Does Tweeting Make me a Digital Humanist? Reflections on NeMLA2013
Last weekend I was in Boston attending the 2013 NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) conference. Late Friday afternoon I presented my paper entitled “‘Hands tell age better than faces’: Sexuality and Subjectivity in Egerton’s ‘Gone Under’” as part of the “Under Her Skin: Victorian literature, the Female Body, and Touch” panel. The panel was well attended and the papers were well received as witnessed by an insightful and lively question period. It was pretty much the kind of ideal conference presentation situation academics look for; a venue to present ideas and gain valuable feedback.
However, there was something that I kept questioning the whole time I was at NeMLA. Where are all the tweets? NeMLA had approximately 400 panels with 4 panelists each. Quick math means there was approximately 1600 people in attendance over the 4 days of the conference, yet a search for #NeMLA, #NeMLA13, or even #NeMLA2013 yields the following number of tweets:
#NeMLA (157)
#NeMLA13 (48)
#NeMLA2013 (50)
One issue of course is that NeMLA did not officially announce a hashtag for the conference. They created a very nice app to help attendees negotiate the conference but no real backchannel was announced. I even had a hit on my blog using the search string “NeMLA hastag?” Most of the hastag hits that I have numerated above actually occurred after the conference was over from March 24th onward.
I was not the only one who realized that there was a tweeting gap at the conference. For example, this tweet from Anne C. McCarthy (@annecmccarthy) on March 21st:
“How was that just the 2d use of the
In a brief twitter discussion with Ryan Cordell (@ryancordell)
on March 23 I asked why there seemed to be a lack of tweets in relation to
other conferences like the MLA for example. His response seemed to echo the
query that Anne C. McCarthy suggested a few days earlier:
There was a discussion on how NeMLA doesn’t have
the same resources as other conferences, but this got me wondering about
whether it really is those scholars who consider themselves digital humanists
who drive Twitter discussions at conferences.
I don’t
really consider myself a digital humanist mainly because I am still working
through the debate as to whether you have to be building something to be a
DHer. However, I am active on Twitter and I blog on a fairly regular basis, and
I really believe in the importance and need of alternative modes to create
community and share information and research. I am still pondering what Ryan
Cordell said and this is why it has taken me almost a week to write/articulate this
debate via blog post.
With a lack of Twitter engagement I made
connections and contacts the “old-fashioned way.” I met scholars based as far
away as England and we exchanged business cards and contact information so that
we could continue our discussions via email or even via Twitter in the future. When
there are only a handful of people working on authors like George Egerton or
Victoria Cross, it is important to foster connections and community when and
where you can. This is why NeMLA was
great.
I don’t want this to read as a harsh critique of
NeMLA 2013, for I truly enjoyed the conference and really appreciated making
the connections that I did- it is simply a questioning of why this conference
did seem to lack Twitter interaction. I had never been to Boston - it is a
lovely city and I enjoyed walking around Harvard and visiting the Boston
Library (what beautiful academic architecture!), which added to the atmosphere of
academic engagement of the conference.
So why the lack of Twitter engagement? What do you
think? Is it a case of a lack of DH panels?
Work Cited
Cordell, Ryan (ryancordell). “@AnnGagne at @MLAconvention
most of the tweets come out of DH panels-NeMLA included very few DH sessions-that’s probably part of it” 23
March 2013. Tweet.
McCarthy, Anne C. (annecmcarthy). “How was that
just the 2d use of the #NeMLA13
hashtag? Am I accidentally a digital humanist? #isthisthingon?” 21 March 2013. Tweet.
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