In the Winter a young classicist’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of the SCS…

It’s that time of year, and I’m starting to get pumped for the SCS, which has (among other things) meant thinking about the big world of classics and classicists, which has also meant that I’ve been thinking about Twitter, and the people I’ve met only or mostly through Twitter. As a big fan and (at best) moderately skilled user of Twitter, I often like to live-tweet conference things, partly to participate in a broader conversation about the topics of the talks I’m attending at the conference and partly for people who are unable to attend the conference but are still interested in what’s going on at the conference. One of my favorite cases in point, because I never stop loving that vase painting:

I’ve had some recent online conversations that have really caused me to think differently about how and what and when I live-tweet conference events though, and particularly in the lead-up to this year’s SCS/AIA, I wanted to share those thoughts and possibly urge others to share some of my newly-found positions.
This all started when a friend of mine posted this article on Facebook: “The Dangers of Tweeting at Conferences.” It opens with a TRULY appalling story in which a conference was projecting a live stream of tweets behind a presenter, and the tweets began personally criticizing the presenter. The Facebook conversation about this article (I’m leaving out all names and identifying information for privacy reasons, since I haven’t contacted the people involved to get their permission to share their comments) included the comment “The SCS/AIA needs to have a policy prohibiting this,” and I jumped in with a defense of how this was an outlier, and not a fair representation of what conference live tweeting can/should be. I stand by some of that, and I particularly stand by my hope that there were severe social repercussions and/or ostracism for the people who were involved in this Twitter bullying.

Where my opinion was changed significantly was about what the norms and defaults should be on this front, and about the legitimate academic concerns involved in putting someone’s intellectual property into the public without their consent. I started this conversation with my stance that “I’m all for allowing (even encouraging) presenters to opt out, but…” That is to say, I used to think that so long as no one explicitly asked audience members not to share details about the talk, sharing was fair game. As multiple other classicists shared, however, this presents very real logistical issues in terms of maintaining actual blind review of research. One might certainly argue that blind review is already compromised in a number of other ways (people talk, and there’s a reasonable chance that if a portion of an article or book was presented at a conference, the reviewer might well have been to that talk and simply remember the scholar’s name, whether or not the details of their talk are readily available on social media). That said, blind review procedures are an important way to help level the academic playing field, and I really didn’t think deeply about this until these scholars pointed it out.

This was one particular comment I really appreciated (emphasis added):

When your arguments are chopped up and published on the internet before you’ve had a chance to publish them yourself, they’re open to all sorts of misrepresentation, appropriation, and abuse by those with more academic (or social) power. (People stealing other people’s ideas is a thing, and I shudder when I think of the ways the live-tweeting trend could feed into this.)
Conference proceedings are their own genre precisely because the conference itself isn’t traditionally considered a form of publication. A scholar who has an idea should be allowed to be the one to put it into print for the first time. We owe each other that much.
It frustrates me to no end to see academics spreading other scholars’ unpublished work around the internet under the guise of “outreach”. This should be an opt-in situation — it shouldn’t be the default.

So, all this being said, I do really still think that there is a great deal of value in engaging in Classics Twitter discussions. Hannah Čulík-Baird makes a wonderful case for the ways that academic engagement over Twitter can be wonderful and intellectually stimulating. Her post (which is a wonderful read — check it out!) was a follow-up to a recent SCS blog post on this topic (Digital Footnotes for Scholarly Communication, written together with Hamish Cameron) and I truly do think that these points and suggestions are both valid and excecllent, but as we all head into the SCS/AIA, I’ve come up with a few additional guidelines that I will be following (and encourage everyone to think about adopting as well!):

  1. Though this shouldn’t even need to be mentioned, BE NICE. That doesn’t have to mean being unfailingly positive about the talk, but the internet is forever and personal attacks have no place in an academic discussion. If basic decency isn’t enough reason enough, think about the experience of the job-hunter whose name, when Googled, turns up nasty, sniping criticism (and said scholar isn’t given the opportunity to defend themselves against Twitter-snarking). This is cruel.
  2. Unless given permission, talk in generalities. I tweet things like “Just saw an amazing talk by XXX” or “Panel on Sophocles looks amazing and I can’t wait to go hear the papers.” I tend to think that if the content you’re tweeting can be found in the abstracts (which are already available online) there isn’t an issue with sharing that information.
  3. Assume that you do not have permission to share specifics unless you are explicitly given permission. This is the big change for me, but I’m really committing to it. With a lot of gratitude to the colleagues who made me realize why this is important.
  4. Help establish these norms more broadly. The internet is always new and changing, and there isn’t a firm code for what it looks like when you combine social media with academia. The personal and professional realms get blended at times (again, not to self-flagellate too much here, but I truly never considered anything I was doing could be a problem because so much of my life is quasi-public, between Instagram and Facebook and Twitter). I will be asking presenters if I can share things about their talks, and I will be clarifying before my own talk that I welcome and encourage anyone who wants to engage publicly with it. I think this will go a long way towards helping establish norms around these questions.

I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this (@apistone on Twitter!) and I look forward to having an ethical and productive conference with y’all in Boston!

no replies

Leave your comment