I’ve had two experiences with heavy research (working at the West Virginia Dialect Project (WVDP) and a summer 6-week class with the McNair Scholars program), so getting to work a little with research in this position wasn’t a completely new experience. However, it was very different in how specific the tasks were to the publishing industry.
While in the McNair program and in the WVDP lab, I was working with literature research and quantitative linguistics research respectively, at FiT Publishing I was able to work on two projects that I qualify as research.
Teamwork
FiT got the chance to work with a new project development program. The old version had some bugs that we weren’t happy with, but we weren’t sure transferring everything over to the new system would be worth the time and effort. So I explored the new software, looking specifically for a few features the old program didn’t allow for.
One of those features was a template. Since all books come into the process with the same expected timeline, it’s useful for us to just be able to enter the start date and have the rest of the process already filled in. The old software didn’t offer this, so all dates had to be entered manually. Teamwork, however, did allow for templates. So I designed one, based on my supervisor’s timeline, and we tested it out.
This was a really interesting experience, because it’s not something I’d ever get to explore on my own. Teamwork was a software the university bought and gave 5 projects to 4 different organizations within the College of Physical Activity and Sport Science (CPASS). It’s something I might gain experience in if I join an organization in the future that uses a project management software, but even then, it’s unlikely I’d be given the chance to explore the software and find out whether there are services that make it preferable over an old system, especially so early in my time with the company.
Emails
A new book was proposed on mindfulness in sports, so my supervisor found the names of authors who published papers on the topic. But their contact information wasn’t with their papers, so my supervisor had me look them up.
I assumed most faculty would be listed on their department website, like the English professors are in West Virginia University. However, I found this really wasn’t true. Quite a few of the authors on her list were from France, and I couldn’t find any of their names on their university website. However, I did find quite a few of them on ResearchGate, a website like Academia.edu, or a LinkedIn for professors where they can also upload their research and network.
This led to FiT Publishing creating a ResearchGate profile and reaching out to some authors that way. Other authors I found on Twitter, but not their emails. It was a really strange process that stretched my research skills, and I think helped me learn a lot of different ways to find things online. I had to try a lot of different ways to find what universities people worked for and then sometimes I had to try to figure out whether that “Ann Summers” (fake name) was really the Ann Summers that wrote the article about mindfulness and sports. It probably wouldn’t be company-ending for the company to ask the wrong Ann Summers if she was interested in editing a book on sport mindfulness, but I wanted to be really sure anyway.
This experience taught me a lot about finding people in a digital age and that I’ll need to go down some unexpected paths in whatever work I continue in. Finding authors on ResearchGate was completely unexpected, but so far it has worked out really well.
Kiersten Woods 