ReCon 2016: Research Communication & Data Visualisation

This is a guest post authored by Graham Steel.

We are looking forward to welcoming you to ReCon (Research Conference) in Edinburgh this June! ReCon (Research Conference) is designed to raise and discuss current issues to do with research communication in academia and beyond. These issues range from the use of metrics for evaluating research, access to publications, data visualisation, tools for researchers to how this affects careers and incentives for researchers. ReCon will include speakers from publishers, people working in outreach, academics, and founders of startups working in the research space.

A number of factors are influencing the way we communicate research in 2016 including new technologies, publishing policies, the variety of research outputs and the assessment of research impact. This conference aims to explore the evolution of research communication and the rising interest in and requirement for data visualisation. What incentives are required for researchers to change how they communicate their work? How can researchers present and share their work in a visual format and what tools are they required to learn?

Data visualisation is a field that spans all disciplines, yet it is not always done well and visual representations are not used as often as they could be. This may be due to time constraints, publishing limitations or lack of training in the correct graphics or statistics software; how can we combat these issues? How can researchers use visualisations to communicate their work and complement their publications?

In addition to the main conference this year (24th June), we will be holding an optional free research communication hackday the following day.

We ran three previous highly successful ReCon events on disruption in publishing in June 2013, June 2014 and June 2015 at the University of Edinburgh. Each year, the conference attracted over 200 delegates including entrepreneurs, students, investors, freelancers, writers and publishers and was broadcast live on the web. You can view the videos from last year’s conference and a summary of the hackday on our blog.

To register to attend this event, just click here.

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We have a number of sponsors for the Conference/Hackday including Digital Science!

Organisers

Joanna Young

Jo is the founder and director of The Scientific Editing Company, a publishing services  and researcher training consultancy. Prior to this, she completed her Ph.D. and  postdoctoral research at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of several research publications, various blog posts and many tweets. She also runs the Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club and an annual careers conference for PhD students and postdocs, NEON21.

Graham Steel

Graham  has been actively involved in Patient Advocacy work in his spare time since  2001.  More recently, his activities have been focused mainly on Neurodegenerative conditions such as Motor Neurone Disease. He is also involved in advocating for Open Access/Science/Data and acts in advisory capacities to the Open Knowledge,  and the Public Library of Science (PLOS). As of January 2015, he acts as Community Manager (now Social Media Manager) for ContentMine.

Jan Wessnitzer

In addition to being a co-founder at technology company Machines with Vision, Jan manages the data analysis projects at The Scientific Editing Company. Prior to this, he  completed his Ph.D. and postdoctoral research in robotics and machine learning at the  School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where he was involved in several open source projects and authored many research papers.