PHD – The Orbital

A simple tweet with the right hashtags will result in students and academics providing answers to the most obscure of questions. For the most part, academic Twitter serves its purpose of connecting people with similar research interests. It has, in many instances, resulted in collaborations between academic Tweeters on articles and books. Nonetheless, disseminating research through the medium of Twitter has its downfalls, namely due to the culture of destructive criticism and satire. People on Twitter have the incessant ability to dissect and ridicule work, revealing the darker side of academic social media: unwarranted criticism. Reviewer two tends to be considered the harsher critic during peer reviews of academic articles, journals and books; however, in recent times, the Twitter re...

A PHD student here at Royal Holloway has been awarded with the ‘Innovation Award’ at this year’s AHCR Research Film Awards. The winners were announced earlier this month, with Iris Zaki’s short documentary Shampoo Summit winning overall. Zaki directed, produced, wrote, edited and filmed the documentary by herself. The documentary was filmed in the Israeli city of Haifa, where Zaki is originally from. Zaki got a job in a hair salon in the city and subsequently placed a camera on the edge of a washbasin so that it would face a customer as their hair was being shampooed by Zaki. Judges said that this was an “innovative technique” to use in this type of filming. Zaki would talk to the clients about a myriad of topics, including but not limited to, Israeli history and politics, general li...

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Academic Twitter: the Good, the Bad and the Unwarranted Twitter Review

Innovative Documenting: RHUL Student Wins Film Award