For publicly funded research, institutions have an obligation to share their discoveries beyond the academy to see impact realised in society. At least I think so. But due to limited institutional support, and resources including funding, easily accessible content is not a priority.
Research videos and podcasts are seen as nice to haves.
For humanities scholars at least, isn’t social impact more important than academic impact? Can a peer-reviewed journal, as prestigious as it might be, compete with platforms like YouTube when it comes to engaging with and transforming society?
It’s understandable that some fields of research require an intermediary between a discovery and social impact. If we think about a medical breakthrough, alone, researchers can’t change the lives of millions of people. Collaboration must take place with clinicians and healthcare providers to see research impact realised. Or new developments in electrical engineering. This isn’t, generally speaking, research that people can apply in their own lives. Industry must implement the findings of research in their products and services to then provide value to society and realise social impact.
But this isn’t the case for many, or even most, disciplines.
“The QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) conducts world-leading interdisciplinary research for a flourishing digital society.”
A question I would ask scholars within the DRMC is: to bring about a flourishing digital society, is academic or social impact more important?
I talked about this with DMRC researcher and Senior Lecturer Dr Ehsan Dehghan1.
“We’ve spent time learning a lot of things. A lot of the money spent on us comes from people’s taxes, right? We owe it to the society to basically give back to them and communicate our research.”
This is particularly important to Ehsan.
Outside of his official research and teaching, Ehsan volunteers on ethnic radio to discuss AI in Persian. He finds these engagements rewarding and fun.
“I’ve had so much fun recording a program on AI, because I feel that I’m not limited to academic language there. I can have a chat with another AI expert, talk about very difficult things in a very easy language, and the feedback we get from our listeners is that oh, it’s the first time I’m understanding what unsupervised learning is.”
Ehsan contines.
“It does have a lot of benefits because you are, kind of, focussing on the medium as a medium for the audience. You adapt the language, you adapt the content, you adapt the format and you’ve got more freedom and creativity. That’s the benefit, because you can really communicate your research to the audience that, kind of, really matters.”
He discusses further.
“I study disinformation a lot, right, so I can easily talk to disinformation researchers and they nod, they say good job, we cite each other. But if we want to stop disinformation we have to actually communicate it to ordinary people who are exposed to disinformation.”
And,
“If I want my research to make sense to the general public, beyond academia, the impact is not in the articles or papers or books… The social impact is in the social communication.”
For all Ehsan’s efforts to engage audiences, provide value and achieve social impact he undertakes this work on his own time. He finds it rewarding.
But does this engagement count for much, at least professionally speaking?
"We require a change in institutional culture in a way. Because at the end of the day you’ve got a limited time, right? And if you have career aspirations you want to do things that count… when it comes to getting grants, or getting promotions… if it turns out that the university doesn’t even care whether you’ve done YouTube videos, or these kinds of things, it kind of, it doesn’t incentivise us.”
That’s problematic.
Because, for academics like Ehsan, it is through their own proactive engagement that social impact is achieved for their research2. This touches on something that I discussed with Dr Brendan Keogh, the potential for institutions to exploit their academics’ engagement efforts with little reward.
But according to Ehsan, progress is being made.
“The kind of culture and metricisation or metrification of those engagement metrics has been changing… It has been slowly changing towards more, a more qualitative understanding of these engagement metrics so that’s something good. And I would like to see it, of course, expedited… That change is needed, and I think it has been felt.”
So how can we, as well supported researchers, realise social impact from our research for a flourishing society (digital or otherwise)?
Public events aren’t my thing, so this is all from the perspective of online engagement with creative content. And these aren’t particularly mature or developed ideas.
Something researchers have talked about is the lack of acknowledgement for, or scholarly credibility of creative content like YouTube videos. Part of the problem is that most YouTube videos are absolutely lacking in scholarly credibility. But not all of them3. Another issue is that many academics have an idea of what they think research videos are4, with limited exposure to their true potential5.
In my own work, I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach this challenge of acknowledgement. But there’s also the pragmatic consideration or resources, budget, and ROI. One thought is that it’s possible for videos with a research translation focus to also function as marketing and PR. But it isn’t really possible for a marketing or PR video to achieve any significant knowledge translation67.
So I guess my next step is to think about the roots of scholarship. What the purpose of academic research even is. And then to consider how these same goals might be achieved through creative content, like YouTube videos. YouTube videos that can also serve a secondary marketing and communication purpose to achieve ROI through the raising of a researcher and their institution’s profile.
And work with researchers to produce research videos that will be acknowledged for their scholarly merit, while engaging audiences and realising social impact.
Check this out if you’re interested in making better research videos.
“Ehsan is a lecturer in Digital Media at the School of Communication, QUT, and a chief investigator at the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC). He received his PhD in Digital Media from QUT (2020), and has a background in Discourse Studies and Philosophy. His main research interests are in the inter-relationship of social media and democracy. Ehsan employs and has developed innovative mixed-methods approaches to studying communication on social media platforms, drawing from social media analytics, network analysis, corpus linguistics, and discourse theory. His recent work has focused on the dynamics of polarisation in a number of case studies in the Australian Twittersphere. His work includes the investigation of issues such as polarisation, political discussions on social media, 'fake news', information flows on platforms, and the dynamics of discursive struggles on social media.”
Obviously institutions do a lot to achieve social impact, such as DRMC’s public events at Woodford Folk Festival. But these tend to be the big things. And while these engagement and outreach activities are incredibly meaningful, there should still be support for individual academics to reach their own audience in their own way.
Then there are YouTube channels like Every Frame a Painting. Could it be argued that there is just as much scholarly rigour and academic merit in some video essays on YouTube? While institutions are still primarily focussed on using video for marketing and public relations, YouTubers are using video to share ideas and inspire audiences.
Ehsan described the research videos he’s familiar with: “Something is happening, someone appears with a camera, records it and then pushes the whole thing to YouTube. The decision is not ‘let’s make a YouTube video’. The decision is ‘we’re doing this thing so let's film it and put it on YouTube’.”
Just a few researcher YouTube channels to check out: Dr Becky, Medlife Crisis, and Unlearning Economics.
Another way to look at the dull nature and poor performance of the typical institution produced research video is to compare it to the way institutions approach podcasts. When a university produces a podcast, they typically follow some best practice for the format. Which just means they make podcasts the way people enjoy listening to them: they are entertaining, educational, thought provoking etc. But, I think due to decades of media and marketing at universities producing corporate videos and “news” type content, nobody seems to approach videos this way. As in, making videos that people will actually enjoy watching.
Thinking more about this, I needed to clarify my thoughts on research marketing.