What I learned from this experience–which built on previous experiences of twittering at the DAC09 and Nowcasting conferences–was that it works best when there are multiple tweeters in the audience.  This not only works well because more ‘soundbites’ can be harvested, but because it creates a conversation between the people in the room that produces content that moves beyond simple summary. For me, tweeting in isolation is harder work–there’s far more pressure to summarize the material completely and there’s no one to query for clarification.  Those panels where I attempted to tweet the highlights on my own felt more like spitting into the wind than reportage.

As I think about how I want to organize twitterers at the upcoming #PDP2010 conference, I’m hoping to have two people per session designated as semi-official tweeters to keep the conversation going and to encourage others to join in.  Though I know there’s some danger to creating too much back-channel conversation, I still feel that its worth it because of what Twitter can and will add to audience engagement.

What are your best twitter-conference experiences?

Also, I intend to “tweet” details from each session I attend.  You can follow my feed here and see all of the archived tweets about the AHA (using the designated hashtag of #AHA2010) at TwapperKeeper. If you’d like to meetup during the conference happenings, please drop a comment here or send an email to remyjATucidotedu.

Thursday
3:00 PM-5:00 PM

• Misbehaving Women: Sex Radicals and Nonconformists Who Made U.S. History

• Is Google Good for History?

• Connecting the American West: Constructing American-Pacific, Borderlands, and Cascadian Imaginaries

• Rethinking American Disability Movement History

Friday
9:30 AM-11:30 AM

• Multiple and Intimate Wests: Conquest in the Everyday Lives of Southwestern Women

• Humanities in the Digital Age, Part 1: Humanities in the Digital Age, Part 1: Digital Poster Session

2:30 PM-4:30 PM

• Polynesian Experimental Canoe Voyaging and Revival

Saturday
9:00 AM-11:00 AM

• The Art of the Article: Advice on Publishing in Journals in the Twenty-First Century

11:30 AM-1:30 PM

• Becoming Helen Keller: Perspectives and Experiences Integrating Disability into U.S. Survey, Higher Education, and Secondary School Coursework

• Collaborative Historical Research and Funding

2:30 PM-4:30 PM

• Reclaiming the Disabled Subject in Historical Research and Representation

• Four New England Towns Turn Forty: A Portrait of the New Social History in Middle Age

8:00 PM-10:00 PM

• Marriage on Trial: Historians and Lawyers in Same-Sex Marriage Cases

Sunday
8:30 AM-10:30 AM

• Mormonism and National Politics

• Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

• Americanists Reconsider the Pacific

11:00 AM-1:00 PM

• Americans’ Pacific in the Age of Melville: Labor, Race, Slavery

• Whither the History of the Emotions?

So began my day of twittering the “Nowcasting: Design Theory & Digital Humanities” conference held at UCLA last month. My first volley of the day:

@janaremy audience is assembling & positioning themselves around available power outlets (my kind of conference!) #nowcasting

After a few initial tweets I realized, through hashtag searching, that there were several other twitterers in the room. By following the other tagged tweets I discovered a website that was liveblogging the conference happenings, too. Within an hour, I found about a dozen people in the audience actively writing about the conference events as they unfolded. We were not only twittering our impressions, but we were in a dynamic conversation about issues raised by the talks. One person with a digital camera was taking occasional pictures of the presentations & posting the links. Another was sending links to the various speakers’ publications. As the conversations evolved they added more depth to the conference presentations than I gleaned from the talks themselves. In turn, I was getting to know the various personalities chattering about the conference, and by the end of the day after learning the “in-real-life” identities of my fellow twitters, we chatted at the closing reception and have since then become better acquainted via continued interactions on Twitter and Facebook.

Not every conference that I’ve attempted to liveblog or twitter has gone so smoothly. For example, my intention to post updates on the 2009 American Historical Association conference was thwarted by the high cost of wireless access at the venue (what history grad student can afford a $129 hotel room plus a $15 daily internet access fee?). A few months after that, when I tweeted the happenings at another history conference, I couldn’t find anyone else who was also doing so (hashtag searches weren’t helpful this time), which made it feel like I was simply having a conversation with myself rather than creating community with fellow attendees. For example, in one panel about digital humanities my sense of alienation was evident as I sat in a nearly-empty room in what, in my opinion, should have been the session generating the biggest buzz:

@janaremy Only 4 women in audience of Digital Humanities panel. Why? #WHA

@janaremy Wondering why they didn’t find a commenter who knows more about Digital Humanities than just Powerpoint & online syllabi (sigh) #WHA

The positive outcome from tweeting that conference came later, when my twitter feed funneled into my Facebook page status updates. Colleagues who weren’t at the conference responded to my tweets, creating an opportunity for follow-up discussion about the digital tools that are useful for scholars. Later, I also reflected on my experience with a blog posting about the panel.

My latest experiment with using twitter is in my role as the “Online Media Chairperson” for an upcoming Digital Humanities conference at Yale. Recently I created a twitter account dedicated solely to discussion of the conference, and started tying that presence to other digital humanists on twitter through “following” them, especially those users included in Dan Cohen‘s comprehensive Digital Humanities twitter list. Within 30 minutes of my launching the account Dan tweeted an announcement about our event and numerous users began following @PDP2010 or “re-tweeting” Dan’s message. I don’t exactly know yet how the twitter account will augment attendance or ongoing discussion for this conference, but I’m excited to be experimenting with this technology and to see how it might create possibilities for scholarly collaboration that begin before the two-day event and carry on for long afterward.

I’m curious, do any of you have experiences with liveblogging at conferences or advertising academic events via twitter? Or do you have any advice to offer on how to use social media for academic networking and collaboration?

If you’re on Twitter or if you have an announcement for MHpodcast to Tweet, drop a line in the comments.