Managing and Professionalizing your Online Professional Identity

October 19, 2013

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.

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?

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

SharingConversi

ng

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.

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

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 & Budgets

Comparative Pedagogies

The Role of the Humanities

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 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.

5-minute tweet break!

(Use the #dmdh hashtag)

PROFESSIONALISM:MORE THAN JUST GETTING A JOB

No.

Is this workshop really all about Twitter?

But what is professionalization

?An active process of balancing between

conversing and sharing.

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

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

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 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

ItJanuary 18, 2013

With thanks to our sponsors...

Faculty sponsors: Tyler Fox, Ann Lally, Brian Reed, Miceal Vaughan, Stacy Waters, Helene Williams