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?