Pointless Babble or Enabled Backchannel: Conference Use of Twitter by Digital Humanists.

Ross, C.; Terras, M.; Warwick, C.; Welsh, A.

Abstract

Microblogging, a variant of a blogging which allows users to quickly post short updates to websites such as twitter.com, has recently emerged as a dominant form of information interchange and interaction for academic communities. To date, few studies have been undertaken to make explicit how such technologies are used by and can benefit scholars. This paper considers the use of Twitter as a digital backchannel by the Digital Humanities community, taking as its focus postings to Twitter during three different international 2009 conferences. This paper poses the following question: does the use of a Twitter enabled backchannel enhance the conference experience, collaboration and the co-construction of knowledge, or is it a disruptive, disparaging and a inconsequential tool full of ‘pointless babble’?

Citation

Ross, C., Terras, M., Warwick, C., & Welsh, A. (2010, July). Pointless Babble or Enabled Backchannel: Conference Use of Twitter by Digital Humanists. Presented at Digital Humanities 2010, London

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: Digital Humanities 2010
• Publication Date: 2010-07
• Deposit Date: Sep 5, 2014
• Pages: 214-217
• Book Title: Digital humanities 2010 : conference abstracts : King's College London, London, July 7-10, 2010.
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1154349
• Publisher URL: http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-programme/abstracts/papers/pdf/book-final.pdf