Digital & Public History: Twitter

Today I should have presented a paper on "Digital History: History and Memory for and by everybody ?" or, in French, "La Digital History: Histoire et Mémoire à la portée de tous" -not easy to translate- during a whole day conference on Digital History organised by Sébastien Poublanc doctoral researcher at Toulouse II Le Mirail, and webmaster of FRAMESPA laboratory (French do like abbreviations that nobody else can understand.... In this case it's about the Early Modern History of Southern France and Northern Spain if I understood correctly ! ). This paper draws on my essay "La digital history: histoire et mémoire à la portée de tous » in Pierre Mounier (ed.), Read/Write Book 2. Une introduction aux humanités numériques, Marseille, OpenEdition Press, 2012, p. 151-177.

The -in French- abstract of my paper was the following

« L’histoire publique numérique (Digital Public History) dans sa version 2.0, a certainement permis de désenclaver la «culture haute» mais avec l’apparition du web 2.0, l’histoire et la mémoire sont à présent la prérogative de tout le monde dans la toile grâce au «crowdsourcing». Le danger aujourd’hui est que les spécialistes ne dominent pas les mutations du numérique en histoire ou que l’on se limite aux usages publics du passé. Sans une prise de conscience qui ne peut passer que par la connaissance des nouveaux instruments, la révolution du numérique éliminera la capacité professionnelle de reconstruire le passé qui deviendra l’apanage des mémoires individuelles et de l’horizon aveugle de chacun. Cette intervention lors du séminaire "Histoire et historiens face aux usages et à l'instrumentalisation du passé", à Toulouse le 13 juin 2013, tentera de comprendre quelles sont les mutations plus significatives de l’histoire 2.0 pour le métier d’historien et quels sont précisément les enjeux épistémologiques posés par le numérique participatif. Elle s’attardera sur les pratiques nouvelles de la Digital Public History, l’histoire désenclavée à la portée de tout le monde qui répond aux profonds besoins identitaires de nos sociétés globalisées. (Mots-Clés: Histoire Numérique, Web 2.0, Sources Historiques, Public History, Digital Public History, Humanités Numériques, Mémoires, Toile d’Histoire.)»

Unfortunately Air France -I am a frequent flyer- was on strike between 11-13 of June 2013 and after rescheduling my flight twice and taking a taxi to Florence Airport to leave my city for Paris hoping to reach Toulouse in the evening on the 12th, I was unfortunately unable to leave Tuscany and I had to take a taxi back home, frustrated.

So I tried -as much as I could- to follow the live streaming of the conference discovering that my friend Sean Takats -which was also blocked in London Heatrow Airport- succeeded in taking its own flight to Toulouse....

I tweeted the following:

"Vu seulement l'aéroport de Florence pas celui de Toulouse pour #DigHist13 merci #AirFrance ! Désolé pas être à http://instruhist.hypotheses.org"

Toulouse Airport Twitter account retweeted my tweet with a real sense of humor I may say ...

Anyway I tried my best to interact with all the participants using twitter and the conference live stream channel and this is again an example of how much useful for scholarly purposes is now twitter.

Photo near Waterloo, 2011

For instance, when Sean Takats (CHNM, George Mason, USA) and, in direct streaming, mentioned the importance of popular history and reenactment in the USA he remembered that also in Europe we had reenactors like for the 18th of June 1815 Waterloo battle. He remebered that I said him about some "grognards de Napoléon" walking on the street nearby the battlefield still in 2011 !

I also loaded two power point presentation in SlideShare to add some information/queries to the lively ongoing debate. But I felt anyway heavily frustrated not to being able to interact live with all the other participants

The first power point presentation was about a possible list of books -and monographs issues of Journals- on Digital History in all languages that I knew .. (Please help to complete the list).

A second presentation was about defining the field/champ or sub-discipline (if we connect DigHist to Digital Humanities) that Digital (Public) History is about today.

Here they are

Short Biblio on Digital History from Serge Noiret

and also this one

Digital history, evolution or revolution ? Some definitions - 13 -6 -2013 from Serge Noiret

@sergenoiret

So, you use Facebook and publish your family pictures, or you write about how you feel today, what you saw at the cinema or whether your cat is pretty cool? Twitter is not for you, or you may wish to “command” FB using your Twitter account directly. But let’s rephrase it: yes using the social network Twitter ‒ like a Hollywood celebrity would do ‒ is possible of course. 50 million tweets were sent per day in 2010 and as of Twitter’s fifth anniversary in early 2011, about 140 million tweets are created per day. But experience shows that the micro-blogging software ‒ 140 characters only available for a post ‒ is not used like FB but often for very different purposes. Twitter is also something else and this “something else” is important for communicating today within professional and scientific communities.

Mibazaar Syria Uprising

Twitter is used widely worldwide to sustain new forms of democratic participation, new information channels and web 2.0 “crowdsourced” new forms of journalism. The immediate involvement of citizens and their participation in the polis and their communities, is analysed in depth today by political scientists and sociologists. Twitter is connected to all possible e-devices, mainly smartphones, to inform “live” on the developments of protests in Middle East and in the Maghreb. Whoever actively participates in the “Arab Spring” is using Twitter.
Today you can view online a Google map showing in real time ‒ thanks to Twitter ‒ how the uprising and the repression is affecting Syrian people and Syrian cities. And Barack Obama during his first Presidential campaign in 2008 used Twitter heavily to communicate with the electorate, so there’s nothing strange in finding that Twitter has signed an agreement with the Library of Congress (2009) to be fully archived. This is the first social network for which we have a public archiving procedure, because the network matters to societies.

So, let’s forget about our use of Facebook and instead concentrate on what Twitter is offering in an academic environment like the one I am living in at the EUI (European University Institute) in Florence. The EUI community of social scientis, lawyers and historians ‒ like other academic communities ‒ may use Twitter for very different purposes and in different ways thanks to Twitter’s technology. How can we make the most of this recent social network, created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, founder and first CEO of Twitter? Let’s look very briefly here at some possible uses.

Academics are going to visit libraries, research centers, archives and universities and they may wish to know about these institutions online before, during and after their visit. So, first they need to see if a Twitter feed, like the recently created EUI https://twitter.com/#%21/EuropeanUni, is available. This feed will complement the often too static web pages available for universities and their institutional web sites.

EUI @EuropeanUni Twitter account

In our academic community, the @THATCampFirenze account was created at the end of 2010 to follow the March 2011 #THATcamp EUI, the Digital Humanities and Technology Camp at the Badia Fiesolana. Twitter accounts, at the EUI or elsewhere, are indeed a good way to get updates, see highlights of collections, get research tips, ask questions to staff and professors, and follow new and updated information.

In order to do this, the most useful characteristic of Twitter is the so-called Twitter Hashtags #, a combination of the pound sign and text used on Twitter to find connected tweets. The # symbol is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. People also use the symbol # before relevant keywords in their Tweet in order for them to show up more easily within a Twitter Search. Clicking on a “hashtagged” word in any tweet, will show you all other Tweets in that category. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the Tweet. If you Tweet a # on a public account, anyone who does a search for that # may find your Tweet. It is suggested that #s are used only on Tweets relevant to the topic. The web service http://hashtags.org/ is the de facto standard for # information. Hashtags can be very general, like #history or #archives, or #syria or #communism or more specific, like #ncph2012, the annual meeting of American Public Historians in Milwaukee in April, in which I participated. Hashtags are also a way of joining a professional community, like #twitterstorians, created by Katrina Gulliver for all historians willing to use Twitter.

So, if the EUI decides to organize an important event like the State of the Union, a specific # is created ad hoc for us – everybody ‒ to connect eventually our own tweets and/or follow that specific event: #SoU2012. Furthermore using the # of the conference allows everybody ‒ especially in the case of a conference like the State of the Union which is a huge event with many people attending ‒ to directly participate and interact. #s allow speakers or organizers to deal immediately with important queries and comments raised by the public attending the conference on site or those following via the streaming channel. These queries and comments may be shown on a laptop or, during the event, displayed on a large public screen. This is the way tweets are commonly used in a TV channel transmission like the Stream, Al Jazeera’s “aggregator of online sources and discussion”. The Stream uses a Twitter feed for direct interaction between those watching the television broadcasting, the journalists viewing on their own computers, and the Twitter stream itself. So now that you fully understand what # is about, and how to use them, you can categorize or follow topics with the service.

Another extremely useful reason for using Twitter in our academic environment is to share resources and links to these resources. Shortened URLs – web addresses that are shortened by Twitter itself by default in order not to lose character spaces ‒ are often embedded in tweets and allow you to find digitized documents, blogs, interesting articles, new projects, new websites or use the integrated photo or video sharing service.

Twitter can also be used to remind researchers and students about homework, meetings, deadlines, etc. Seminars at the EUI could be promoted using Twitter. In this case it would be important to verify that each single member of a community – a department, a centre, an administrative service ‒ had created its own Twitter account. Because Twitter is available on many electronic devices like smartphones ‒ not only on laptop computers ‒ it is easy to receive the latest news notifications. Twitter’s SMS service can also come in handy when without access to a Wi-Fi connection and when being tweeted at by somebody else, mentioned in a tweet, or addressed through a DM, Direct Message.

Tweetdeck

To conclude these few comments about using Twitter in academic communities, let’s look briefly at some third party software – there are many and the business is growing ‒ that will help you make the best of your Twitter account and Tweets. Tweedeck is a portal which organizes your tweets, messages and hashtags in parallel columns. It allows you also to post your tweets contemporaneously in Twitter and Facebook.

I have already said about the iPhone, Blackberry, Windows phone & the Android mobile API that is available to facilitate entry into Twitter through your smartphones but, thanks to a specific plug-in called TechHit, Twitter is readable in your Microsoft Outlook account and together with your emails.


TechHit

Finally a very nice way to present your Twitter Feed as a blog or, better still, as an online newspaper, is through the Tweeted Times which “aggregates news in your Twitter stream and ranks them by popularity among your friends. … You can create a newspaper for any topic of your interest. Topical newspapers are based on streams produced by Twitter Lists or Twitter search”. Tweeted Times is available also for iPad, nowadays the best place to read an online newspaper.

So are you convinced and thinking about creating a permanent and shared information Feed using Tweeted Times applied to your own Twitter account which would integrate the EUI Twitter account @EuropeanUni ?

Tweeted Time

Reflections following the Atelier Multimédia in Digital History held by @sergenoiret, (EUI History Information Specialist) on Wednesday 28th of March 2012 for the Max Weber Programme in Villa La Fonte. (The PowerPoint presentation of the course and the PDF of the accompanying slides are available here).

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Used Webliography:

• Benoit Majerus: Using Twitter during a lecture – how to evaluate the experience?, December 10, 2011 and Using Twitter during a lecture – some technical remarks, December 16, 2011

• Greg Ferenstein: How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement, March 01, 2010,

• Susan Orlean: Hash, Posted June 29, 2010, the New Yorker,

• Elisabeth Grant: Five Ways for Historians to Use Twitter, August 16, 2011

• Katrina Gulliver: Twitterstorians keep the faith, August 14, 2011,

• Nancy Messieh: How to use Twitter in the classroom, 23rd June 2011

• Sarah Perez: 10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets, August 11, 2009

• Shane Atkins: The history of the Twitter Timeline, February 10, 2012

• Matt Raymond: The Library and Twitter: An FAQ, April 28th, 2010

• Graeme McMillan Tweet Eternal: Pros and Cons of the Library of Congress Twitter Archive, December 8, 2011

• Twitter, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and List of Twitter API’s here

• Kelly Truong: Scholars Compile Academic Book From Twitter and Blogs, June 2, 2010

• Silvio Gulizia Twitter: un anno di hashtag. Alcuni utenti italiani hanno ricostruito la storia di un anno raccontata attraverso il social media, 20 dicembre 2011

• Monica Rankin: Some general comments on the “Twitter Experiment ” at the UT Dallas

• Michelle Higgins : Practical Traveler. Twitter Comes to the Rescue, in NYT, July 1, 2009

• Christopher Beam: #Posterity: How future historians will use the Twitter archives, Tuesday, April 20, 2010,

• Sara Yin: Twitter Cracks Down on Another Third-Party App, TwapperKeeper, February 23, 2011

• Blogs et réseaux sociaux en, histoire , pour quoi ? Conférence de l'EHESS pour les étudiants de Master : Outils Informatiques pour l'Historien (2011)

• Yves Gon zalez-Quijano Trois remarques à propos du “Web 2.0 arabe”, 22 mars 2011.

• Martin Hawksey: Twitter : How to archive event hashtags and create an interactive visualization of the conversation, 7 November 2011.

• Modern language Association: How do I cite a Tweet ?

• Katrina Gulliver: 10 Commandments of Twitter for Academics, 9 May 2012.