On Oct. 20, I attended the Live Tweeting for Academic Conferences workshop hosted by CUNY Graduate Social Media Fellows in anthropology, earth and environmental science, English, music, philosophy, and urban education. One might say  that “Tweeting? We all know how to do that”. Yet, personal tweeting is different than tweeting for a particular event. Simply, the latter requires a basic planning, in parallel to the conference.

Live tweeting is a documentation of an event by Twitter users, and it includes sharing quotations, images, and external links. Tweets from different users are usually interlinked to each other by an event based hashtag. Today, live tweeting is quite essential, since it provides a wider audience to the conference. Especially for those who can not attend, it presents an opportunity for contribution; they can comment, ask questions, or just retweet the content. At this point, it is possible to consider live tweeting as a creation of a communication platform for those who are interested in the same topic, either they are in or out of the event venue. As Social Media Fellows highlighted, live tweeting should be planned as a particular session of the conference, and according to them its organization is divided in three periods; before, during, after.

The first step in the “before the event” phase is creating a hashtag, and its promotion. It could be an abbreviation of the event name, or refer directly to the conference theme. It’s important to check the availability of the hashtag on Twitter, in order to eliminate confusion with other causes. It is also useful to check the hashtags of the previous events. For instance, if it is an annual event, it’s helpful to mark the year. Moreover, conference hashtag should be mentioned on print materials such as posters, booklets, flyers, etc. It is also an effective way to remind official hashtag during welcoming talk, and also by panel moderators.

The following step is setting up a tweeting team, and CUNY Social Media Fellows suggest four basic roles: Preparatory Researcher (compiles pre-drafted tweets beforehand, and makes an archive of Twitter handles and hashtags they can use throughout the conference), Master Tweeter (the person designated to write/craft tweets), Designated Retweeter (retweeting using the hashtag), Post-Conference Curator (curating/showcasing highlights after the event). Having multiple tweeters help to avoid overwhelmness of live tweeting, because it is very exhausting to try quote and/or rephrase speakers’ statements in 140 characters, including hashtag. Another very important issue to always remember is the knowledge of tweeters about the conference theme. Being familiar to topic would provide a certain filter to select what to tweet. At this point, it is important also to consider the risk of tweeting too much, which might cause unfollows.

The third job in before the event organization is making a preliminary research on speakers, their institutions and previous works, and their relevant tweets, handles, external links. It is called master document,and it is very helpful to find quickly needed information. It is also a practical way to schedule some tweets of particular announcement; such as, the 2nd panel will be starting after lunch. But it is important to be on alert in case of any changes in the event program.

The final step is about technological infrastructure; controlling wifi connection, power connections, computers and mobile devices, taking some photos before the conference in order to share during live tweeting, etc. Fellows highly recommend laptops, which facilitates writing quickly.

After setting everything up, it’s time for live tweeting, and there are issues that tweeters should pay attention during the event. First of all, tweeters should be always on alert during the talks, and use their own judgment to take out important parts and tweet. The fellows suggests writing speech on a notepad simultaneously, and paraphrase the content in 140 characters. Furthermore, attribution is also quite important during live tweeting in order to connect tweets through handles and hashtags with other Twitter users. Another tip from the fellows is using images as much as possible. In my opinion, it would be also helpful to set an image library, including images of speakers, books of speakers, flyers, conference team, event venue, etc. During live tweeting session, usually follower number increases, and it is essential to follow them back . But controlling the accounts is a must. It could be a Twitter robot, or an irrelevant person to your event. On the other hand, it is also very effective to promote your hashtag during live tweets via retweets. The fellows suggest planning also some re-tweeters among scholars, conference team, and speakers. Before the event you can ask for their support by retweeting, and inform them about your tweets. The retweeters are mostly the people who also tweet often during an event.

The final phase of live tweeting is after the event. Curating all the tweets, and writing history of the event with tweets. My interpretation is that it is possible to call it a conference report on Twitter. For instance, Storify is a digital tool that you can create, and present this curation.

Workshop provided a certain look at Twitter vocabulary, some abbreviations that accelerate the communication among tweeters by connecting them via hashtags. If you are new on Twitter you can use Twittionary to get tweeting language.  

Above all, the fellows gave some advices on certain applications which helps to moderate the account easily and quickly; such as Hootsuite, and Tweetdeck. In both of them you can follow multiple accounts in particular feeds; newsfeed, mention, direct messages, etc. Furthermore, these applications allow you to control your other social media accounts; such as Facebook and Instagram.

Live Tweeting workshop was very fruitful for me; it provided me a framework on developing a social media session for a conference by focusing on key concepts of tweeting, which is beyond creating interesting content, more about organizational issues to increase the impact of hashtag. Because there are millions of hashtags everyday, and if you do not outreach sufficiently, there is always a risk of not being noticed.

By following this link you can find CUNY Social Media Fellows’ guide, which includes further reading links.

I recently attended the workshop “So you want to make a map: Starting a GIS project” with Javier Otero Peña and Kelsey Chatlost. Although I have always had an interest in mapping projects, I have never attempted one myself, mostly because I didn’t know where to start. This workshop, despite some of its flaws, pointed me in the right direction by providing what I thought was an accessible introduction to QGIS, a map-making program.

We began with some questions: Do you really need a map? What type of map do you need? How / Where are you going to get / produce additional data you may need? Although this section was somewhat tedious, it did open up a space in which I could think about the potential use maps could serve in my project, or if a map was something that was even worth my time pursuing.

We then covered some basic terminology, the most important of which seemed to be the term “data.” Data, at least in a map project, can be divided into two separate categories: raster data and vector data. In either case, however, one needs a dataset, that is, a spreadsheet / attribute table / database, which contains the information you would like to render as, or on top of, a map.

This led to a discussion about layers. I found that they worked similarly to the layers in Photoshop, in that each layer could only contain one type of data: either vector or raster. And with all this information, we were finally able to begin our own map experiment!

Despite being an enjoyable experience, especially for a new learner like me, there were some things that I felt could be improved upon. First and foremost, the time allotted to actually making a map was insubstantial; I found that we spent too much time on the intro stuff (such as definitions, what a map could do, etc.). Somewhat paradoxically, another issue was the speed of the directions once we began the map-making. I often found myself looking at other people’s computers, in the vain hope that I could see what they were doing, and therefore catch up. This was somewhat alleviated by the PowerPoint Otero and Kelsey sent out after the workshop, but I believe the workshop would have benefited from more detailed attention given to the actual process of making a map. This isn’t a total dismissal of the workshop’s procedure, just an observation about what would have made my experience better.

In the first chapter of Planned Obsolesce, Kathleen Fitzpatrick discusses peer review. She begins with a summation of its history, tracing it back to seventeenth-century censorship; knowledge production was relegated to various “societies” (such as the Royal Society of London) which were funded, in part, by the state, and therefore peer review was a tool that allowed the state to police what could and could not be considered “knowledge.” However, this isn’t, according to Fitzpatrick, how peer review functions in the present:

Gradually…scholarly societies facilitated a transition in scientific peer review from state censorship to self-policing, allowing them a degree of autonomy but simultaneously creating…a disciplinary technology, one that produces the conditions of possibility for the academic disciplines that it authorizes (21).

Peer review is now a self-policing enterprise, meaning that academics create and perpetuate the conditions that determine what is and is not “scholarship.” They are, in essence, slaves to their own system, a system which, as Fitzpatrick points out, is no longer sustainable. This unsustainability has been caused by numerous factors: academic publication is no longer profitable, more and more work is being done online, and, perhaps, most importantly, the very nature of “authority” is being undermined by the Internet, where the production of knowledge is often crowdsourced.

This creates the following problem, as Fitzpatrick notes: “The production of knowledge is the academy’s very reason for being, and if we cling to an outdated system for establishing measuring authority while the nature of authority is shifting around us, we run the risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant to contemporary culture’s dominant ways of knowing” (17).

This notion of relevancy is, at least for, me, where one could provide some pushback. Doesn’t privileging relevancy imply that academia had/has some sort of ongoing relationship with the public? I don’t believe that this is necessary true, at least historically, nor, dare I say, in the present. Isn’t it rather the case, as we’ve discovered by tracing the beginnings of peer review to “societies,” that academia has always been a space cut off from the rest of the world? We may, in fact, be arguing for a relevancy that never existed, which isn’t to say that Fitzpatrick’s proposals are worthless. But wouldn’t it be more honest to say that embracing alternative methods of knowledge production is first and foremost a way for academia to gain a relevancy it never had?

Fitzpatrick also often uses the terms consensus and dissensus, buzzwords taken from the philosophical project of Jacques Rancière. The internet is a site of dissensus, which means that no one opinion (theoretically) can ever gain precedence over all other opinions. This, according to Fitzpatrick, benefits peer review, in that it can provide multiple perspectives from which the writer can draw, essentially democratizing scholarship. The problem with dissensus, however, is that it can just as likely lead to a terrible consensus (one can think of the dissensus of a portion of America, which led to the consensus around a presidential nominee: Trump). Fitzpatrick seems to acknowledge this:

As we think about peer-to-peer review, it will be important to consider the ways that network effects bring out the both the best and the worst in the communities they connect, and the kinds of vigilance that we must bring to bear in guarding against the potential reproduction of the dominant, often exclusionary ideological structures of the Internet within the engagement between scholars and readers online.

Doesn’t this imply, however, that all dissensus isn’t created equal, that what Fitzpatrick is actually advocating for is in fact a dissensus with certain limitations, i.e. consensus? Can there be a truly sustained dissensus, one which leads to a fully democratic scholarship? Wouldn’t such a sustained dissensus be the end of scholarship?

WORKS CITED

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Peer Review.” Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 15-49. Print.

In the fourth chapter of Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence, titled “Preservation,” Dr. Fitzpatrick addresses a sort of anxiety about the future of texts produced in the age of networked publishing systems. This anxiety lies in underlying assumptions that printed books are tangible/material/durable while digital texts and data are insubstantial/ephemeral/fragile. Dr. Fitzpatrick dismantles this binary by highlighting the way in which printed material degrades and how recoverable data is.

[In my current job at a conservation studio, I can attest to the fragility of paper (or any other material). Even acid-free can develop all sorts of unforeseen problems: accumulations of dirt, mold, salt, foxing (a sort of rust), etc. It can be really gross but also fascinating but I digress…]

I am very generally simplifying her nuanced disagreement with these assumptions about printed material and digital texts in order to get to a key difference, which Fitzpatrick explains, “has to do with our understandings of those forms” (123).

Centuries of theory and practice have given way to a culture and infrastructure devoted to the preservation of printed material. Dr. Fitzpatrick argues that there now exists a need to quickly and carefully “develop practices appropriate to the preservation of our digital heritage” (123) that involves “collective insight and commitment of libraries, presses, scholars, and administrators” (125). One challenge in this age of digital production and the establishment of preservation practice(s) is due to the multiplicity of systems that host digital projects, which makes the task of developing unified theory difficult. Dr. Fitzpatrick argues that three preservation issues must be addressed: the development of commonly held standards for markup, the provision of appropriate metadata, and continued allowance of access.

What was most compelling to me was the way that Dr. Fitzpatrick highlights the significance of social systems are in addressing these issues. In discussing standards, she highlights that open source software is supported by committed development communities. When discussing metadata, she argues that future classification systems should reflect both expert opinions as well as user experience. In the section on access, Dr. Fitzpatrick discusses two preservation programs, LOCKSS and Portico, with regard to their models of installation, collection, and distribution of material, and user experience.

Overall, this chapter demonstrates how productive a shift in focus can be. Certainly, issues of technique and best practices for digital preservation need to be considered, which Dr. Fitzpatrick discusses. At the same time, by calling for a shift in focus from the (im)material aspects of digital publications, which can fatalistic and reductive, to the social aspect of preservation. Establishing communities devoted to digital preservation beneficial to host institutions as well as a public good.

Source:

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Preservation.” Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 121-154. Print.

I receive a weekly email from Ted Talks every Saturday morning and depending on how busy I am catching up on all the things I wasn’t able to do during the week, I try and make (a little) time to browse the newest talks.  Not too many Saturdays ago, I was feeling a little burnt out on work and school (and the ever-present big data project we’re supposed to be thinking about), so I turned to Ted Talks for some inspiration.

The first talk I viewed was given by Amit Sood that introduces the audience to “Every piece of art you’ve ever wanted to see up close and searchable.”  Amit is the director of Google’s Cultural Institute & Art Project and got me thinking how a large scale collection of images can be used to make new stories and connections across the various places they are located!   This project has been done in coordination with many of the world’s greatest art institutions (including museums, archives, and other foundations) and is a shining example of how access to valuable cultural artifacts can be shared extensively with everyone, despite their proximity or ability to physically (or monetarily) go to a museum.  However, I’m most likely not going to use images as my large data set (I’m thinking more along the lines of gathering data about my library’s book collection), I was impressed by the many visualizations displayed and the possibilities of uses for this kind of data set.

A big bang metaphor was used regularly throughout this talk and it reminded me fondly of the many times I’ve gone to the AMNH’s Hayden Planetarium.  At minute 3:51, Amit states,

“So let’s zoom. We start from this one object [the Venus of Berekhat Ram–one of the oldest objects in the world, found in the Golan Heights around 233,000 years ago, and currently residing at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem]. What if we zoomed out and actually tried to experience our own cultural big bang? What might that look like? This is what we deal with on a daily basis at the Cultural Institute — over six million cultural artifacts curated and given to us by institutions, to actually make these connections. You can travel through time, you can understand more about our society through these. You can look at it from the perspective of our planet, and try to see how it might look without borders, if we just organized art and culture. We can also then plot it by time, which obviously, for the data geek in me, is very fascinating. You can spend hours looking at every decade and the contributions in that decade and in those years for art, history and cultures. We would love to spend hours showing you each and every decade, but we don’t have the time right now. So you can go on your phone and actually do it yourself.”  

Amit Sood speaks at TED2016 – Dream, February 15-19, 2016, Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

Amit and his co-presenter, Cyril Diagne who is a professor of Interaction Design at ECAL (Lausanne, Switzerland) and an artist in residence at the Google Cultural Institute Lab (Paris, France), give the audience a demonstration of how these images, when put together on such a massive scale, demonstrate how this platform can allow a user to go through time and across great distances to make connections among the 6 million objects contained in the collection.  I’ve just downloaded the app for my phone and I plan to play quite a bit!

After being inspired by Amit’s talk, I wanted to search for a more literary themed talk and project.  I did a search for “library” and found this talk among the top hits entitled Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden: What we learned from 5 million books which was given a little earlier than Amit’s talk.

Apparently, I seem to be most impressed with Google enabled/sponsored projects–or at least that’s what TedTalks has presented me with!  I promise, I am not a loyal devotee to all things Google, but I do recognize their strides in contributing to the availability of information online and how pretty & user friendly they’ve made it all.  I was not aware of the Ngram viewer prior to this talk, so at the very least, I learned of one more tool available to me.  The presenters humor alone is worth viewing this short talk.  I was appeased by their discussion of how awesome it would be to read all the published books in the known world in order to form an understanding about a massive corpus, but how absolutely impractical it is!  They also poke a little bit of fun at the practical practice of close reading.  Which of course has its own merits, but with access to millions of digitized works, distant reading is opening up new means for awesomeness to be had!  Nonetheless, they make an excellent case for undertaking such large scale endeavors.

I often feel that the many digital humanities project ideas I have often feel awesome yet terribly impractical and mostly insurmountable with my current skill set.  Although, I’m slowly realizing that many projects are practical and #gcpraxis16 is designed to move us from frightened big-data novices into seasoned practitioners.  I am looking forward to, and inspired by, the process ahead.