1. Managing and Professionalizing your Online
Professional Identity
October 19, 2013

2. Our opening assumptions
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Professionalization is communication.
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Your value as an academic is more than merely
your finished articles or dissertation.
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Scholarship is cyclical, not linear.
Learning to be social is a skill in itself -- and a
process, rather than something that happens
instantly.

3. Applicable DH Values
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• collaboration
• dissemination
• transparency
process and product

4. How and why do academics
interact?
What are the results of those
interactions?
Which interactions result in
productive conversations?

5. Most social media platforms
are made to encourage
sharing and/or conversing.

6. Sharing platforms
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Encourage you to upload durable and sizable
content
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Provide infrastructure that encourages you to
organize content in specific/customizable ways; and
develop individual aesthetic design preferences
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Allow others to navigate freely through present
and past content as it accumulates

7. 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

8. Sharing
Conversing

9. Sharing platforms feel more
similar to traditional academic
publishing structures, but require
greater commitments and more
skill.

10. Conversing platforms are
dissimilar to traditional academic
publishing structures; but are
more conducive to
experimenting, and learning
online communication
techniques.

11. 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.

12. Why start with Twitter?
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It’s free!
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.

13. What do you do when you tweet?
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Report on what you see, hear, or read
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Describe what you’re working on
Ask questions (to specific people, or as part of
thinking out loud)
Experiment with different ways of phrasing ideas
Agree, and disagree
Share content that you think other people should
be aware of

14. What are you doing when you’re on
Twitter?
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Discover what other people are learning and doing
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Support peers and colleagues by showing interest in their work
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Learn through dialogue and interaction
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)
Find content through your contacts (rather than through search
engines)

15. 5-minute tweet break!
(Use the #dmdh hashtag)

16. 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

17. Avenues of Access
Burke characterizes participation in the conversation as open.

18. Avenues of Access
For academics entering 70 years later, the open parlor
becomes more akin to an endurance course.

19. How do you prepare
for becoming active in
the conversation?

20. Who is qualified to
participate in the
conversation?

21. How many conversations are
there?

22. What are academics discussing?
Academic labor
Accessibility
The Role of the Humanities
Race & Social Justice
Contingencies & Budgets
Comparative Pedagogies
Privilege

23. Are academics hacking social media?
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Hacker: n.
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7.One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of
creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
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.
•
--The Jargon File, http://www.jargondb.org

24. 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

25. Are academics using
Twitter to hack the
academy?

27. Social media encourages
the larger academic
conversation to become
more inclusive of multiple
voices.

28. Participating in social media
can help you become more
aware of your own
privilege, as well as broader
issues of marginalization
within academia.

29. Understanding how the
academy manifests beyond
your own immediate
experience of it is central
to academic
professionalism.

30. 5-minute tweet break!
(Use the #dmdh hashtag)

31. PROFESSIONALISM:
MORE THAN JUST GETTING A JOB

32. Is this workshop really all
about Twitter?
No.

33. But what is
professionalization?
An active process of balancing
between conversing and
sharing.

34. You can attempt to professionalize on your own,
but...

35. •
Ingredients for social media
participation with people with
Academic interests that connect you
similar interests
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Desire to engage with people you don’t know
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Awareness, which allows you to choose how you’re
using various tools
Varied interests and playfulness, which allow more than
academic interactions

36. 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

37. 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 nonacademic)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?

38. Basic Twitter Toolbox
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Twitter’s List function: for filtering different types of
content
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HootSuite, TweetDeck: account management
platforms for reading and managing multiple feeds
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Storify: for archiving tweets and conversations
Tweet-a-friend: ask Twitter!

39. 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?

40. Considering other social media
platforms?
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Read and explore them first, in order to get a
sense of the culture of participation.
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Investigate your options for exporting/backing up
your content.
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Think about how your audience will find you, and
what sort of commitment the platform requires of
them.
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Consider integrating with Twitter in order to
promote and discuss your project.

41. “No! Try not. Do, or do
not. There is no try.”
--Yoda, Star Wars Episode
V: The Empire Strikes Back
(adapted)

42. Next time...
• Non-threatening coding exploration
• Learning to think like a programmer
DMDH 3:
How To Parse Code Before You Can Write It
January 18, 2013

43. With thanks to our sponsors...
Faculty sponsors: Tyler Fox, Ann Lally, Brian Reed, Miceal Vaughan,
Stacy Waters, Helene Williams