Researchers and the IndieWeb: Owning your presence online
I’m starting a series called
/lost+found/netto highlight corners of the web that deserve sharing.
When I first applied to PhD programs, I emailed a professor who wanted a link to a personal website instead of a traditional CV. So, I put together this site. Personal websites for researchers have been around for decades, and it’s a great way to showcase your research independent of your institution. Today, though, our academic identities are at risk of being fragmented across different sites, publishers, and tools. There’s GitHub for tracking your open source code contributions, Web of Science for marking down peer reviews, and sites like Google Scholar and Scopus that index your publications.
You can take control of your academic identity online using tools created by the IndieWeb, a community of people focused on making independent personal websites that give you control over your data. It’s decentralized - there’s no one way to be a part of the IndieWeb, but there are some common principles shared among the community.
What can I do using the tools of the IndieWeb? I can respond to other people’s sites using webmentions, and their responses appear on my site. I syndicate posts from my website out to social media like BlueSky and Mastodon and receive likes and comments back on my site using Bridgy and BridgyFed. I’ve set up a way to post directly to my site from my phone using a Micropub server.
To get started, check out the guide on the IndieWeb’s wiki, which is a handy resource. There’s plugins available for many IndieWeb tools to integrate into however you are creating and hosting your website. The IndieWeb IRC channel on #indieweb on irc.libera.chat (also bridged onto Discord and Slack) is welcoming and helpful.
There’s room for innovation in bringing IndieWeb principles to researchers. Could we post preprints on our websites and automatically send them out to preprint servers like arXiv? What would it look like to automatically draw in papers indexed from Scopus onto our CVs? Can we share and respond to papers independent of any individual social media platform? A Google Scholar page doesn’t have to define you as a researcher - with the IndieWeb, give your work a home.
Webmentions:
Likes
Like this post on any social media syndication links listed above or using Webmentions.
Reposts
Other
No webmentions were found.
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{% for webmention in webmentions %}
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{% if webmention.author %} {% capture author_id %} {% if webmention.author.photo %} {% capture title_attr %} {% if webmention.author.name %} title="{{ webmention.author.name }}" {% endif %} {% endcapture %}{% endif %}{% endif %} {% if webmention.author.name %} {% endif %} {% endcapture %} {% if webmention.author.url %} {{ author_id }} {% else %} {{ author_id }} {% endif %}
{% if webmention.content %} {{ webmention.content }} {% else %} {{ webmention.title }} {% endif %}
{% endfor %}
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{% for webmention in webmentions %}
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{% if webmention.author %} {% capture author_id %} {% if webmention.author.photo %} {% capture title_attr %} {% if webmention.author.name %} title="{{ webmention.author.name }}" {% endif %} {% endcapture %}{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
Like this post on any social media syndication links listed above or using Webmentions.
{% endif %}-
{% for webmention in webmentions %}
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{% if webmention.author %} {% capture author_id %} {% if webmention.author.photo %} {% capture title_attr %} {% if webmention.author.name %} title="{{ webmention.author.name }}" {% endif %} {% endcapture %}{% endif %}{% if webmention.content %} {{ webmention.content }} {% else %} {{ webmention.title }} {% endif %}
{% endfor %}
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{% for webmention in webmentions %}
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{% for webmention in webmentions %}
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{% endfor %}
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{% for webmention in webmentions %}
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{% if webmention.author %} {% capture author_id %} {% if webmention.author.photo %} {% capture title_attr %} {% if webmention.author.name %} title="{{ webmention.author.name }}" {% endif %} {% endcapture %}{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
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{% endfor %}
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{% for webmention in webmentions %}
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{% if webmention.author %} {% capture author_id %} {% if webmention.author.photo %} {% capture title_attr %} {% if webmention.author.name %} title="{{ webmention.author.name }}" {% endif %} {% endcapture %}{% endif %}{% if webmention.content %} {{ webmention.content }} {% else %} {{ webmention.title }} {% endif %}
{% endfor %}
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{% endif %}