Craig Gallagher

In anticipation of going to my first American Historical Association conference this past weekend in Washington D.C., I sought out a range of senior colleagues who had attended past AHA meetings for advice on what to expect. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate who is about to start writing a dissertation, I was regularly advised that many aspects of the AHA meeting did not yet apply to me, such as the Job Center, where interviews for academic positions are conducted, or the Book Exhibit where publishers meet with scholars and teachers to discuss manuscripts or books for use in the classroom.

My first AHA, therefore, was largely confined to the scholarly panels (and, I should add as a brief aside, various receptions, where I shamelessly handed out business cards and tried to score five minutes of chat with some of my favorite scholars. I was mostly successful). I attended six different panels over the four days, enjoying some immensely and others not-so-much. On the whole, I was impressed with the range of questions posed by various luminaries in my field, and – especially in the Atlantic History panels I was most interested in – the sweeping state-of-the-field discussions most papers engendered.

But it turned out that physically attending those panels and listening to the presenters was only scratching the surface of what was offered by this year’s AHA. I made an early decision this year to live-tweet the panels I was attending so that scholars who couldn’t attend the conference could get a sense, at least, of what issues were being raised. For this purpose, as the AHA themselves recommended, I tweeted with the hashtag #AHA2014 (which remains searchable).

But as I sat there with my laptop, oftentimes the only person in the room not using pen and paper,  frantically summarizing points raised via the game-changing medium of Tweetdeck (if you’re not acquainted with it, become so), I discovered that I was also attending almost every other panel that was happening concurrent to the one I was listening to.

Where I had intended to provide a flavor of the conference proceedings for scholars unable to attend, I quickly found myself in dialogue with interested scholars actually present in D.C. but at another panel or professional development workshop (or even waiting for a job interview to start). Although they were mainly reading my shorthand summaries of points raised (far more eloquently) by the presenters I was listening to, they nonetheless sent me pertinent questions, comments or asked for clarifications which I did my best to provide.

Indeed, it seemed as though every panel or workshop across the AHA program had a dedicated tweeter, whether on classical Rome or modern China, and especially the various digital history (#dhist) workshops run this year by many younger scholars. This was all fitting as part of the AHA meeting featuring the inaugural Reception for History Bloggers and Twitterstorians, which was well attended and stimulated very lively discussions.

Could live-tweeting panels be the answer to the long-suffering conference-goer’s gripe about too many similar panels scheduled at the same time? I’d offer a cautious yes, as long as the tweeter is willing to be the only person in the room typing away furiously and is prepared to spend the intervening time between panels desperately searching for an outlet to charge their laptop or phone!

But at the very least, it suggests that history conferences like the AHA in future are likely to take place in two separate but intimately related spaces: the real world of Washington D.C. on the verge a major snowstorm, and the ethereal, abbreviated, but undeniably lively world of the Twittersphere.

Craig Gallagher is a Ph.D. Candidate at Boston College, who is writing a dissertation about religion, trade and empire in the early modern British Atlantic world. He tweets at @Gallacticos87

Heather Cox Richardson

For all their new applications, new technologies are also good for the old-fashioned craft of history. They are excellent for honing our writing skills.

First of all, blogging and tweeting require very low investments of professional energy. There is something daunting about starting A Book. I often panic when I face a new project, because I simply can’t remember how to begin. What do you write first? How do you set everything up? Do you write an introduction? And on and on and on. For days. Everything seems Very Important.

Andrew Sullivan, an early and influential blogger.

Blogging, though, requires none of that. It is an exercise in brevity, centered on a single idea. It is not intended to Sit On A Shelf Forever. It doesn’t have to be Brilliant. It has to get done, and done quickly. So stepping over the threshold is easy. It’s fun. It’s a good way to rev up your engines to carry into the day’s more daunting projects.

Blogging also forces your writing up several notches. It has to convey an idea clearly and, with luck, engagingly. Those are not necessarily skills professional historians practice very much. We tend to fight over arcane theories and dig so deeply into our research that we lose all but a few other specialists. Blogging forces you to distill complicated ideas into crucial points, and then to communicate those points in such a way that a nonspecialist can understand. (Twitter and texting have similar value. Never is the importance of strong verbs more clear than when tweeting. You MUST use short, powerful verbs to keep ideas within 140 characters. Don’t believe me? Follow @JoyceCarolOates.)

Blogging and tweeting also let a writer develop a personal style that is terribly hard to find in academic writing. The form is much more epistolary than academic argument, and that very informality means that much more of your own quirks come out, which can bring your online prose to life. Blogging lets you develop a sense of humor in your writing. Hell, it encourages you to.

And that is maybe the key to why blogging and tweeting are good for the historian's craft. They’re fun. They let us love what we do on a daily basis. We can play with words and new ideas without committing to them for months or years. We get to share our enthusiasms with a different audience, and learn new perspectives and get new ideas to keep our work fresh. There is a whole wide world of terrific historians out there, both in and outside of the academy, blogging about American menus, and things that show up in historical romances, and American cultural icons, and on art history, and so on across an incredible range of topics. Getting to spend time in their company is a gift.

Heather Cox Richardson

Untenured scholars are in a funny place: that gap between the old world and the new. Ten years ago, yes, blogging would convince many senior scholars that a junior person was not a serious academic because s/he was catering to a popular audience. Since then, the old world of the academy is crumbling, and while many departments have not yet caught up, others are aware they must move into the twenty-first century.

So will blog posts and tweets hurt your career? Maybe. But they can also help your career in very practical ways.

The first has to do with publishing. The gold standard for employment and for tenure remains a published book. When most senior scholars finished their doctorates, it was almost guaranteed that their dissertations would find academic publishers. In those days, university presses had standing contracts with university libraries that guaranteed automatic sales of a few thousand copies of each monograph that came out from a reputable press. Budget cuts over the last twenty years killed this system. No longer can an academic press be certain that libraries will buy their monographs. This means that they can’t accept everything that comes over the transom, making it harder than ever to get a book contract.

But you still need one to get tenure.

One of the ways to improve your chances of landing that contract is for you to make sure you have written a book that is of wider interest than to those in your immediately area of interest, one that a press thinks it will be able to sell. How can you do that? Engage with a wider audience on-line. Listen to questions. See which of your posts get a strong response. Are they written differently than your other work? Are they asking different questions? What does this tell you about your argument and your writing style? How can you speak more clearly to what is, after all, a self-selected audience of interested people?

Contracts also depend increasingly on your own networks. Do you have standing because you contribute to a popular blog? Are there lots of people who like to follow what you have to say? That will help convince a publisher that you’re worth a hearing.

An on-line presence might speak to an employer more directly. Blogging gives you an opportunity to present yourself on your own terms. Any diligent search committee will google you. A series of interesting blogs about teaching, for example, will never hurt your profile.

There are pitfalls to an on-line presence, of course. First of all, and above all, it’s important to remember that the very act of on-line work means your opponents can’t respond, and it’s unsporting, at best, to launch a tirade against someone who can’t answer. For the job market, this means it’s crazy to write intemperately about anyone or anything. This is a very small profession, and even if XYZ’s work infuriates you, there is no reason to call it out. XYZ will certainly have good friends at any institution at which you might interview, and they will not forget you have taken a pot shot (they googled you, remember?).

The exception to this rule, of course, is that if you feel strongly that you must take a stand either for or against something on principle, do it proudly and openly. And be prepared to defend your stand against opponents. Just don’t pick fights gratuitously.

On Twitter, the rules are like Facebook. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t post about how much you hate your students, or your colleagues, or any of the obvious rants that will ruin you with a committee. Don’t post endless self-absorbed pieces about what you’re eating or drinking or saying or thinking. But Twitter and Facebook are not just danger zones; they can also reflect you well. I follow a number of junior scholars on Twitter who are obviously tightly linked to their communities and to new scholarship, and who are struggling with really interesting intellectual issues. If one of them applied to my school, their Twitter presence would make them stand out.

The other major pitfall is that you cannot let your on-line presence keep you from producing more traditional scholarship. Blog and tweet, yes, but make sure those contributions to knowledge reflect and/or point back to your larger body of work. No search committee is going to consider a blog equivalent to a manuscript, but it very well might like to see a blog that augments the rest of what you do. Just don’t let on-line work suck all your time.

Here’s a newsflash: The internet is here to stay. The profession hasn’t yet caught up with its implications, but it must, and soon. Today’s junior scholars are in a vague zone between the past and the present, but that same vagueness offers them a great opportunity to shape the way historians use the world’s revolutionary new technologies.

Heather Cox Richardson

Yes.

But since I still have more than 136 characters left, here’s my take on the Twitter question:

I have had many conversations lately with historians based in America about whether or not they should use Twitter. There are three complaints about it. First of all, there is a general impression that Twitter users are narcissists who feel obliged to inform the world every time they eat a bagel. Second, there is a sense that it is a waste of valuable time.  Third, younger scholars are concerned that presence on social media might hurt them on the job market.

These are valid concerns, but they are, to my mind, vastly outweighed by the advantages of Twitter both for individual historians and for the profession.

Let’s start with the profession. Yes, there are plenty of people who use Twitter to issue a play-by-play recap of their most mundane activities. But there is no law that says that’s the only way to use the medium. Twitter works best for historians when participants use it to direct followers to content. This works in two ways. Tweets can mention a new archive or recently discovered source or the significance of a date. They can also be used to call attention to a longer blog post or article—or even a book—on a historical topic. Imbedded links make the longer format instantly available.

It is striking how few established historians in America use Twitter this way. Historians in Canada and the UK are all over Twitter, claiming history for professionals either within or outside the academy, while established historians in America are simply not claiming any territory. There are exceptions, of course. William Cronon posts great links.  So do Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; David Armitage; Tera Hunter; Kevin Levin; and certainly many others I’ve missed. But their heroic ranks can’t compare to the sheer numbers of Twitter users based in Canada and the UK.

If American-based historians don’t take up more oxygen in public spaces, their expertise will continue to be ignored, and the importance of their work discounted. A good way to combat that denigration is simply to show up.

A second benefit to the profession is that Twitter offers a place where people on both sides of the tenure divide can exchange ideas. Another thing I have found shocking about Twitter is how many junior people are active there, and how few senior people are. Following as many junior scholars as I have found suggests to me that they have a completely different set of concerns and skills than people safely ensconced in the academy.  Early career historians are all over digital technologies and new archives. They are terribly worried about the rise of adjuncts and MOOCS. And they have no idea how they will find permanent employment in academia . . . or even if they want it. In my experience, these are not conversations that happen often among tenured folks. We worry much more about research, narrative techniques, and dealing with administrators. People on both sides of this divide have a great deal to offer each other; indeed, it seems to me fatal to the rapidly-changing historical profession NOT to be talking.

Finally, Twitter offers to historians outside perspectives. It’s an opportunity to stand in the same virtual world as a whole bunch of really smart people and hear what they think is important. Aside from the posts I saw yesterday about the problems of transnational history, teaching American history in a diverse classroom, Bruce Bartlett pointed me toward Bloomberg’s recap of the five years of America’s financial crisis, and NPR announced that Alan Lomax’s archive is now on-line. All of this information will inform my teaching and scholarship, and none of it would have come to my attention if it hadn’t flitted across my Twitter feed.