Top Retweets from 2015 Australian Historical Association Conference

Retweeting amplifies tweets. One tweet is ephemeral. It can easily be lost in the deluge of tweets that are emitted at the same time. Retweeting is one way that tweeps catch tweets that appeal to them and increase the volume on those tweets. The tweet is sent again but to a slightly different audience and at a different time. A tweet that is retweeted many times has something in the 140 characters that has captured the imagination of the Twittersphere and has a much larger audience than the first time it was sent.

In my last post I wrote about the dominant themes that emerged in the Australian Historical Association Conference’s Twitter stream. This was done by analysing the most popular words in the Twitter stream. Another way to understand what interested the conference tweeps is to have a look at the most retweeted conference tweets:

Trove was the subject of the most retweeted tweet in the conference. It seems a lot of people are interested in learning how to use the facility provided by Trove for the speedy, mass download of search results. This technology is called an API. You don’t need any qualifications or programming expertise to use it. As I said in the tweet, you can learn how to use it with some simple step by step instructions I have written. By using an API you are liberated from the tedium of clicking each search result and saving it one by one. Give it a go – it will open up a world of possibilities for you.

In a similar vein, Tim Sherratt’s well-received and provocative keynote speech at the previous week’s Global Digital Humanities Conference gained deserved attention by people following the #OzHA2015 hashtag. His paper examined our access to government archives and questioned the perception that “open access” really means that. If you have not already done so, make sure you read his paper which he has made available on his discontents blog.

Three tweets from the Big Questions plenary panel were in the top retweets which reflects my comments in the last post about the interest of conference tweeps in this session on public history. panelists, Mark McKenna, Catherine Freyne and Anna Clark provided these morsels of interest. Likewise, women’s history is reflected in this list of popular retweets. It is worth clicking on the link to the screenshot from Jill Julius Matthews’ Australian Women’s History Network keynote presentation.

The last in the list of retweets is a wonderfully quirky but perceptive insight into the learning of history in real life. This pearl was contributed by Denis Mootz of the History Teachers’ Association of NSW in his paper on ‘Historical Literacy’.

There are two interesting tweets in this list. Both the third and the fourth tweets on the list were pre-scheduled tweets that Kate Bagnall and I sent while we were speaking. This indicates that people following the Twitter stream found it helpful when speakers contributed some tweets about their papers while they presented their papers. These pre-scheduled tweets provided some context to those following from afar and helped tweeps in the audience by locating information about the paper for them. For more about this see my post, ‘Presenting at a Conference in the Social Media Age’.

This post has focussed on the people who was the subject of the tweets, not the person who wrote and sent the tweets. There is a very good reason for this. In the academic and professional sphere the content of tweets is important. To take an extreme case, a professional who only tweets about their morning coffee is unlikely to get many followers, even if they are an esteemed leader in their field. A person who only tweets about themselves and their own work is of limited interest unless they are a leader in their field. There are few people like this.

Effective professional use of social media is an act of service to a professional community. Professional tweeps help share knowledge and assist members of the community to connect with each other.

Librarians and teachers understand this well. They regard their social media connections as a ‘Professional Learning Network’ (PLN). The historian tweeps at the conference and those following online were using social media to learn and to connect. People who use social media professionally learn from others and pass it on. They ask questions of their Professional Learning Network when they need help. While they certainly contribute their own work, this may be only about 25% of their tweets/posts. For the vast majority of us it is the content of the tweets that we send that is valued above all else.

It was the presenters at the conference and other conferences who provided the interesting ideas and comments which tweeps passed on to the Twittersphere. This list of popular retweets shows that Twitter can help raise the profile of people who are not on Twitter. Tweeting a conference is a service to an online community which wants to learn more about the subject. It is also a service to presenters at a conference as their ideas are disseminated to a wider audience.

This analysis uses the data from the Conference’s Twitter Archive maintained by digital historian, Sharon Howard. If you would like to look behind the analysis I have done of the conference tweets go to the Voyant Tools text analysis page I have created. Let me know if you find something interesting.