#GoScholarGo: Thoughts from an Academic Tweeter

Can I confess something, y'all? And I say this cheekily, like this is just between you and me, but I also mean it sincerely because it may still be transgressive: I never feel so at home as an academic than when I'm tweeting at a conference.

It's not just that I'm really good at tweeting--and, let's be clear, I am. One of my mentors, Professor Pat Sullivan, asked me about my live-tweeting decision process, and my first response was, "You have to predict the future." It was partially a joke, but partially not, and some time I'm going to put my thoughts on tweeting into a coherent how-to of some sort. In any case, my academic adoration of tweeting isn't just because I feel comfortable doing it.

No, it's something else. It's something about access and networking and on-the-cusp relevance. It's being able to share thoughts with people who can't make it to conferences. Not just that, but sharing thoughts from a sparsely-attended panel (for many reasons, including time and/or programming conflicts) with the, at the moment, 209 people who follow me. And maybe only a third of those 245 are academics, and maybe only a dozen of them actually read my tweets. But, hey. Those are a dozen more people thinking about intersections of racism and admissions policies, or the impacts of testing culture on basic writing pedagogy, or how feminist practice can make for better databases. And maybe a half-dozen people think about it, and maybe two people pass it on.

But...I get to be a part of that. It's kind of thrilling, and it's immediate, and it's more connected than I feel to academnia, almost any other time.

And it's writing. And a lot of days, lately, it's really hard for me to write. Or even think of myself as a writer, and that's a vital part of myself that I need to keep alive.

So, I tweet a lot at conferences, and it's important to me. And yeah, I think it's important for this weird nebulous thing that I like to call "the field."

Anyway, Storify is a handy tool, and I used it to archive my tweets from the past two conferences I attended. Click on, if you're interested!

The Association for Teachers of Technical Writing

• Panel A3: A Series of Odd Things That Happened While Programming Databases
  Starring Jennifer Justice, Jeff Gerding, Heejung Kwon, Patrick Love, Talisha Haltiwanger, Christine Jach, Amelia Chesley, and Nick Marino
• Panel B6: Data Narratives: Streams, Stories, Genres
  Starring Stuart Selber, Kristen Moore, Tim Elliott, Michael Knievel, and Dan Richards
• Panel C5: Big Data Policy and Ethics: What Technical Communicators Should Know about University Contracts, User Agreements, and Digital Information Control
  Starring Heidi McKee, Ann Hill Duin, and James E. Porter
• Panel D4: Research Methods, Frames, and Challenges
  Starring Rebecca Walton, Lucia Dura, Ryan Moeller, Ryan Price, and Kyle Vealey

The Conference on College Composition and Communication

• Opening Session
  Starring Adam Banks, Gail Hawisher, Cynthia Selfe, and Howard Tinberg
• A Session Featured Speaker: Angela Davis
• Panel B9: Voices from the Asian/Asian American Caucus: Opening Up Our Disciplinary History and Scholarship
  Starring K. Hyoejin Yoon, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, and Linh Dich, with appearances by Asao B. Inoue
• Panel E14: Wireless Women: Gender and Access in the 'Wide Open' Web
  Starring Daniel Liddle, Carrie Grant, and Liz Lane
• Panel F38: Rethinking Difference in Composing Composition: Language, Translation, Genre, Modality
  Starring Bruce Horner, Anis Bawarshi, Juan Guerra, Nancy BouAyash, and Cynthia Selfe
• Panel G14: WPA-Outcomes Statement Revision for a Multimodal, Digitally Composed World - PART II
  Starring Darsie Bowden, Beth Brunk-Chavez, Dylan Dryer, Bump Halbritter, and Kathleen Blake Yancey
• Panel H20: Methodological Discovery: Opening Research Design to Invention and Instability
  Starring Libby Miles, Pat Sullivan, and Michele Simmons
• Panel K27: Feminist Ruptures, Feminist Responses: Toward a Deeper Democracy
  Starring Shirley Logan, Cheryl Glenn, and Joyce Irene Middleton
• Panel L05: Teachers and Scholars of Basic Writing: Renewed Debates Over Policies and Practices
  Starring Elizabeth Hollis, Kerry Lane, and Sugie Goen-Salter
• Panel N36: Never Mind Geoffrey Sirc: A Tribute Panel
  Starring Cynthia Haynes, Byron Hawk, Victor Vitanza, Jenny Edbauer Rice, Jeff Rice, Thomas Rickert, and Geoffrey Sirc

The thing is, this doesn't even cover everything that I did out there.

There was the super-heartening Women in Tech Comm luncheon, which I had never joined before, but felt so welcomed when I did. And, of course, the Purdue Rhetoric and Composition reunion party, which was filled with hugs and delicious, delicious pizza.

There was 4C4Equality, at whose table I spent a good amount of time, even though I was only officially there for an hour. There were the amazingly lovely C's the Day folks, who awarded me a fistful of sparkleponies after I spent FIVE YEARS without any at all.

There was the ridiculously early Council of Writing Program Administrators breakfast, and the cheerily late WPA-GO mixer (and I happily joined those who closed that mixer down, even though I'm no longer part of the leadership).

There was the Asian/Asian American caucus, where I got to talk about how I fit, and where I fit, and how any of us fit, and what it all meant.

And there was meeting up with old friends, and making a bunch of new ones, and breakfasts and brunches and coffees and lunches and dinners and movies.

But yeah. Conference tweeting, y'all. It's where it's at.

*All credit for the #GoScholarGo hashtag should go to Abigail Scheg, who is pretty much my go-to role model for academic tweeting.