A short presentation describing how a graduate student can develop their digital presence using personal and institutional websites, sharing platforms, social media, repositories, and academic society sites.

1. Developing Your
Digital Identity as
a Graduate Student
Shawna Ross, Texas A&M
February 28, 2017

2. That Evil Networking
• Is networking just cynical and instrumentalizing?
• Amanda Licastro: “Do you want a job?”
• Networking is simply optimizing productive interactions
with other scholars.
• Mutually helpful relationships beyond TAMU
• Don’t let undue modesty/humility get in your way.
Curiosity is almost always welcome.

3. Why build an online presence?
• Prove that you actually exist
• Control your online persona
• Share your work more easily
• Make a memorable impression on others
• Connect with academics at other institutions
• Build a portable space for you on the web

4. Typical Spaces of
Digital Scholar-building
• Your institutional website
• Your personal website
• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, GoodReads)
• Academic repositories (Humanities Commons, academia.edu)
• Digital tool and application profiles (GitHub, Zotero)
• Research/citation trackers (Google Scholar, ORCID)
• Resource-sharing platforms (Dropbox, Google Drive, Scribd, Slide
Share, Flickr, iTunes)
• Digital journals, blogs, and conference programs sponsored by
academic associations

5. Institutional Website
• Official—therefore authoritative
• People who are uncomfortable with the digital realm may
check here first - maybe even only here
• Limited in its customizability
• Try to have links to your other online presences from here
• Check your profile, both the information and the picture
• https://english.tamu.edu/graduate-assistants/
• Contact Tammy Whisenant to make changes

6. Personal Website
• Nothing wrong with Wordpress or Weebly to start out with
• Better: Obtain your personal domain with Reclaim Hosting
• $30 a year for students w/2 GB w/great support
• Includes cost/registration of your unique domain (you.com!)
• Can use Wordpress, Drupal, Omeka, etc, with Reclaim as well
• Can use GitHub and Jekyll if you know Markdown (def. if you specialize in DH)
• Make sure to link your URL to all your other online presences, accounts
• Host your CV, a picture, teaching materials, publications/abstracts, and your email
address (spell it out: shawna ross at tamu dot edu). Research and teaching
statements also good. Link to your other online presences from here.
• Blogging is good but not necessary: do not let it interfere with your time-to-degree.

7. Social Media Policies
• You don’t have to have it all. Select only one or two that you particularly
like and/or that your field is fluent in, and excel at it.
• Facebook is not ideal for cultivating your professional identity.
Recommendation: keep it secure; be up to date on privacy settings.
Remember that a friend of a friend may see your information.
• Cultivate a multidimensional profile, but don’t give away personal
information that you’d like to keep private. Balance the cat pictures with
the promotion of conference presentations. Don’t confuse being a
personality with oversharing: it isn’t necessarily about sharing intimate details
of your private life but about being distinctive.
• Do not criticize your institution, your professors, or your students. You
will look like a difficult and unreliable colleague. (References to recognized
and impersonal social justice movements/events are generally okay.)

8. Twitter
• Use Twitter to punch above your weight when talking to senior scholars.
Compliment scholars for research they’ve done that you like (be specific or you
may come off as a bit “forward!”)
• Use Twitter to find out about new publications, new publication opportunities
for you, archive fellowships, conference CFPs, etc. Find peers whom you can
send your materials to or collaborate with on a conference panel.
• Interact with people! Retweet, quote, respond. Twitter is not a one-way
promotional organ about just your own stuff. Be generous with your feed. Spread
useful and interesting information.
• Cultivate a unique persona: find a niche that allows you to fulfill an unmet need.
Use analytics to determine which of your tweets are most successful. Use images
and videos to enhance your feed. Try not to be negative all the time. Space out the
timing of your tweets.
• During conferences, use the proper hashtag and arrange meet-ups with your
Twitter followers. Remotely attend conferences via Twitter.
• If you’re overwhelmed, use a Twitter client (an alternate interface) to streamline
and organize your experience.

9. academia.edu
The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
• Good
• Super simple
• SEO (search engine optimization) is great
• Check your analytics: during job search, find out who checked your
materials
• Bad
• No firm metadata structure
• Not a lively community
• Ugly: It’s private, for-profit firm that can use your data in any way it
wants and hasn’t made its business model clear to users

10. Humanities Commons
http://hcommons.org
• Transparent, non-profit, and linked to MLA
• Derive a DOI (digital object identifier) for anything you submit
• Stipulate licensing (how people can or can’t use your stuff)
• Because it is new, you can be a big fish in a small pond
• @MLACommons will retweet you!
• Combination of social network and repository means it can
serve you as a personal website quite efficiently.

11. Bottom Line
Use both if your need for short-term
publicity outweighs your long-term
worries. But delete Academia.edu when
you can, and recognize that Humanities
Commons is more in line with our long-
term values as scholars.

12. What You Can’t Control
• The profiles and actions of people with your same name
• Take control of your name now
• Think about what your “publication name” is going to be
• Rate My Professor, Koofers, etc
• Be willing to file a complaint or correction with these sites if you have
an unfair or inappropriate review
• What your alma mater writes about you
• What collaborators write about you
• If you mention others (and tell them when you do!), they are more
likely to mention you
• Newspaper article results

13. Security Concerns?
See FemTechNet

14. Your (Long-Term) Mission
• Create an ORCID and a GoogleScholar account (advanced: check if the MLA
Bibliography has all of your publications, and if not, write to them to request
them to add it)
• Sign up for Humanities Commons and use it to generate DOIs for syllabi,
conference presentations, publication proofs (check your contract, and if it
doesn’t allow republication, ask if you can revise it).
• Ideally, join Twitter and start building a personal website.
• Ideally, check up on your analytics by joining academia.edu (if you can stomach
it) or setting up Google Analytics for your personal website. Set up a Google
alert for your name.
• Future-proofing
• Make sure you can link to a new email address when you leave TAMU
• Update your online presences as regularly as you would your normal CV

15. SANITY CHECK
You don’t have to do it all.
You don’t have to do it right now.
Just do something.
Choose the platform(s) that allow you to do
the kind of things you like to do.
Start with the minimum; you can build more in later.