Social media activities for NSF Synergistic Activities

social_media_nsf.md

Communication and Education via Social Media

I actively maintain Twitter and GitHub accounts, as well as a blog to interact with other scientists both junior and senior, and provide links to works that may be useful to others, as well as reply to questions about programming in the R statistical language, often advising users I do not know who use the #rstats hashtag. Interactions on Twitter directly resulted in my (and others) suggesting improvements to the draft version of Ten Simple Rules for Taking Advantage of Git and GitHub in PLOS Comp Bio, resulting in my co-authorship of a paper with 19,000 views and 9 citations. My Twitter activities also directly lead to my involvement in the ROpenSci organization. I was accepted to attend the ROpenSci un-conference in May 2017, which resulted in the generation of the testRmd R package (authored with 3 others), as well as my open review of the gitlabr R package, which is expected to improve an R package already used by many to interface with the GitLab software hosting platform. Via GitHub, I provide publicly available R packages that may be used for copying large amounts of data (waitcopy), or installing a large number of R packages into a new R library (reup). I have used my blog (https://rmflight.github.io) to provide long-form software tutorials as well as commentary on my own and others research activities.