There seems to be quite a backlash on this topic, stateside.

See e.g. http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Tweckling-Twitterfolk-/8895/

James Cummings wrote:

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 11:41, O'Donnell, Dan daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:

...

If I might add one comment born of unfortunately hard experience at the TEI: please remember that postings to a dm twitter feed are public and reflect on us as a community. It is easy to end up criticising people more harshly than you realise!

Hello Dan,

Have no fear. Currently the 'DigitalMedieval' twitter feed is set up only to forward DM's news feed (and twitterfeed.com seems to be being highly selective in forgetting to forward some things in any case!) so anything posted has to undergo the same moderation as posting news items (approval by a number of volunteers on the board). As the person who set up the account I can, if necessary, post something manually. In my announcement of it when I suggested that we might add something extra to it during conferences, I was only thinking we might update it with reminders of important digital/medieval sessions or something like that. I don't think anyone would suggest using any of the official DM channels for criticising anyone, at any point!

But otherwise I'd say that what people post on their very own non-official twitter feeds, facebook statuses, blogs, webpages, or bulletin boards is a matter for their own consciences. (It is perhaps interesting to note the different modes of writing people use in such things, compared to email and traditional publication, but that is, of course, a different conversation.)

-James

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 6:09 PM, Dan O'Donnell daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:

At the TEI, we just ran an experimental tweet feed (or rather, one was proposed and we encouraged people to use it). It got really good reviews from many participants, but there were also a couple of complaints and I worry about how the whole idea of a public metaconversation might affect those who worry, for example, about contributing to mailing lists and the like. I can see how somebody might find the idea of presenting a conference paper very intimidating while subject to instant public comment and criticism.

Dan, the thing is that *this is something that neither the TEI, nor DM, nor any other conference or scholarly organization can possibly control*. If in the future the TEI or DM don't advertise or encourage people to use the feeds (that is, mark their tweets with hash tags), some people are going to do it anyway, and there will be these public conversations whether the presenters, or the conference organizers, like it or not. If someone is going to say, well I can't present at that conference because someone might be snarky about me on a Twitter feed... well, I'm not sure how the conference organizers can possibly respond to that. Ban Twitter? The best approach may be to make it clear that the feed is not "official" conference discussion and that participants in the feed are solely responsible for their own comments. It's clear that that is not obvious at this point.

Dot

Obviously an area that still requires experiment and careful thought.

-dan

Lou wrote:

...

There seems to be quite a backlash on this topic, stateside.

See e.g. http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Tweckling-Twitterfolk-/8895/

James Cummings wrote:

...

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 11:41, O'Donnell, Dan daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:

...

If I might add one comment born of unfortunately hard experience at the TEI: please remember that postings to a dm twitter feed are public and reflect on us as a community. It is easy to end up criticising people more harshly than you realise!

Hello Dan,

Have no fear. Currently the 'DigitalMedieval' twitter feed is set up only to forward DM's news feed (and twitterfeed.com seems to be being highly selective in forgetting to forward some things in any case!) so anything posted has to undergo the same moderation as posting news items (approval by a number of volunteers on the board).  As the person who set up the account I can, if necessary, post something manually. In my announcement of it when I suggested that we might add something extra to it during conferences, I was only thinking we might update it with reminders of important digital/medieval sessions or something like that.  I don't think anyone would  suggest using any of the official DM channels for criticising anyone, at any point!

But otherwise I'd say that what people post on their very own non-official twitter feeds, facebook statuses, blogs, webpages, or bulletin boards is a matter for their own consciences. (It is perhaps interesting to note the different modes of writing people use in such things, compared to email and traditional publication, but that is, of course, a different conversation.)

-James

Digital Medievalist --  http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

Digital Medievalist --  http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

-- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/) Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/) Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)

Vox: +1 403 329-2377 Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental) Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/

Digital Medievalist --  http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

I agree with both Dot and Gabriel... the point of my comparison to the early days of listservs was not that twitter needs similar controls (moderation, etc.), but that it is a new type of communication that participants are still learning to understand and for which etiquette is still developing. The fact is that people do misunderstand how the feeds work. I can't see them stopping. But that doesn't mean that people won't find them intimidating or assign responsibility to the organisation being tweeted about.

I was shocked at the TEI to learn that people find contributing to listservs intimidating (I seem to have been born without that gene). But they report that they do. I don't think that there is anything to be done about twitter feeds or that one ought to do something about them (other than perhaps encourage people to be kind to each other). But it seems to me still a fact for any organisation that is trying to encourage inclusiveness and openness that people who are already intimidated by contributing in a public form are likely to find the twitter conference even more so. Over time everybody will (have to) get used to it, of course, because it is inescapable (and quite useful).

--dan

Gabriel Bodard wrote:

The trouble with this statement is, that it wasn't really the TEI who created or even "ran" the feed, it was just a tag that people used. The TEIMM website proposed a tag, and people followed it, but it would probably have happened without the suggestion (possible various tags would have been suggested, and all but one would have died out within the first day or so). Anyone who reads the feed and thinks that it's anything but a collection of what *anyone* in the world chooses to say and self-identify with the #tei_09 tag is misunderstanding not only Twitter but the way Web 2.0 works. Not only can we not control this, but nor should we be able to and nor should we want to.

(This same method was used at DH09, and at several other conferences I've attended and/or run, and has been a very useful way to collect reviews and discussions afterwards. If there was trolling or tweckling at tei_09 [I haven't seen it, and I suspect we shouldn't dredge it up here if there was], there certainly wasn't at any of the other hashtags I've followed.)

I'm all for experiment and careful thought, but let's not (a) panic, nor (b) think that this is in our hands. Abuse on the TEI-L or DM-L can (and should) be handled by the listowners, but Twitter is bigger than us. We just need to make clear that what happens under "our" hashtag is not actually our responsibility. In any way.

In any case, as James points out, the DM account announced here is not a hashtag. As far as I can see, no one has tweeted anything under #digitalmedieval yet. (#digitalhumanities gets occasional hits, but I haven't seen any abuse there yet ;-) )

Dan O'Donnell a écrit :

...

I think myself that it is an area that the dust has yet to settle on: in a sense like the academic listserv 20 years ago. We now generally know how to deal with the perils of lists (trolls, flames, etc.) and it all seems quite usual. But I remember back in the late 1980s and early 1990s that things were very different and listservs seemed quite difficult to manage.

At the TEI, we just ran an experimental tweet feed (or rather, one was proposed and we encouraged people to use it). It got really good reviews from many participants, but there were also a couple of complaints and I worry about how the whole idea of a public metaconversation might affect those who worry, for example, about contributing to mailing lists and the like. I can see how somebody might find the idea of presenting a conference paper very intimidating while subject to instant public comment and criticism.

Obviously an area that still requires experiment and careful thought.

-dan

Lou wrote:

...

There seems to be quite a backlash on this topic, stateside.

See e.g. http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Tweckling-Twitterfolk-/8895/

James Cummings wrote:

...

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 11:41, O'Donnell, Dan daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:

...

If I might add one comment born of unfortunately hard experience at the TEI: please remember that postings to a dm twitter feed are public and reflect on us as a community. It is easy to end up criticising people more harshly than you realise!

Hello Dan,

Have no fear. Currently the 'DigitalMedieval' twitter feed is set up only to forward DM's news feed (and twitterfeed.com seems to be being highly selective in forgetting to forward some things in any case!) so anything posted has to undergo the same moderation as posting news items (approval by a number of volunteers on the board). As the person who set up the account I can, if necessary, post something manually. In my announcement of it when I suggested that we might add something extra to it during conferences, I was only thinking we might update it with reminders of important digital/medieval sessions or something like that. I don't think anyone would suggest using any of the official DM channels for criticising anyone, at any point!

But otherwise I'd say that what people post on their very own non-official twitter feeds, facebook statuses, blogs, webpages, or bulletin boards is a matter for their own consciences. (It is perhaps interesting to note the different modes of writing people use in such things, compared to email and traditional publication, but that is, of course, a different conversation.)

-James

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

I generally agree with you James. And as I said, I really don't have an intuitive sense of what it is like to feel intimidated on a list or in a lecture--I tend to get annoyed rather than scared. But all that being said, enough people raise the issue about even quite innocuous places--like tei-l, dm-l, humanist, ansax-l--that it has to be accepted as a real issue.

I think myself that there are countervailing imperatives at work. On the one hand, there is a sense in which academia is where the purists live and one shouldn't get involved if one would rather not have one's work and performance open to criticism--including sometimes quite fundamental criticism. Moreover not all academics are equally endowed with the social graces... so you need to be prepared for some rough and tumble, including sometimes harshly phrased and sometimes even spiteful criticism.

However, the other imperative is that academics should not glory in rudeness. I'm sure we have all experienced criticism that is insightful, perhaps fundamental, and not cruel. And criticism that is cruel without being particularly right or helpful. Just like listservs seemed to bring out bizarre behaviour in academics 20 years ago, twitter seems to already have created a couple circumstances where people have confused "duty to criticise" with "licence to be an A**H***." That example that Lou cited for example from the Chronicle, seems to me to be a case where there was legitimate reason for complaint that unleashed the inner monster in more than a couple of people. I imagine a lot of pictures in a lot of attics aged considerably over the course of that lecture.

So I do feel that one can be fundamentally critical, but one ought to try to be constructive and avoid unnecessary rudeness. I know as an editor, I find the negative reviews that realise that authors are human beings whose papers are flawed rather than flawed human beings are far more useful all round. I agree with Gaby that nothing can control this, and I think the idea of opening up a new communication channel at conferences and the like is really exciting and powerful. But I think that we as the twits involved ought to try and remember that real people with real mothers and fathers are readings our contributions.

-dan (same provisos as James).

James Cummings wrote:

Coming back a bit late to this conversation... with far too long of a post:

Dan earlier said:

...

I worry about how the whole idea of a public metaconversation might affect those who worry, for example, about contributing to mailing lists and the like. I can see how somebody might find the idea of presenting a conference paper very intimidating while subject to instant public comment and criticism.

People find presenting conference papers intimidating for all sorts of reasons beyond our control, while all academic societies (like TEI and DM) should do their best to minimise any major sources of anxiety for people, I don't believe it should be a major concern of them to cater for everyone's fear and paranoia. I think it is a myth that twitter somehow opens up new way to provide public comment and criticism. During a paper one could easily email a mailing list and say "Dot is talking about yet another image viewer/navigator, why do funding bodies *keep* funding the same thing again and again?!" Or one could put it in a blog... and blogging conferences is quite common. If Dot were then somehow offended by this, then she could of course answer this criticism (to point out that the TILE project is really more about Text/Image linking in my example). But in my opinion we should avoid attempting to shield people from comment and criticism; we do them and the field a disservice. I'd be tempted to posit that without forums for causing disagreement and possibly offence that an academic field would stagnate. Obviously I'm not suggesting we just all go out and vilify each other, but there certainly is an academic benefit in pointing out the emperor seems to be a tad scantly dressed. As a comedian I went to see recently when discussing attempts to legislate to prevent hurt feelings commented something along the lines of: "What ever happened to 'sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you', if you are offended by what I say, then _fine_ be offended, that is your right. But nothing really _happens_ to you when you are offended, it isn't like I've pushed you down the stairs, if you don't like what I've said then just vote with your feet!".

At a recent conference (DRHA in Belfast) I specifically followed the tweets by one particular person because he was being blunt and honest. He was outraged by the waste of his tax revenue being spent by JISC on the development of software that already existed in countless forms, and scathing when people presented the same project they'd presented four years ago with almost no difference in content, but equally lauded those papers which had something new and interesting to say. It made attending other parallel sessions much more enjoyable. I remember one person expressing regret that the person in question had attended another session instead of theirs -- they *wanted* the honest blunt feedback that everyone else would hide behind meek assertions that the paper went 'fine' or tweets that just described what the person had said.

...

I was shocked at the TEI to learn that people find contributing to listservs intimidating (I seem to have been born without that gene). But they report that they do.

I know when I joined the TEI mailing list eons ago it was a bit more rough-and-tumble, but plenty of people were nice to me and helped me. I think the TEI list these days is actually a really nice and pleasant list compared to some, so while I'm not shocked that people are sometimes intimidated by the idea of posting to mailing lists, the TEI one is so much better than it once was and so much better than some other mailing lists. It goes without saying, I hope, that the DM-L mailing list is similarly a nice friendly place when we occasionally break out into conversation. I certainly hope that no one feels that they can't contribute to any conversation on DM-L or start new ones! Please do! I'd like to hear from more people I *don't* already know!

...

I don't think that there is anything to be done about twitter feeds or that one ought to do something about them (other than perhaps encourage people to be kind to each other).

While I recognise it is personal preference, I'd certainly prefer people were honest with me. They were in the questions afterwards: "Why didn't you just use software X", and I replied "Well because it does something different, here is why..." During the #tei_09 conference there were 3 tweets about my paper all by the same nice person, but all just descriptive of what I was saying, no critical feedback one way or another. (All the people doing that kind of thing were in the other parallel session, which sounded quite interesting!) In most cases, most of the tweets were just like this, descriptive of what was going on with occasionally some additional comment. If the person in my session had complained that the paper was just a basic description of what the software does and why we made it, then well, they'd have been right, because that was the paper I chose to give! Even if they'd been viciously cruel about the paper and my method of presenting, I would have shrugged it off as one person's opinion, but tried to do better in the future. I wonder if a 'tweet' flame-war results in roasted poultry of some sort.

Sorry for rambling on so much about this! Feel free to criticise that on any twitter account you have. ;-)

-James (And only my opinions, not the opinions of Digital Medievalist or any institution connected with it. If you are offended by any of its contents, then I apologise and hope that makes you feel somewhat better.)

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l