Demystifying DH Session 2 - 2014-15
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This document provides guidance on using social media for professional purposes in academia. It discusses that professionalization involves communication and social skills. Twitter is recommended as a starting platform due to its large and supportive community and flexibility. The document outlines best practices for using Twitter, such as reporting on work, asking questions, and sharing content. It also discusses using social media to engage in academic conversations, gain different perspectives, and build professional networks.
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Demystifying DH Session 2 - 2014-15
- 1. Managing and Professionalizing your Online Professional Identity
- 2. Our opening assumptions • Professionalization is communication. • Learning to be social is a skill in itself -- and a process, rather than something that happens instantly. • Your value as an academic is more than merely your finished articles or dissertation. • Scholarship is cyclical, not linear.
- 3. For me, community happens when people are genuinely invested in seeing each other succeed. This doesn’t happen by being nice to each other — although there’s nothing wrong with that, per se — but by recognizing and rewarding other people’s work. We depend too much in the academy on the currency of prestige and what some have called “hope labor” — the idea that it’s OK for your labor not to be rewarded now, because it may pay dividends down the road. The unpaid internship is the classic example of this. A durable community forms when people’s labor is valued and rewarded, and it worries me that in the excitement of doing digital humanities, people’s labor sometimes gets erased. This is why I won’t circulate unpaid internship announcements to our students and why I won’t accept volunteer help, even though we have no program budget to speak of. If labor is valuable, the university should reward it, and we all should recognize it, too. -- Miriam Posner
- 4. Applicable DH Values •process and product •collaboration •dissemination •transparency
- 5. How and why do academics interact? What are the results of those interactions? Which interactions result in productive conversations? Do “non-productive” interactions have results?
- 6. Most social media platforms are made to encourage sharing and/or conversing.
- 7. Sharing platforms • Encourage you to upload durable and sizable content • Provide infrastructure that encourages you to organize content in specific/customizable ways; and develop individual aesthetic design preferences • Allow others to navigate freely through present and past content as it accumulates
- 8. Conversing platforms • Encourage you to upload smaller, transient content • Provide infrastructure to help you interact, rather than organize • Focus on the present, and allow limited views of past content, especially to anyone other than you
- 10. Sharing platforms feel more similar to traditional academic publishing structures, but require greater commitments and more skill.
- 11. Conversing platforms are dissimilar to traditional academic publishing structures; but are more conducive to experimenting, and learning online communication techniques.
- 12. However, even conversing platforms require basic academic conventions if you want to come across as a professional.
- 13. While both sharing and conversing platforms are useful, you need to be skilled in conversing platforms in order to use sharing platforms to the greatest effect.
- 14. Why start with • It’s free! Twitter? • It’s flexible, but technologically simple to use. • It comes with a large, curious, and supportive community. • It provides you with a rehearsal space. • It allows you to control information overload easily. • It’s popular enough that junior and senior academics from a wide range of disciplines use it, and are accessible through it.
- 15. What do you do when you tweet? • Report on what you see, hear, or read • Ask questions (to specific people, or as part of thinking out loud) • Describe what you’re working on • Experiment with different ways of phrasing ideas • Agree, and disagree • Share content that you think other people should be aware of
- 16. What are you doing when you’re • Discover what otohenr p eTopwle airtet elearrn?ing and doing • See academic and public contexts side by side • Watch projects and ideas evolve through conversation • Find out about processes and practices at other institutions (academic and non-academic) • Support peers and colleagues by showing interest in their work • Find content through your contacts (rather than through search engines) • Learn through dialogue and interaction
- 17. Twitter syntax can be confusing… …but the basics are easy to master and will be most of what you need.
- 18. •hashtag: a searchable, hotlinked #topic •@reply: a tweet to a specific user, viewable by anyone following that user •.@reply: a tweet to a specific user that will show up for both of your followers •RT: retweet – an unchanged rebroadcast of someone else’s tweet •MT: modified tweet – indicates a retweet with changes
- 19. 5-minute tweet break! (Use the #dmdh hashtag)
- 20. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. --Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1941
- 21. Avenues of Access Burke characterizes participation in the conversation as open.
- 22. Avenues of Access For academics entering 70 years later, the open parlor becomes more akin to an endurance course.
- 23. How do you prepare for becoming active in the conversation?
- 24. Who is qualified to participate in the conversation?
- 25. How many conversations are there?
- 26. What are academics discussing? Academic labor Accessibility Race & Social Justice Contingencies & Budgets Privilege Comparative Pedagogies The Role of the Conferences Humanities
- 27. Where are academics discussing this?
- 28. Facebook
- 29. Twitter
- 30. Other Places •Tumblr •Academia.edu •Personal blogs •Aggregate blogs
- 31. Are academics hacking social media? Hacker: n. 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 7.One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. --The Jargon File, http://www.jargondb.org
- 32. Are academics hacking social media? How do you measure the value of social media? Commercial: through quantitative metrics, i.e., number of followers, site visits, etc. Academic: through qualitative results, i.e., confidence and experience gained, contacts made
- 33. Are academics using Twitter to hack the academy?
- 35. Social media can also allow you to engage with your subject matter in more affective ways:
- 36. Social media encourages the larger academic conversation to become more inclusive of multiple voices.
- 37. Participating in social media can help you become more aware of your own privilege, as well as broader issues of marginalization within academia.
- 38. Understanding how the academy manifests beyond your own immediate experience of it is central to academic professionalism.
- 39. PROFESSIONALISM: MORE THAN JUST GETTING A JOB
- 40. 5-minute tweet break! (Use the #dmdh hashtag)
- 41. What did you tweet? How?
- 42. Ingredients for social media participation • Academic interests that connect you with people with similar interests • Desire to engage with people you don’t know • Varied interests and playfulness, which allow more than academic interactions • Awareness, which allows you to choose how you’re using various tools
- 43. You can also... • Talk through your dissertation chapter • Discuss and see the success/failure/impact of your projects • Misunderstand, clarify, and iterate • Conduct/listen to public/semi-public forums on issues relating to academia • Work through teaching ideas with colleagues in your field
- 44. Building your own Twitter topic list What are you working on currently? What would you like to work on in the future? What’s the last thing that you read and enjoyed? What did you like about it? What’s a non-academic thing that has a connection with your academic interests? What would you like to know about using social media? What topics/activities could you help people understand? (academic or non-academic) What would you put on your Twitter profile page? What’s the most valuable advice you’ve been given recently? What’s a photo you took recently?
- 45. Basic Twitter Toolbox • Twitter’s List function: for filtering different types of content • HootSuite, TweetDeck: account management platforms for reading and managing multiple feeds • Storify: for archiving tweets and conversations • Tweet-a-friend: ask Twitter!
- 46. Ways to keep tweeting • Reading a Twitter list, or feed • Live-tweeting events • Participating in weekly chats #fycchat, #prodchat, etc. • Schedule Twitter time: 1 hour per day? 3 hours per week?
- 47. Considering other social media platforms? • Read and explore them first, in order to get a sense of the culture of participation. • Investigate your options for exporting/backing up your content. • Think about how your audience will find you, and what sort of commitment the platform requires of them. • Consider integrating with Twitter in order to promote and discuss your project.
- 48. “No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.” --Yoda, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (adapted)
- 49. Next time... • Non-threatening coding exploration • Learning to think like a programmer DMDH 3: How To Parse Code Before You Can Write It January 17, 2015
- 50. With thanks to our sponsors... Faculty sponsors: Tyler Fox, Ann Lally, Brian Reed, Miceal Vaughan, Stacy Waters, Helene Williams