Twitter – Next Generation Humanities PhD

Graduate Students and the Potential of Twitter

Stephanie M. Blalock is Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Iowa and Associate Editor of the Walt Whitman Archive. She artfully uses Twitter to spread the word of new Whitman discoveries. Her twitter handle is @StephMBlalock.

Dr. Ivan Kreilkamp’s “flipped lecture” on the use of Twitter in academia rightfully depicted the social media platform as a very public medium that at once has the potential to connect graduate students to scholars in their respective fields and–for better or for worse–to stand as a perpetual archive of the personal opinions they choose to share at any given moment. On the one hand, as Krielkamp and audience members pointed out, Twitter facilitates networking and community formation, allowing scholars and students to participate in social activism, publicize their own work, amplify the efforts of others, and benefit from having their efforts amplified in return. In an academic climate in which graduate students are increasingly and astutely advised to be entrepreneurial, to create professional online profiles in numerous online venues, and to make connections in and beyond their chosen fields long before tackling the academic job market, Twitter and the act of “tweeting” can play a key role.

On the other hand, Kreilkamp and attendees were also right to advise graduate students and, for that matter, anyone in academia, to exercise caution and to think carefully about the implications of rapidly firing off tweets in the heat of the moment. None of us wants to become famous (and jobless) in the way of Justine Sacco after what the New York Times called “one stupid tweet.” But listening to Kreilkamp and his audience pushed me to think about how graduate students and faculty have used or garnered publicity on Twitter, and, in this post, I want to briefly offer current graduate students a few examples.

In 2010, Dr. Jessica Lawson, then a PhD candidate in English at the University of Iowa, created the Twitter persona “Feminist Hulk”; the account’s profile picture features Hulk holding a copy of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Feminist Hulk’s tweets are commentaries on gender and feminism and have captured the attention of the Ms. Blog, Salon, and NPR, among other media outlets. During the government shutdown in 2013 when WIC (Women, Infants, and Children food and nutrition service) faced uncertain funding and reduced services, Lawson created an online resource to help families find formula and baby food, and turned to the 74,000+ followers of her Feminist Hulk account to help.

In February 2017 and April 2016, Zachary Turpin, a University of Houston graduate student, saw his research go viral, both in print and on online news sites, with his work shared widely on both Twitter and Facebook. Turpin’s most recent discovery is a lost novel by Walt Whitman entitled Life and Adventures of Jack Engle. Turpin had already uncovered “Manly Health and Training,” a previously unknown journalistic series by Whitman. The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (WWQR, @WaltWhitmanQR), an open access online journal, published both the novel and the series in full, as well as introductions to each work by Turpin. The discovery of Jack Engle was covered by The New York Times, as was that of “Manly Health and Training.” Articles on these discoveries were published on online news sites in Germany, Estonia, Slovenia, Romania, Finland, and Israel, among other countries, and the news was tweeted and shared repeatedly in the days following the publication of the works in WWQR. As of March 2017, “Manly Health and Training,” has been downloaded more than 28,000 times from the University of Iowa’s digital repository, while Jack Engle has more than 29,000 downloads. Turpin’s introduction to the health series has more than 6,500 downloads, while his introduction to Jack Engle has been downloaded more than 4,000 times. In each of these cases, Turpin’s research appealed both to academics and to Whitman’s large popular following, and the publicity generated by Twitter and Facebook posts helped to increase the number of people who encountered his scholarly work and Whitman’s lost publications.

In October 2016, the Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed William J. Richardson (@HoodAcademic), a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern, who started the #TheseAcademicHands hashtag, which called for Twitter users to tweet out examples of racism and microagressions in academia. The numerous responses are now collected in a “Twitter Moment” that documents instances of “Racism and White Supremacy in the Classroom.” Among the articles and experiences tweeted with this hashtag was the recent story of Suffolk University sociology major Tiffany Martinez, a Latina student, who reported that her professor had returned an essay, circled the word “hence,” and told her “This is not your language,” in addition to writing, “‘Please go back & indicate where you cut & paste,’” implying that Martinez had plagiarized the paper. Martinez’s blog post about the incident went viral in its own right.

Again, the aforementioned examples are not meant to be comprehensive, and they are not the only ways graduate students can use Twitter. But, taken together, they do show how Twitter can help graduate students to build communities of shared experience in and beyond academia; to participate in social activism; to increase the visibility of their experiences and worldviews; to bring their academic interests to bear on larger social, political, cultural, and economic issues; and to demonstrate the relevance and the public engagement aspects of their work. These examples also raise important questions that are worthy of further consideration and discussion. I would like to end with a series of such questions:

What does a replicable model of the successful use of Twitter by graduate students look like?
Can or should graduate students draw search committees’ attention to their use of Twitter for engaging in academic conversation, for making connections to scholars within and beyond their fields, and for demonstrating the public appeal of their academic research? And how much weight, if any, should such use of social media be given in hiring decisions for academic or even alt-ac jobs?
How can graduate students and faculty be given credit for public engagement via Twitter or other forms of social media? Should this be part of a graduate student’s portfolio? A faculty member’s tenure portfolio? Or does such an effort to draw attention to social media use risk becoming a conversation solely about the numbers; will we be measuring success on Twitter by giving credit for number of tweets, number of followers, and number of retweets, or for less quantifiable types of impact?
Is the small chance of going viral, of being visible and recognizable on Twitter, worth the risk of being publicly shamed or losing a job opportunity as the result of one all-too-hastily-typed tweet?

Twitter and the Academy: Reflections of a Job Candidate on Her Use of Social Media

Jennifer Janechek

Jennifer Janechek, a PhD candidate in English at the University of Iowa, is completing a dissertation that reveals how Victorian and modernist writers engaged with telephonic technologies.

If George Eliot were living today and her sense of determinism shifted from ethical to technological, she might modify her famous line in Adam Bede to read, “Our tweets determine us, as much as we determine our tweets.” Such a sentence captures my anxiety as a social media user who is currently on the academic job market: we make the initial decision to tweet, but then our tweets can get decontextualized, misappropriated, and plagiarized. Or they can encounter audiences we didn’t anticipate, and take on lives of their own.

In his conversation about Twitter communication with the UI Next Gen PhD community, Professor Ivan Kreilkamp addressed both the opportunities and the risks associated with social media. The session reframed the way I conceive of Twitter (and social media in general) as an academic, and gave me new impetus to integrate this platform into my daily writing practice. Below are three of Kreilkamp’s points that I found particularly generative:

Twitter is highly effective at facilitating “soft” networking.

Kreilkamp pointed out that Twitter gives graduate students access to contexts we might not have imagined possible. If someone with a large Twitter following retweets us, our tweets can reach audiences otherwise unthinkable (hence the need to be mindful of our postings—see point three below). Also, we can “attend” conferences virtually if there are actively tweeting participants and a conference hashtag (I’m following #NAVSA2016 as we speak!). In addition, Twitter connects us with scholars we might not have had the opportunity to meet under other circumstances, and it enables us to continue conversations with people we meet at conferences or other events. Whereas I would never send a professor whom I’ve never met a friend request on Facebook, nor would I feel comfortable sending him or her an unsolicited email, I have unabashedly followed numerous scholars on Twitter. Because Twitter provides a less “personal” setting for the exchange of ideas, I am able to engage in conversations with academics to whom I might not otherwise have access—giving me greater visibility, sure, but also enabling me to participate in timely discussions with faculty and graduate students around the world. Indeed, Twitter has given me a better sense of the state of my discipline and its subfields, since I have been able to follow trending topics and watch major debates unfold.

Create lists in Twitter to start conversations of which you want to be a part.

I identified with students in the audience who spoke of concerns about sounding smart enough or professional enough on Twitter, a particular challenge when one is constrained to a 140-character limit. But Kreilkamp encouraged graduate students to converse with other scholars, emphasizing that Twitter is a “social” medium rather than an archive of self-promotional tweets. Those tweets do have their place, to be sure—after all, Twitter is a great way to publicize one’s work—but they should not dominate one’s Twitter feed. I was particularly struck by Kreilkamp’s idea of using “lists” to tailor Twitter feeds to specific research and/or teaching interests, in this way taking an active role in creating and maintaining scholarly conversations. As Kreilkamp emphasized, Twitter discussions can fuel work aimed at both academic and broader audiences, triggering ideas for different kinds of writing.

Be mindful that tweeting can carry very real implications.

Both Kreilkamp and the audience referenced Twitter scandals and instances of public shaming that have resulted from ill-advised or misconstrued tweets. We discussed the possibility of having two accounts—one personal (and potentially pseudonymous) and one professional. However, there is still a risk, if you choose the former option, that someone will discover your private account. I approach Twitter as a space for intellectual exchange and social activism, reserving my more personal stories or ideas for Facebook—all the more so now that I am on the job market and have to consider how each tweet contributes to my digital identity. But the question and answer session caused me to scrutinize my pedagogical use of Twitter. Although I have been cautious in having students use Twitter, making this use optional, recommending that students adopt pseudonyms for their Twitter handles, and reminding them of the various audiences (e.g., potential employers) who might read their tweet history, I left Kreilkamp’s talk with a renewed sense of the need to be mindful of how my students use social media. I think Twitter provides a great place for students to share reactions to readings in real time and to extend large-group discussions beyond the classroom, but because I teach courses that often address contentious topics, it’s especially important for me to emphasize to my classes the public (and permanent) nature of social media.

I have always had an on-again, off-again relationship with Twitter, never knowing quite how best to use it. The question and answer session with Dr. Kreilkamp gave me concrete ideas for how to make (careful) use of the unique writing and networking space it offers. See you in the #twitterverse—tweet to me @jjanechek!

Tweeting Dangerously

gooblar-head-shot_2016_4x4-web_sq — David Gooblar, Lecturer, Department of Rhetoric

David Gooblar, Lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric, is the author of The Major Phases of Philip Roth (Continuum, 2011). He writes a column on teaching at chroniclevitae.com. His twitter handle is @dgooblar.

It is impossible to talk about Twitter, it seems, without talking about danger. In the first minutes of Ivan Kreilkamp’s “flipped lecture” on Twitter and the academy on Tuesday, the following subjects were broached: the lack of control one has after a tweet makes its way into the world; the “context collapse” that can allow viral tweets to be easily misinterpreted; the tendency of some graduate students to maintain two twitter accounts (one professional, one personal) to be on the safe side; and Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and the case of Justine Sacco, who tweeted a joke before boarding a plane, flew to South Africa, and disembarked to find herself a newly jobless pariah. Tweeting, it would seem, is a dangerous activity, best practiced with an abundance of caution.

I think this sense of danger arises from something particular to Twitter’s design: it feels private, but it definitely is not. Kreilkamp mentioned a number of times the “conversational” appeal of Twitter, how the medium is filled with what Walter Ong called “secondary orality.” We type tweets quickly, often on our phones, and use the informal vocabulary and syntax of texting. As well, the only people reading our tweets, the vast majority of the time, are the people who have elected to follow us. For most of us, this is a small number of people. This can fool us into acting as if we are at a cocktail party, speaking freely to people we can trust. Even if we can’t trust them—they’re just a handful of people.

But if using Twitter is like conversing at a cocktail party, it’s like conversing at a cocktail party on a reality show. We are free to confess our most shameful secrets to our fellow contestants, but we’d be wise to remember the cameras recording us, all the time.

Every tweet you compose and send out into the ether remains inscribed on your profile page, searchable for as long as the service remains online. In addition, the Library of Congress wants to archive every tweet ever sent (although, with more than 500 million tweets a day being added to the archive, it is by no means certain that the project will succeed). So even if you delete that embarrassing joke you made back before you had any followers, you can’t be sure someone won’t find it someday and use it against you.

This built-in confusion—the way Twitter masks its publicness—leads directly to the cautionary tales that make us want to warn graduate students to be careful. Of course we have no such fear of scholarly articles, say, or other kinds of public writing. We don’t warn our graduate students about the necessity of maintaining professional personae when they give conference papers—there’s no need to. When any of us speak or write publicly, we accept that there are certain risks we take. We are free to express whatever dubious personal opinions we have, but we understand that someone out there might be listening, and they might not like those opinions.

For those who are on or will soon be on the job market, caution seems wise. But this caution is medium-independent: it wasn’t Twitter that caused the University of Illinois to rescind its job offer to Steven Salaita; it was that the university’s chancellor objected to what Salaita said publicly.

Whatever else Twitter is—promotional megaphone, generative writing lab, networking tool, community space—it is, first and foremost, a public medium. If we are to help graduate students, or indeed anyone in the academy, navigate the world of social media, we could do a lot worse than to underline this fact: Twitter is public, Twitter is public, Twitter is public.

If we say it enough, maybe we’ll remember.

Questions, We’ve Got Questions for Ivan Kreilkamp

We look forward to Ivan Kreilkamp’s conversation with the UI Next Gen PhD planners on Tuesday, November 1, at 3:30 (BCSB 101), part of a series of symposia organized around rhetorical forms. In our grant proposal, we described this event as follows:

Symposium 3: The Tweet The speed of Twitter communication presents an opportunity and a challenge. As they compose 140-character missives, tweeters can try out different identities, throw out fishing lines, and sharpen lures. On the other hand, an ill-considered comment can have an alarming permanence as it rockets across the Twitter-verse. This symposium will attend to how graduate students can craft professional personae online, with particular attention to voice and tone. The symposium will consider how the same rhetorical skills that allow Twitter-users to disseminate scholarship can be marshaled in careers beyond the academy.

We’re especially interested in talking to Dr. Kreilkamp about how he has come to write for both scholarly and popular venues, and about how his Twitter persona has evolved. To sample Ivan Kreilkamp’s writing in advance of the symposium, check out his essay “Against ‘Against [X]’” in the New Yorker, or his Twitter handle @IvanKreilkamp. Listed below are the questions we’re poised to ask him on November 1. Feel free to add more in the comments section.

Will you talk a little about how you made the transition from writing for scholarly venues to writing for magazines like the New Yorker, Village Voice, or Public Books?

Are there ways in which you (or others at your home institution) are helping PhD candidates develop skills that will serve them in careers beyond the academy?

What advice do you have for graduate students who want to cultivate a Twitter presence?

Are there aspects of voice curation on Twitter that you think are especially important for graduate students?

Do you encourage your graduate students to develop an online presence?

Are there Twitter mistakes of which graduate students need to be especially cognizant? How does one rebound from a Twitter mishap?

Who maintains the Twitter presence of Victorian Studies (@VictStudies), the journal which you edit?

How, or to what extent, is it possible to use Twitter to advance a research program?

What are the potential positive and negative effects on scholarly production of an active Twitter presence?

How much time do you think a graduate student should spend on curating an intellectual presence online?

Do you recommend that graduate students follow certain communities online? In your field, are there “must-follow” online entities? What are they?

To what extent does Twitter help you keep up with your field?

How do you feel about the live-tweeting of conference papers?

What would you say to skeptics who think that Twitter is about self-promotion and little else?

What is the shelf life of a tweet? Do you anticipate a future in which tweets get cited in scholarly articles?

Ivan Kreilkamp on Creating a Twitter Voice

@IvanKreilkamp

Guest post by Kate Nesbit, PhD student in the Department of English.

How can we craft personae and build professional and intellectual communities in posts of 140 characters or less? On Tuesday, November 1 (BCSB 101), Ivan Kreilkamp joins us to discuss the genre of the tweet in our third Next Gen PhD symposium. Kreilkamp, co-editor of the journal Victorian Studies and professor of English at the University of Indiana-Bloomington, curates a lively Twitter account. His tweets engage in intellectual debate, promote others’ scholarship, link to his publications, and—of course—mourn the woes of the current election season. Young scholars and graduate students admiring Kreilkamp’s Twitter presence may wonder: How can I cultivate an online voice that feels authentic and conversational, but also scholarly and professional? How can I create a community of thinkers who take interest in what I have to say?

What we hope to accomplish through Twitter, Victorian authors like Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens hoped to accomplish through novels. For, as Kreilkamp argues in his book Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (2005), Victorian novelists tried to create in their fiction an “imaginary-voice-in-writing.” Victorians figured the novel as the utterance of an authentic, charismatic storyteller, he argues, in order to reconstitute isolated readers as a community of rapt listeners. Kreilkamp challenges characterizations of print culture as oppositional to oral culture. He reads Victorian fiction in relation to the phonograph, Victorian shorthand systems, and other attempts to represent the sounds of speech in writing.

So, how can we describe the “Voice of this Victorianist Tweeter”? Kreilkamp, too, is adept at crafting a personable and smart imaginary-voice-in-typing, a voice accessible and engaging to a community that extends beyond the academy. He has published scholarly articles on topics ranging from speech and voice in the nineteenth century to Victorian pet-keeping and animal studies. Yet he also publishes regularly in venues geared toward wider audiences—The New Yorker, Public Books, and The Los Angeles Review of Books—on issues literary, academic and otherwise. In short, his is a voice worth listening to, whether in the form of an article about dogs in Great Expectations, an opinion piece on pulp comics in Public Books, or a 140-character tweet about whether men should be pictured squashed under skillets instead of high heels.