3. How to talk about science - science communication #scicomm#WissKomm
I love to talk about my research. Giants were always a good topic at a party for non-science people to talk about bc everyone has something to say about giants.
The key to make peope care about your topics is to find some common ground and go from there. Like "My dad used to read me this story about this giant eating all these children" might be slightly disturbing, but you hace sth to work with at least. :D
Know your audience. Are you adressing the scientific community? Young adults? Interested readers with no academic background? Choose yours wording and style accordingly.
Be fun. Be you.
An evolution of platforms I "played" with #scicomm content through the years:
Can you believe I started studying *without* a laptop or a smartphone in 2006?! Anyway, I started a blog as a student with a friend (die Mediävistinnen, "the female medievalists"). It was the hot new thing. Nobody read it. mediaevistinnen.wordpress.com
We blogged about papers we wrote and discussions we had, museums we visited, etc. In 2017, we stopped posting. We were doing it for ourselves not really caring about our audience.
Then, @Mittelalterblog found me and I switched to this #OpenAccess blog and worked there as an editor for a few years.
In 2009, I started using Twitter. I'm glad many academics from Germany have since jumped aboard, esp. in the last two years, the discourse from US/UK is much more promiment still. But we're catching up.
I tweet extremely niche puns about Middle High German Literature in German and English. I make stupid memes. I post private things. Somehow, I have gained almost 1k followers.
IMO there are a lot of German academics who are still afraid of using social media this way. But I think nobody is really into an account just for the occasional "Ohh, I'm going to this and that this month". We want cat pics and we want to see a little bit of the person, too.
I also did #scicomm in newspaper articles, podcasts and radio interviews. It's always challeging and you get no money, but you get to promote your research and adress problems in public. You get to shape opinions and remind people why your area is relevant.
So right now, I'm going where the people are: that means TikTok. I do short scenes from medieval literature and mix them with TikTok trends.
Here is a graph of who gets my humor
Here is one about Tristan
Do you get it?
And that concludes this section of my approach t of #scicomm. Migrate to platforms where people hang out, and have fun with it.
OK, it's time for today's last segment: 4. Working (on) conditions in academia
This is the hardest part to talk about but it's important. I'll show you why: here is a list of my employments since 2014.
I'm sure you are aware of the German initiative #IchBinHanna and the continuing strikes at UK/US institutions against the exploitative working conditions in academia.
2. Natural nerdiness and the research that developed from it, or, Games and the Middle Ages 🧵
Hi, I'm a nerd. As a kid, I loved to read and as soon I got a computer in the glorious year 2000, I was glued to the screen.
My hobbies always revolved around literature and gaming. Fictional worlds are awesome. So one passion became my profession and soon I thought, why not include the other?
I studied German Medieval Literature and Northamerican Literature at the University of Hamburg. I wrote my dissertation about Giants in Medieval German Literature and got #PhDone in 2020.
Giants in Medieval Lit are not just big and powerful, but complex. Sometimes the definition of what a giant can be extends to human heros and vice versa.