,” Haustein explains, “but to really think about, discuss, and develop new ideas, it makes sense to work on things together in the same space.” Haustein says she was lucky enough to do a few research stays herself as a postdoc, which has instilled a strong belief in the power of collaborative research. “I’m still co-authoring and working with many of the people I met through these programs,” she says. “We’re hoping to achieve something similar through our Visiting Scholar Program.”
Kicking off the program, Kate Williams visited the lab from September 20 to 27. Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Centre, Harvard University, Williams is also an Economic and Social Research Council Future Research Leaders Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College Cambridge. During her time in Ottawa she kicked off a collaboration with the ScholCommLab about the structures and cultures of evaluation in policy research, and how altmetrics might be used to assess the societal, cultural, or economic “impact” of research.
Rodrigo Costas, a senior researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, will join the lab from Oct 5 to 16. Costas, who holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from the CSIC in Spain, leads the research line in ‘altmetrics’ at CWTS, where he focuses on developing new theoretical and analytical approaches to study the interactions between social media and science. Costas has been collaborating with members of the ScholCommLab for many years, and the team looks forward to continuing and strengthening that relationship this October.
Finally, Enrique Orduña Malea will complete a longer research stay from October 1 to 26. Malea is a Technical Telecommunication Engineer and an Assistant Professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) in the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation and History of Art (DCADHA). His main research lines are focused on Web Scientometrics, the analysis of Science and its main agents through the Web.
The ScholCommLab is thrilled to welcome these three distinguished scholars to the lab this fall, and to continue the Visiting Scholar Program with several new faces in the new year.
To find out more about the Visiting Scholar Program, visit scholcommlab.ca/join-us/visiting-scholar-program.