Monday, March 9, 2015

Week 7: #Twitterstorians

Discuss experience of trying to understand the AHA through Twitter
How could you use Twitter for your future historical work (broadly considered)? Will you?

Leah Wright, “Tweet Me a Story,” in Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching & Learning
  • What is Wright trying to teach her journalism students to do? Which of these skills apply to historical writing?
  • Is brevity a virtue or a vice for historians?
  • Did the student Tweeters tweet similarly to or differently from the scholars in the “Embedded Backchannel” article?
  • What role does Twitter have in news reporting now?
  • Why would you want to use Storify to compile tweets?
  • How could you use Twitter and Storify to engage students in an undergraduate history class? In a museum exhibit? In a digital history project?


C. Ross, M. Terras, C. Warwick, and A. Welsh, “Enabled Backchannel: Conference Twitter Use by Digital Humanists,” Journal of Documentation, 67(2) (2011): 214-237.
  • What did Ross et al. try to investigate about scholars’ use of Twitter for conferences?
  • What did they find?
  • What methodological problems did they encounter?
  • Is Tweeting in public fora such as conferences disruptive or fragmenting?
  • How do the peculiarities of Twitter make formal analysis difficult?
  • Page 219: “Tweets were divided into seven categories: comments on presentations; sharing resources; discussions and conversations; jotting down notes; establishing an online presence; and asking organizational questions.”
  • Page 221: “the presence of the @ sign signifies that the Tweet is part of a conversation.”
  • Page 221: “This lends support to the notion of a “90:9:1” rule (Nielson, 2006) for new social media, where 90 per cent of users are lurkers, 9 per cent of users contribute from time to time and 1 per cent participate a lot and account for the majority of contributions.”
  • Why would non-attendees use a conference hashtag?
  • Page 224: ‘Twitter challenges the traditional authorial boundaries that are associated with writing and the word “text”.’


#aha2105
  • Frustrated that non-historian groups are using the same hashtag? Try using advanced search to limit by date around the early January 2015 time of the AHA meeting.
  • Is there a way around reading the conference backwards in time?
  • To what uses do you see Twitter users putting the hashtag?
  • If you were going to use these tweets to write an essay about the meeting, how would you go about tackling the problem of reading and managing your notes?
  • Why do I go into skimming mode when reading Twitter instead of careful reading?
  • How do historians use Storify to communicate about #aha2015?
  • Should/Would you embargo your thesis or dissertation?




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