UPDATE: Peter Suber (@petersuber) replied to my tweets and followed me! Am I a digital humanist now?
I decided to live-tweet my reading of chapter 1 of Peter Suber’s book. I figured this would be a neat entree to the concept of socially connected scholarship. I’m including the full tweet stream in images below, but a couple observations are in order. First, I was (and continue to be) extremely nervous about addressing my responses directly to Peter Suber. It forced me to be accountable in a way I wouldn’t have in a normal online post for the class. It also caused a bit of anxiety—I was well aware that my blow-by-blow reactions and questions were likely to be addressed by Suber in the course of his arguments. However, I thought it would be a betrayal of my experiment’s premise to read through first and then go back to tweet it. This, of course, forced me to formulate some sort of premise out of what was, at first, a gut feeling. I came up with this: What effect does socially networked discourse have on what is, traditionally, a non-immediate discipline? In other words, what could go wrong tweeting reactions to a work before you’ve actually read it through? In other words, what do drunk celebrities with twitter access and (sober) digitally enabled graduate students have in common? There is a partial straw man flavor to this exercise—it is possible to formulate one’s thoughts on a topic and then let the world know—and a disciplined scholar would do well to take that route. But, just as surely, instant technologies introduce instant reactions and incomplete methodologies into the discourse. Twitter (and other networked technologies) should undoubtedly be explored for potential to enhance scholarship/discourse/etc. But pitfalls are inevitable. My verdict, roughly, is that a certain decorum of generosity and politeness must be adopted in these kinds of instant, partial, rapid conversations—something that is extremely hard to do in 140 characters, especially when addressing @petersuber AND including the tremendously cumbersome #digitalhumanities hashtag. Nonetheless, the experience was edifying and bizarrely scary. Mr. Suber has not yet responded, and I dread the thought that he will. The nightmare is a resounding smackdown on my incomplete analysis and amateurish methods. In order to militate against such a coup de tweet, I threw in an endorsement of Suber’s book for my pitiful 56-tweep public. Welcome to the academy, I suppose. To weet (get it?)(also, they’re in reverse order, so scroll to the bottom and read up to most recent):
