Thread by @roopikarisam

Thank you, @annetiquate & @caitduffy49 for the opportunity to speak today and to all of you who are participating. I'll be talking about the role of Twitter and social media in humanities knowledge production and how they've influenced my work. #HCTwitterConf19

I often say I owe my entire career to Twitter. And that's true - though I'm super conscious of my reliance on a third-party platform with a dubious track record on social justice. #HCTwitterConf19

Twitter has been a space of connection and intellectual community that I've never been able to find consistently anywhere else - ever. #HCTwitterConf19

I first joined Twitter in 2007, when I was a grad fellow @cndls. I'd been inclined towards social media platforms (anyone remember Friendster?) but I couldn't see the point of Twitter and deactivated. #HCTwitterConf19

Came back in 2009 while procrastinating on my comps reading. I found my OG Twitter fam, including @redclayscholar @SPBPHD.There were even OG VIPs like @newblackman who actually *talked* to us grad students. #HCTwitterConf19

That was the first time I recognized the power of social media, particularly for academics of color. I had people to talk to! We supported each other through the wandering-in-the-desert of dissertation writing. We made connections with senior scholars. #HCTwitterConf19

That fall, I was asked to share advice with incoming grad students, and the first thing I said was, "Get on Twitter." The DGS was horrified, contradicted tme, and said, "No, don't waste your time with that." #HCTwitterConf19

The don't-waste-time-with-social-media attitude is super predictable. It also reflects the prestige economies of knowledge production in the humanities that those of us who care about access to knowledge fight. #HCTwitterConf19

a) Closed ranks = power: access to networks of scholars is often mediated by advisors and graduate programs; b) Cost = value: paywalled journal > open access journal and are more rigorous (yay capitalism!) #HCTwitterConf19

c) Solitariness = seriousness: a real scholar retreats to their hermitage, emerging periodically to share the knowledge they've produced alone #HCTwitterConf19

d) Single authorship = real authorship: collaboration is a sign of weakness, an inability to produce one's scholarship alone; e) Digital = trivial: digital media is recreational, a vernacular genre, a low cultural form #HCTwitterConf19

This is a new front in the culture wars: anxiety over controlling academic culture exacerbated by technologies facilitating connections that exist outside of and work around the channels of power that have wielded control over knowledge production #HCTwitterConf19

When I was writing my diss, I was struggling to convey ideas in writing, so I started paying attention on Twitter to a thing called "digital humanities." It opened up the world of multimodality for me. Everything didn't have to be a chapter or a book! #HCTwitterConf19

I found my OG DH Twitter fam, who are brilliant thinkers, excellent collaborators, and amazing friends. I can't imagine what my professional life would be like without Twitter, but it would be lonely and isolated. #HCTwitterConf19

When I started my job, where we have a 4/4 teaching load, a colleague told me my sabbatical would be spent catching up on what happened in my field over the last 6 years. Turns out that Twitter solved that problem - a lot of the latest shows up on my screen daily #HCTwitterConf19

Another told me I'd struggle to find a publisher for a book because I'm not at an elite institution. I ended up writing New Digital Worlds because of Twitter. (Presses asked for the book.) nupress.northwestern.edu/content/new-di… #HCTwitterConf19

We won't talk about what my grad program said when I took my current job instead of waiting to see if a shiny, fancy university would hire me. Kermit needs more tea. #HCTwitterConf19

But the scholarly community I'd built on Twitter made me rethink the prestige economies of humanities knowledge production to which I'd been socialized. So, I took the job that would best let me do the scholarly work *I* believed was important. #HCTwitterConf19

Most important, though, is how much I have learned from the colleagues I've met on Twitter, particularly from areas of study different from my own, that have helped me grow both professionally and personally. #HCTwitterConf19

We've parlayed these connections into a number of different initiatives intended to directly push back against the prestige economies of humanities knowledge production. Here are a few in which I've been involved with awesome friends and colleagues. #HCTwitterConf19

.@michacardenas & I taught a class at HILT 2016 that created "Social Justice and the Digital Humanities," providing project designers with key questions to consider to promote equity and justice through digital scholarship criticaldh.roopikarisam.com #HCTwitterConf19

The #TornApart #Separados team drew on the skillsets we'd been building for years to use data visualization to respond to the U.S. government's family separation policy. xpmethod.plaintext.in/torn-apart/vol… #HCTwitterConf19

.@castabile and I, with a wonderful team of partners, started Reanimate, an intersectional feminist publishing collective dedicated to recovering & publishing writing by women in media industries to change dominant media histories. reanimatepublishing.org #HCTwitterConf19

It isn't hyperbole to say that none of these projects would have been possible without the scholarly communities that Twitter has allowed us to build. #HCTwitterConf19

But, returning to my earlier caveat, I've relied on a third-party platform that generates revenue through my digital labor to find the friends and the communities needed to challenge the prestige econonies of humanities knowledge production. #HCTwitterConf19

Surely, we can find alternatives - particularly ones that are better positioned to themselves change the stakes of scholarly communication and academic community formation online. #HCTwitterConf19

.@humcommons is a critical intervention that can be one alternative. It certainly facilitates connections and communities, and its relationship to professional societies squarely places it in humanities knowledge ecologies. #HCTwitterConf19

We also need alternative approaches that complement work like @humcommons that are extra-institutional. #HCTwitterConf19

.@elotroalex & I have been talking about a "supercommons" (name subject to change) as a way of conferring scholarly value on a different mode of scholarship done digitally. #HCTwitterConf19

Unlike a commons, a supercommons would not be a single platform but the intersection of ephemeral platforms born of extra-institutional collectivities of scholars collaborating with communities outside of the academy. #HCTwitterConf19

A supercommons could respond to challenge of doing agile research while facilitating flexible, responsive & nimble scholarship based on minimal computing principles - low maintenance digital scholarly practices & access in low-bandwith environments #minicomp #HCTwitterConf19

A prototype for the supercommons is the Nimble Tents Toolkit, a collection of case studies on channeling scholarly activity at moments of crisis, like #TornApart #Separados nimbletents.github.io #HCTwitterConf19

We could be tilting at windmills with this one but we'll be talking about it at an #MLA20 roundtable with some great minds: @lgmerchant @sferna109 @clboyles @jmjafrx #HCTwitterConf19

To think, my senior year high school superlative was "most optimistic" and they put in quotation marks. (I've been listening to The Cure since I was 6. It explains a LOT.) #HCTwitterConf19

But we have the power to intervene, to use technologies available to continue pushing back against power dynamics - white, male, economically privileged, hetero, cis, able, Anglophone - that have overdetermined value for humanities knowledge. #HCTwitterConf19

In doing so, we can expand the boundaries of access to humanities knowledge production itself, beyond tenure track jobs, beyond the walls of universities. #HCTwitterConf19

This is particularly crucial at this moment of economic, political, social, and cultural turmoil for the humanities and for higher education itself. This is a case that @kfitz makes powerfully in her great new book Generous Thinking jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/generous…

But as the book I'm currently writing, Insurgent Academics, argues, scholars of color have been doing work like this for a LONG time, without reward, often under contingent and precarious labor conditions. roopikarisam.com/insurgent-acad… #HCTwitterConf19

Thus the dismantling of the prestige economies of humanities knowledge production is a cornerstone to increased equity and justice in higher education as well. Thanks for reading! Questions? #HCTwitterConf19