May 15, 2013, 8:00 am
By Amy Cavender
Recently, I witnessed a Twitter conversation that pretty clearly demonstrated that the participants weren’t understanding one another very well on a key point. They worked things out, and the discussion ended with no hard feelings, but for a while the atmosphere seemed pretty tense, at least to those of us watching the conversation unfold.
Who the participants were in this particular instance really doesn’t matter, but the incident got me thinking about both the importance of effective communication and some of the difficulties involved in achieving it. Both the attitude we bring to a conversation and the means by which it takes place are vitally important.
In the Twitter conversation mentioned above, the two principal participants were able to work things out in part because there’s already a relationship—one involving mutual liking and respect—between them. They were…
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April 2, 2013, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
[This post originally appeared on MediaCommons, in response to the question "What are the major social, legal, and professional stakes with sharing online"? Because ProfHacker has addressed similar questions about online identities and social media, I am reproducing the post here. I welcome your comments at the end.]
When it comes to scholarship, pedagogy, and service — the three pillars of the professoriate — I am a staunch supporter of open access and the ideal of an intellectual commons that we can all learn from, discuss and critique, and build upon. But I recently had an unsettling experience that’s made me question my assumptions about making so much of my life public.
My experience played out against the milieu of Twitter, where I’ve been active for over five years. My Twitter stream is comprised of digital humanists, electronic literature creators and theorists,…
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March 27, 2013, 8:00 am
By Mark Sample
As the culminating move of a Twitter-based storytelling experiment, I recently deleted my Twitter account. One minute it was there, all twenty-six thousand and something tweets, and the next it was gone. My tweets, my favorites, my lists, my followers — all gone. A number of friends were in disbelief that I had so summarily erased everything that I had ever written on Twitter. Not only had I evidently turned my back on the social networking service, I had destroyed all the symbolic capital that I had built up on it. Were it not for an off-site back-up, no trace at all would have remained of my years on Twitter.
But I knew something most people didn’t.
You don’t — you can’t – delete a Twitter account. At least not at first. Instead, you deactivate it.
You do this on your settings page. There at the very bottom, directly below the button to request your Twitter archive, there…
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January 31, 2013, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
[Editors' note: this is a draft that Mark Sample uploaded to Profhacker last week. We have been unable to contact Mark for the final revisions, so we are posting it as-is. Our apologies for any errors.]
In late 2012 Twitter began rolling out a long-requested feature: a complete archive of a your public (non-DM) Twitter activity, from your very first tweet up to the moment you request the archive (from your Twitter Settings page). Shortly after you submit your request, you’ll be emailed a unique link to a zipped folder. Download that folder, unzip it, and open up the index.html file in your browser, and there’s your complete archive, organized by month and year, and totally searchable.
Despite my initial skepticism that the official Twitter archive might end up being a plain text file, stripped of any kind of metadata, I must admit that the archive is quite robust. All the…
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January 14, 2013, 8:00 am
By Prof. Hacker
[This is a guest post by Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig, the writers behind @occupymla. Mark teaches at the University of Southern California, and Rob teaches at University of Minnesota Duluth, both as non-tenure-track faculty. You can find out more about each of them via their websites -- http://markcmarino.com/ and http://robwit.net/ -- or follow them on Twitter: @markcmarino, @Netprov_RobWit, & @occupymla).]
@occupymla: In our list of demands, only the Oxford comma divides us!
@occupymla: Do not let the hiring committees tell you the value of your scholarship. Join us!
What Was Occupy MLA?
On November 8, 2011, a new sect of the Occupy movement appeared. Actually, the movement had appeared just a day earlier, first mentioned when @markcmarino was describing a speech he was giving in his candidacy for a Modern Language Association (MLA) committee. In the fictional Tweet, Mark…
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November 12, 2012, 11:00 am
By Ryan Cordell
Yes, this is another post about Twitter. ProfHacker readers know how fond we are of the social media platform. That fondness perhaps explains why I’m writing an entire post to recommend the new Tweetbot for Mac, a Twitter client that runs a costly $20 on the Mac app store.
If you’re an occasional Twitter user, you probably don’t need such an expensive client for checking in on the service. If, however, Twitter has become central to your academic life, Tweetbot for Mac includes a number of features that might make it a worthwhile investment. My favorite features of Tweetbot are:
- Its beautiful design. Perhaps aesthetics might seem less important than functionality, but if you use your Twitter client frequently it certainly doesn’t hurt to use an attractive, responsive interface to do so. Tapbots (the designers) carried the design from Tweetbot for iOS—which I also recommend highly…
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October 9, 2012, 9:07 am
By George Williams
One of the most frustrating aspects of using information and communications technology (ICT) is the frequency with which things don’t work, where “things” equals just about any hardware or software tool that you could possibly name. Monitors start flickering, files won’t open, obscure error messages crowd your screen, hard drives make funny noises… you name it. One of the most rewarding aspects of using ICT is the access it provides to an enormous network of people who might be able to help you. Twitter can be an extremely effective way of getting your questions answered, but it also teaches us some important lessons about the right ways to ask questions.
In one of my classes this semester, students are learning to use a variety of software tools to create online resources. Like all of us, they are frequently running into problems or roadblocks. This is often how one learns: trial a…
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October 8, 2012, 8:00 am
By Anastasia Salter
Last week, Adeline chronicled the recent “Twittergate” and considered the best practices for tweeting at conferences. I’m a huge fan of conference backchannels, particularly since my work is very interdisciplinary and it seems there’s an interesting conference every weekend that I wish I could attend. Twitter offers some insight into what happens in those spaces. How much insight? It depends–but not just on those tweeting. The presenters can play a big role in determining how accessible their work is to those looking in.
Why encourage tweeting of your work? There’s been lots of discussion of the value of academic tweeting and open exchange of ideas, which is important philosophically and part of why I tweet a conferences. But there’s also value to you as the presenter–feedback, a chance for extended conversations, and even the potential for finding collaborators, publishers, or new…
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October 3, 2012, 11:00 am
By Adeline Koh
Over the last few days, a big debate over the appropriateness of live-tweeting conference panels has taken place over Twitter under the hashtag #Twittergate. Participants shared concerns of bad backchannel behavior, the accuracy of tweets, and whether tweeted research will be able to find a publisher. On the other hand, others raised points about how livetweeting conference panels increased access to research for those unable to travel to these conferences, and that tweets could work to increase visibility for scholars. Readers may be interested in
While the concerns …
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September 5, 2012, 8:00 am
By Natalie Houston
If you’re new to Twitter, or if you’re not sure if you even want to give it a try, participating (or even just observing) a tweetchat is one of the best ways to see the professional possibilities that Twitter offers. As Tom Scheinfeldt notes in Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values, the openness of Twitter’s communication model readily lends itself to the exchange of ideas:
The reasons we like Twitter are complex and I won’t pretend to understand them all, but I’ll throw out a few suggestions. First, its “follow” rather than “friend” model is more open, allows for the collaboration and non-hierarchy that the Internet and digital humanities values. Second, and related to this, Twitter is the place where content-creators—journalists, writers, artists, web developers, etc.—tend to hang out. We overlap with those communities, or at least see…
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