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Managing and Professionalizing your Online Professional Identity
Managing and Professionalizing your
Online Professional Identity
Our opening assumptions
• Professionalization is communication.
• Learning to be social is a skill in itself -- and a
process, rather than something that happens
instantly.
• Your value as an academic is more than
merely your finished articles or dissertation.
• Scholarship is cyclical, not linear.
For me, community happens when people are genuinely
invested in seeing each other succeed. This doesn’t happen by
being nice to each other — although there’s nothing wrong with
that, per se — but by recognizing and rewarding other people’s
work. We depend too much in the academy on the currency of
prestige and what some have called “hope labor” — the idea that
it’s OK for your labor not to be rewarded now, because it may
pay dividends down the road. The unpaid internship is the classic
example of this. A durable community forms when people’s labor
is valued and rewarded, and it worries me that in the excitement
of doing digital humanities, people’s labor sometimes gets
erased. This is why I won’t circulate unpaid internship
announcements to our students and why I won’t accept volunteer
help, even though we have no program budget to speak of. If
labor is valuable, the university should reward it, and we all
should recognize it, too.-- Miriam Posner
Applicable DH Values
•process and product
•collaboration
•dissemination
• transparency
How and why do academics
interact?
What are the results of those
interactions?
Which interactions result in
productive conversations?
Do “non-productive” interactions
have results?
Most social media
platforms are made to
encourage sharing and/or
conversing.
Sharing platforms• Encourage you to upload durable and sizable
content
• Provide infrastructure that encourages you to
organize content in specific/customizable
ways; and develop individual aesthetic design
preferences
• Allow others to navigate freely through present
and past content as it accumulates
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
Sharing Conversing
Sharing platforms feel more
similar to traditional academic
publishing structures, but
require greater commitments
and more skill.
Conversing platforms are
dissimilar to traditional
academic publishing
structures; but are more
conducive to experimenting,
and learning online
communication techniques.
However, even
conversing platforms
require basic
academic
conventions if you
want to come across
as a professional.
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.
Why start with
Twitter?• 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.
What do you do when you tweet?• Report on what you see, hear, or read
• Ask questions (to specific people, or as part of
thinking out loud)
• Describe what you’re working on
• Experiment with different ways of phrasing
ideas
• Agree, and disagree
• Share content that you think other people
should be aware of
What are you doing when you’re
on Twitter?• Discover what other people are learning and doing
• 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)
• Support peers and colleagues by showing interest in their
work
• Find content through your contacts (rather than through
search engines)
• Learn through dialogue and interaction
Twitter syntax can be
confusing…
…but the basics are easy to
master and will be most of
what you need.
•hashtag: a searchable, hotlinked #topic
•@reply: a tweet to a specific user,
viewable by anyone following that user
•.@reply: a tweet to a specific user that
will show up for both of your followers
•RT: retweet – an unchanged
rebroadcast of someone else’s tweet
•MT: modified tweet – indicates a
retweet with changes
5-minute tweet break!
(Use the #dmdh hashtag)
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
Avenues of AccessBurke characterizes participation in the conversation as open.
Avenues of AccessFor academics entering 70 years later, the open parlor
becomes more akin to an endurance course.
How do you prepare
for becoming active
in the conversation?
Who is qualified to
participate in the
conversation?
How many conversations
are there?
What are academics
discussing?Academic
laborAccessibility
Race & Social Justice
Privilege
Contingencies &
BudgetsComparative
Pedagogies
The Role of the
HumanitiesConferences
Where are
academics
discussing this?
Other Places
•Tumblr
•Academia.edu
•Personal blogs
•Aggregate blogs
Are academics hacking social
media?Hacker: n.
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.
7.One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of
creatively overcoming or circumventing
limitations.
--The Jargon File, http://www.jargondb.org
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
Are academics using
Twitter to hack the
academy?
Social media can also allow you to
engage with your subject matter in
more affective ways:
Social media encourages
the larger academic
conversation to become
more inclusive of multiple
voices.
Participating in social
media can help you
become more aware of
your own privilege, as
well as broader issues of
marginalization within
academia.
Understanding how the
academy manifests
beyond your own
immediate experience of
it is central to academic
professionalism.
PROFESSIONALISM:
MORE THAN JUST GETTING A
JOB
5-minute tweet break!
(Use the #dmdh hashtag)
How?
What did you
tweet?
Ingredients for social media
participation• Academic interests that connect you with people
with similar interests
• Desire to engage with people you don’t know
• Varied interests and playfulness, which allow more
than academic interactions
• Awareness, which allows you to choose how
you’re using various tools
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
• Work through teaching ideas with
colleagues in your field
Building your own Twitter topic listWhat 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 non-academic)
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?
Basic Twitter Toolbox• Twitter’s List function: for filtering different types
of content
• HootSuite, TweetDeck: account management
platforms for reading and managing multiple
feeds
• Storify: for archiving tweets and conversations
• Tweet-a-friend: ask Twitter!
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?
Considering other social media
platforms?• Read and explore them first, in order to get a
sense of the culture of participation.
• Investigate your options for exporting/backing
up your content.
• Think about how your audience will find you,
and what sort of commitment the platform
requires of them.
• Consider integrating with Twitter in order to
promote and discuss your project.
“No! Try not. Do, or do
not. There is no try.”
--Yoda, Star Wars
Episode V: The Empire
Strikes Back
(adapted)
Next time...
• Non-threatening coding exploration
• Learning to think like a programmer
DMDH 3:
How To Parse Code Before You Can Write It
January 17, 2015
With thanks to our
sponsors...
Faculty sponsors: Tyler Fox, Ann Lally, Brian Reed, Miceal
Vaughan, Stacy Waters, Helene Williams
