The Donut's Quest: Altmetric for Books

Presented by Jean Liu at the 4:AM Conference in Toronto, 27 September 2017.

All words and pictures by Jean Liu.

Transcript

2. Once upon a time, there was a little sentient donut who wondered what people were saying about scholarly books online.
3. The little donut embarked on an epic quest across the scholarly landscape, hoping to map the online locations of a l l t h e w o r l d ’ s books.
4. He crossed the Taylor and Francis Mountain Range and ambled through the Springer Nature Woodlands…
5. He traversed the Elsevier Rapids, canoed around the venerable Wiley Islands, and surfed on the bustling Amazon River…
6. He even followed the mysterious nomadic books, who somehow managed to live in many places all at the same time! ? ?
7. T h e l i t t l e d o n u t searched tirelessly for the magical ISBNs – special numbers that identified each unique book…
8. Sometimes his X-ray metadata goggles would sometimes pick up anomalies… Sometimes he had to try to avoid his foe, the Bad Metadata Snowman! Bad metadata snowman The Bad Metadata Snowman liked to mess with the little donut’s metadata reading goggles, making it hard to track books and chapters…
9. But the little donut remained determined, knowing that ISBNs were the keys to identifying books, especially the ones that lived in many places. 978-0-674-97652-8 978-0-520-28394-7 978-0-19-879063-1
10. Finally, with a map of online book locations, the little donut returned home and logged into the Fantastical Altmetrics Database…
11. Suddenly, he was flung into a rainbow of online attention, flying past over 1 million mentions from mainstream news, policy, social media, syllabi, and more…
12. “This is wonderful stuff,” exclaimed the little donut. “I must tell the authors!”
13. And so he baked batches of rainbow donuts and set off again, this time with a new mission… to show hard-working authors all the online attention paid to their scholarly books…
14. The End jean@altmetric.com (Help us improve the “Fantastical Altmetrics Database” by joining our user testing programme!) Words and illustrations by Jean Liu