On Joining Twitter, Part 1: Reasons

I have a book needing final edits and major proofreading, an academic article to restructure for an editor who's interested in it, two conference papers to research and write for the summer conference season, neglected (more accurately, abandoned) duties as a book reviews editor for a local history journal, and my first ever paid-magazine writing to complete for a loose late summer deadline.

 

So, naturally, I am panic-procrastinating absolutely all of it. Ugh.

I am very sympathetic to students who procrastinate, in part because I feel that a lot of them are doing it for the exact same reasons I do: a desire to Do The Thing to an exceptionally high standard and a deep-seated fear that achieving that standard is impossible. And as the window for achieving that standard becomes smaller and smaller, panic and paralysis grow greater and greater...

Which explains why I have been finding distractions aplenty. Some of those are good--I've been doing a lot of reading, and tried a lot of new recipes. Some of them make me feel awful afterwards--I've been spending a lot of time reading political and medieval history Twitter feeds as a distraction, and have been thinking seriously about creating my own. In this series of posts, I want to evaluate the pros and cons of joining social media for professional purposes, in order to make a decision about it and hopefully recover some of the time I currently spend thinking about it.

 

"Why" by Ksayer1 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

At this moment in my career, there are three main reasons why being more active and visible online is particularly attractive: self-promotion, networking, and public writing. Let's take each in turn. 

 

1. To Hype My Writing

Not all research is equally visible, and the work of those outside of traditional academic career structures is often particularly hard to find. Credentialed scholars with publications and projects in progress but no permanent research/teaching position are often called 'independent' or 'alt-ac' scholars in writing about academia. Those of us who are pursuing part-time or non-permanent academic work might also be called 'precarious' or 'contingent' scholars. Because of our position within academia, information about our work tends to be very dispersed. While PhD students and early career academics will have a university page that lists their current and developing projects, information about an independent scholar's work might be scattered across LinkedIn, Academic.edu, Humanities Commons, their employer's webpage, Google scholar records of their publications, and more.

 

As someone who has a number of projects nearing completion, readers are on my mind. What if I put all this writing out into the world and nobody reads it?  An article I read recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education recommends creating an author platform. Professor Devoney Looser acknowledges academic discomfort with marketing at the very beginning of her article:

I realize I’ve already lost some academic readers by using the word “sell.” Many of us went into higher education to avoid selling ourselves, our souls, or some widget. We were going to be about the love of ideas, not filthy lucre. That also meant being above the business of plugging our own research findings. Perhaps we mistakenly thought our ideas would sink or swim on their own merits, or maybe we imagined that selling books would be our publisher’s problem.

I share some of this discomfort about self-promotion: especially as a female independent scholar, putting myself out there can feel uniquely fraught with questions about whether my work is 'good enough' given the limits on my time, attention, and research resources that come from fitting academic writing around my job and other responsibilities.

But Looser's definition of author platform is helpful for making me feel less weird about it.

Having an author platform means you are not only publicizing your next article or book, you are seeking the right readers for it. You are thinking long term to actively manage the ways you put yourself forward as an authority. You’re working to pop up in someone’s Google search for your area of expertise.

Yes, that's it! That's what I want! I want readers, and I know that as an independent scholar it might be harder for them to find me. Looser goes on to give some thoughtful and practical tips about using social media effectively, focusing on principles of connecting and amplifying not just your own work, but other people's too. An article by Dr Irina Dumitrescu (a fellow medievalist!) makes a nice complement to this: her piece, 'time to get over your discomfort with book marketing', is focused specifically on step-by-step suggestions for promoting an academic book. Looser argues that social media engagement for the purposes of building an author platform shouldn't just be ceaseless self-promotion but instead a demonstration of a willingness to join a community and participate in conversations; and Dumitrescu has sage advice on that score too:

Do your social-media promotion in the spirit of scholarly generosity, and it will be less irritating to friends and colleagues. If you make a habit of reading, sharing, reviewing, and celebrating your colleagues’ work, too, they will not mind when you shine the light on your own publications. (Of course, it’s best to start appreciating others’ books well before your own comes out.)

But will social media conversations actually lead to readers? Perhaps, says Dr Micah Allen, in a thoughtful post on whether Twitter is a useful way to get people to read a new publication. Dr Allen looked at 'conversion rates'--how likely people are to click on a link in a tweet, finding that internal engagement (for example, likes and retweets), is typically above external engagement (clicking on the link and reading the paper). In fact, as someone with a solid platform, most of his paper tweets have a conversion rate of 2-3%, which he then contextualises with a survey of his followers and concludes that paper tweets do a pretty good job of getting publications in front of interested readers.

"Spider Web" by mkreyness is licensed under CC BY 2.0

2. To Build a Network

When I was an MPhil and PhD student, I had the opportunity to participate in a series of conferences called 'Texts and Identities'. The project ran for over a decade, travelling between the universities of Vienna, Utrecht, Paris, Cambridge, and Leeds for an annual conference. Getting to meet European scholars of my generation and hear their work was one of the best experiences of my doctorate. Texts and Identities came to an end when the senior scholars who founded it retired, but in many ways it formed one of the foundations for what I see as my scholarly network--people whose work I admire and follow, trusted acquaintances whose advice and suggestions and I might ask for and reciprocate.

One of the worst parts of no longer being a doctoral student (as well as being a contingent scholar) is that the fact these networks are no longer an annual part of my life. While I might volunteer papers for sponsored sessions, and attend conference talks I'm interested in, there's something to be said for something a little more systematic. Linus Tan's essay on networking, in which he discusses how he makes networking work as an introvert by treating it as a research project, spoke to me both as a strategy for making networking a pleasant experience:

When I find myself wanting to know more [about the person from reading their ResearchGate profile, social media, etc] that signals to me a genuine interest in that person. But if I start thinking of possible projects, I stop. Why? Because I think networking needs to always be about the person first, not the opportunity.

In other words, I feel disconnected from communities--medieval studies in general, Late Antiquity, late Latin literature--that I used to feel quite connected to; and simultaneously, I have the potential to belong to new and different communities (published book authors, independent/alt-ac/contingent scholars, librarians and archivists), than I did when I was PhD student. Connecting with people on social media would be a way to give back to and become involved in both my old and new communities as well as potentially put my work in front of members of those communities who might be interested in it.

3. To Do Public Writing

I want to write for general audiences. I am inspired by writing that has appeared in places like Tropics of Meta, Public Books, Contingent Magazine, Public Domain Review, and Lady Science. At the same time, public writing is not something that was talked about--at all--at any point of my education, and I've found this piece by Dr Irina Dumitrescu 'how to cope with a fear of public writing' really helpful for thinking about the kinds of writing I'm most interested in doing as well as ways to get around common fear-based roadblocks.

 

Even if the heyday of blogging is over, blogs are still one of the principle forms through which academics share their work with scholarly and public audiences. There are many different types of academic blogs; my favourites focus on advice, thinking in public, and sharing experiences. Restarting this blog was intended as a way to get ready for producing publishable work by ensuring that I practice writing regularly. I wanted to combat my panic-procrastination of all forms of academic writing by giving myself a low-stakes, low-pressure opportunity to produce regular writing, regardless of what else was going on in my life. I deliberately didn't specify whether blogging had to be academic in order to avoid trapping myself in a further spiral of panic-procrastination. Plus, I'm fascinated by the personal side of history writing: what personal, social, and environmental factors shape this scholar's interest in this problem?  Like Dr Anuja Cabral, whose post on writing and fear really resonated with me, I write as a way to understand.

 

What role might social media play in this process of writing to developing my understanding? I am still thinking this through! I don't currently have this blog linked to any of my professional profile pages and I remain unsure as to whether, if I did create a Twitter profile, I would tweet about any of my posts. The next post in this series will discuss some of the reasons why.