Live-Tweeting #AHA2014

Craig Gallagher

In anticipation of going to my first American Historical Association conference this past weekend in Washington D.C., I sought out a range of senior colleagues who had attended past AHA meetings for advice on what to expect. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate who is about to start writing a dissertation, I was regularly advised that many aspects of the AHA meeting did not yet apply to me, such as the Job Center, where interviews for academic positions are conducted, or the Book Exhibit where publishers meet with scholars and teachers to discuss manuscripts or books for use in the classroom.

My first AHA, therefore, was largely confined to the scholarly panels (and, I should add as a brief aside, various receptions, where I shamelessly handed out business cards and tried to score five minutes of chat with some of my favorite scholars. I was mostly successful). I attended six different panels over the four days, enjoying some immensely and others not-so-much. On the whole, I was impressed with the range of questions posed by various luminaries in my field, and – especially in the Atlantic History panels I was most interested in – the sweeping state-of-the-field discussions most papers engendered.

What Blogging, Twitter, and Texting Do for the Historian's Craft

Heather Cox Richardson

For all their new applications, new technologies are also good for the old-fashioned craft of history. They are excellent for honing our writing skills.

First of all, blogging and tweeting require very low investments of professional energy. There is something daunting about starting A Book. I often panic when I face a new project, because I simply can’t remember how to begin. What do you write first? How do you set everything up? Do you write an introduction? And on and on and on. For days. Everything seems Very Important.

Andrew Sullivan, an early and influential blogger.

Blogging, though, requires none of that. It is an exercise in brevity, centered on a single idea. It is not intended to Sit On A Shelf Forever. It doesn’t have to be Brilliant. It has to get done, and done quickly. So stepping over the threshold is easy. It’s fun. It’s a good way to rev up your engines to carry into the day’s more daunting projects.

Blogging also forces your writing up several notches. It has to convey an idea clearly and, with luck, engagingly. Those are not necessarily skills professional historians practice very much. We tend to fight over arcane theories and dig so deeply into our research that we lose all but a few other specialists. Blogging forces you to distill complicated ideas into crucial points, and then to communicate those points in such a way that a nonspecialist can understand. (Twitter and texting have similar value. Never is the importance of strong verbs more clear than when tweeting. You MUST use short, powerful verbs to keep ideas within 140 characters. Don’t believe me? Follow @JoyceCarolOates.)

Will Blog Posts and Tweets Hurt Junior Scholars? Part 2

Heather Cox Richardson

Untenured scholars are in a funny place: that gap between the old world and the new. Ten years ago, yes, blogging would convince many senior scholars that a junior person was not a serious academic because s/he was catering to a popular audience. Since then, the old world of the academy is crumbling, and while many departments have not yet caught up, others are aware they must move into the twenty-first century.

So will blog posts and tweets hurt your career? Maybe. But they can also help your career in very practical ways.

The first has to do with publishing. The gold standard for employment and for tenure remains a published book. When most senior scholars finished their doctorates, it was almost guaranteed that their dissertations would find academic publishers. In those days, university presses had standing contracts with university libraries that guaranteed automatic sales of a few thousand copies of each monograph that came out from a reputable press. Budget cuts over the last twenty years killed this system. No longer can an academic press be certain that libraries will buy their monographs. This means that they can’t accept everything that comes over the transom, making it harder than ever to get a book contract.

Should Historians Use Twitter? Part 1

Heather Cox Richardson

Yes.

But since I still have more than 136 characters left, here’s my take on the Twitter question:

I have had many conversations lately with historians based in America about whether or not they should use Twitter. There are three complaints about it. First of all, there is a general impression that Twitter users are narcissists who feel obliged to inform the world every time they eat a bagel. Second, there is a sense that it is a waste of valuable time.  Third, younger scholars are concerned that presence on social media might hurt them on the job market.

These are valid concerns, but they are, to my mind, vastly outweighed by the advantages of Twitter both for individual historians and for the profession.

Let’s start with the profession. Yes, there are plenty of people who use Twitter to issue a play-by-play recap of their most mundane activities. But there is no law that says that’s the only way to use the medium. Twitter works best for historians when participants use it to direct followers to content. This works in two ways. Tweets can mention a new archive or recently discovered source or the significance of a date. They can also be used to call attention to a longer blog post or article—or even a book—on a historical topic. Imbedded links make the longer format instantly available.