Scholarship and Social Media Aggregation @iMAP

One of the things I find most exciting about the iMAP program is how we're trying to reimagine scholarship in light of new technologies and practices. One aspect of this is exploring how social media can enable and extend the production of knowledge. After examining our research and creative practices, iMAP realized that, like most scholars, each of us was intermittently active on various sites and services across the Web.

Some of us used social bookmark services like Delicious; others blogged, either solo or in groups; most of us shared media like videos or images; and so on. The aggregate of all this constituted a massively distributed narrative telling the story of the program, the people in it, and the evolution of our research (as well as a great many other things).

Of course, so long as that narrative remained distributed, it was invisible -- and so we decided to do something about it. Over the summer, we built a website that aggregates XML/RSS feeds from all the services that iMAP students and faculty use -- from Twitter to Google Reader to blogs and social bookmarking sites. The result is a constant daily flow of posts, gathered from around the Web, reflecting the ongoing and evolving concerns of the iMAP program.

We think we're one of the first academic units to make use of social media aggregation; we're almost certain that we won't be the last. If you're intetested in implementing a similar system, check out this post on the iMAP site, or contact me.

UPDATE: Annoyingly, Blogger doesn't allow for single-author feeds; you can either grab a feed from the entire blog or just a single category, but not (at least as far as I can tell) for a single author. This makes aggregating out of Blogger kind of annoying. To work around this, I'm going to tag my posts with "remotedevice" (in addition to other content-specific labels) so that I can use the feed for that label to aggregate what I post here onto the iMAP site and my own site. If anyone knows of a better solution, please let me know!