Add Relationships: Professional mentor; co-author; co-researcher
sjamieso - Sat, 10/20/2012 - 00:19
Forums:
I love the site, but I think it needs a few more relationships. Here are the options I wanted as I created my profile:
1) Professional mentor; this is the most important. Who validated us as scholars? To whom do we turn in times of crisis? Who offered us great advice? etc
2) co-author;
3) co-researcher
Thanks!
thanks for the suggestions!
Thanks, Sandra! "Co-author" is already there, under "worked alongside" -- or, at least, we have two related types, "co-author of an article" and "co-author of a book." I realize that there are probably other important things one can co-author (e.g. how do we indicate the long-term collaboration of designing digital projects like this website?). Maybe "co-researcher" would be one way, though I could also see an argument that it's not quite right. Could you say more about what kinds of projects you'd imagine if you saw a co-researcher relationship between two other people in the tree?
The "professional mentor" relationship, though I agree it's important, is also trickier, especially if we consider "who offered us great advice," which could mean a single conversation at a conference that changed one person's life but the other doesn't remember. One debate we had internally was about the potential muddiness of determining and displaying feelings of mutuality, or lack thereof; at least so far, we've opted for more objectively verifiable relationships.
What we do have, though, is a catch-all category: mentored "as a formal advisor of a type not listed above." We stuck the "formal" in there as a nod to the verifiability, but in practice, it's a way of signaling a relationship of any sub-type we may want to add in later.
how about informal mentoring?
I've worked with a number of students as an informal advisor/mentor -- I think these relationships are important to capture here, although if verifiability is a concern, you could have the system hold the reference until the mentor (or mentee) approves it. I think it would also be useful to have some way of marking collaboration on projects (as well as books and articles); if you limit the types of work in the system to two main traditional forms, it keeps other kinds of work invisible. Also, having just finished up at the Cs -- how about a co-presenter of a conference presentation as a 'worked alongside' option?