Once the realm of celebrities and their , academics are taking to Twitter: scholars now use the popular microblogging site, according to some sources.
While scholarly chat and self-promotion abounds, Twitter also acts as a virtual water cooler, a place where academics go to build community, have some fun, and let off steam.
A short year has passed since I first delved into Twitter, using the handle to explore the lighter side of higher education. It has been a lot of fun, and I shall no doubt be devoting a chapter to the joys, and oddities, of the academic Twittersphere in the (crowdfunding now!).
Hashtags, used to collate tweets on a particular subject, are great for community building, with regulars such as , ?and providing opportunities for academics to interact with and learn from each other. Others, such as and , are a little more light-hearted, building communities around extra-curricular interests.
The recently coined is encouraging academics to take time away from work, and a quick skim through reveals that we are an active bunch.
Particularly amusing (and distracting) are hashtag games, whereby people offer up their best humour in response to a challenge posed in a hashtag. , , and are among my favourites.
Is that all you've published?
— Bilby Summerhill (@BilbySummerhill)
The first rule of Nature is you don't publish in Nature
— Jon Tennant (@Protohedgehog)
A handful of excellent accounts dedicated to dishing out academic humour have become staples of the academic Twittersphere.
, an account making pithy remarks about academic life, garnered more than 100,000 followers before its author, , decided to take a well-earned sabbatical. , a decidedly hard-to-pigeon-hole mixture of snark, sarcasm, and philosophy, has become (in)famous for its short and sharp quips on everything from current affairs to language. Its author, Eric Jarosinski, was formerly a professor of German at an Ivy League university, but is now dedicated full time to the project.
I do my best proofreading after I hit send.
— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay)
If you need me, I'll be wondering why. Then how. Then for how much longer.
— Nein. (@NeinQuarterly)
pokes fun at the traditional academic publishing model, while others, like , dig into the publishing process itself.
Elsevier's new sharing policy allows you to verbally explain your scholarly work to badgers and other woodland creatures.
— Fake Elsevier (@FakeElsevier)
“I am afraid this manuscript may contribute not so much towards the field’s advancement as much as toward its eventual demise.”
— ShitMyReviewersSay (@YourPaperSucks)
?Even the Oxford Comma, of which I am a strident advocate, has its own account.
Dear world, Feel free to use me. Sincerely, Oxford Comma
— Oxford Comma (@IAmOxfordComma)
?If these people (and anthropomorphised punctuation) represent the best of academic Twitter, the now-defunct @GradElitism represented the worst of it.
The account had managed to attract almost 40,000 followers by reposting others’ jokes without attribution (ie, plagiarising). A sprang into action, calling out the plagiarism and getting the offending account shut down in a matter of weeks. This brief campaign was no doubt buoyed by the that Twitter is clamping down on “joke theft”.
During the early days of my foray into Twitter, I noticed that one of my followers would often retweet things he “overheard” from students on Twitter. Students indeed say the funniest things, apparently unaware or unconcerned of the highly public nature of their musings, so we started a dedicated .
Occasionally more amusing or concerning than students own ramblings are some of the things they quote their professors as saying:
Things my professor says: "I drink like a fish. I can drink you all under the table!" (with the straightest face ever)
— Gina C. (@ginamc)
Papers should be like a woman's skirt. Short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the subject. -My Anthropology professor
— Ali Grow (@ajgrow)
My music professor makes us stay after class and play twister with him to make up attendance. Dead serious. I find a problem with this, no?
— Hailey Beesley (@HaileyBeez11)
Finally, there are some dark corners of academic Twitter that don’t make any sense to me at all. The profile of one looks like any other student Twitter page, yet posts nothing but a never-ending stream of tweets advertising university courses (about one every 5 minutes, over 300,000 in total).
She is then instantly retweeted by 20-100 similarly baffling accounts. Clearly this is all automated, but by whom and to what end remains unclear to me. Answers on a postcard.
The academic Twittersphere is a big place – sadly I couldn’t mention all my favourites. If you want to spice up your timeline, you can check out my lists of and other .
Glen Wright blogs at??and tweets at?. His book is?.
