#twitterstorians

We were just hearing about how ordinary voters let President Franklin Delano Roosevelt know their views about his plan to change the composition of the Supreme Court. Today, of course, when voters want to tell their representatives what they think, or when the president wants to tell us his views, they don’t really write letters, they tweet.

Now if you had told me 10 years ago that I would be spending a big chunk of my time communicating about my work in 140 characters or less, I would have told you you were crazy. But in fact, I am now a regular user of Twitter.

Last week, I was in California at the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians. And one of the conversations there was about whether social media has changed the way historians engage with their work, with each other, and with the public.

In the foyer of the conference center, I spoke to professors Erika Lee of the University of Minnesota, and Tyina Steptoe of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

TYINA STEPTOE: I initially just used it for fun. So my first tweets were sort of like these enchiladas are good. I wasn’t saying anything professional at all. And then– that was when I had 10 hours followers or something.

And then, the first people to follow me were friends, so then it was still way more personal. The turning point was my first Twitter beef. And it was with a person who had a huge Twitter following, and has written some books, and had some controversial views. And I didn’t know who this person was. I was fairly new to Twitter.

But she was tweeting about what I was writing about. At the time, I was working on my manuscript. And she was writing about blackness, and saying that a particular person wasn’t black though this person identifies as black.

And so I thought, that’s interesting. Questions of race formation were very central to my work. So I tweeted back and said, what are you defining as black? I’m interested because this something I’m writing about. So if a person says they’re black, you think that there’s something else there besides ancestry. So what is it? And this person got really mad– how dare you, you are so ignorant, and just profane kind of stuff.

JOANNE: Wow.

TYINA STEPTOE: You know, and I thought, well, this is crazy. So I blocked them, like I don’t want to hear this anymore. But that was a turning point. It did make me realize that there are people outside of the Academy who were talking about the issues that we talk about too.

JOANNE: And have strong feelings about it.

TYINA STEPTOE: That was useful. So I think that’s when I switched over to using it a bit more professionally. Because at first, it probably didn’t even occur to me that there would be people out there who weren’t professors or grad students who would be interested.

JOANNE: And now what about you, Erika, as far as having people engage with you on Twitter. Did you pull something from that that was useful?

ERIKA LEE: Not on Twitter, but more on other social media platforms, or on comments sections, op-eds. The advice is always don’t read the comments sections, especially when you’re writing about divisive topics, like immigration. But for me, I found it first scary.

Because sometimes I’ll get– sometimes I’ll literally get hate mail coming through snail mail, and then sometimes email, and then a lot of it are the anonymous comments online in various different stories or postings of interviews that I’ve done.

So it’s scary, but it’s also, I found, very instructive, because it helps me think about– so often these examples are– I am talking about an Asian-American subject, and the comments are not about Asian-Americans but are using Asian-Americans as a cloak to then talk about the problem of so-called illegal immigrants– the Asians are fine, but what about– something like that. So I found that really instructive to think about the place and the role of a group like Asian-Americans in this inflammatory debate.

JOANNE: Interesting– by engaging in it, basically.

ERIKA LEE: By thinking about it, yeah.

JOANNE: Do you find that being on Twitter has changed your work as a historian?

ERIKA LEE: Absolutely, for me, because I’m increasingly– hadn’t planned on it– but increasingly writing about the present day or the recent past. It’s been instrumental in helping me access the latest data, the journalistic reports, the responses. I’m very much writing about responses to xenophobia.

I am not only interested in what’s happened in the past, but I think that this particular moment today has the potential to be certainly very promising and hopefully change making. And so that’s important to keep track of. But also just personally, it’s nurturing to know that there’s stuff going on, that one can be part of that.

TYINA STEPTOE: For me, it’s reminding me that I can be an accessible writer, and to strive for that. And I know that that’s not a necessity. I don’t think that every one, a historian, has to write that way. But it’s something that’s important to me.

And I think Twitter’s helped reinforce that. That if I write in such a way that can be informative, but without so much jargon that someone from outside of my field can still make meaning of it. And Twitter, especially trying out ideas on Twitter, is practice for seeing, OK, can someone who’s not a historian, who doesn’t do 20th century urban history, or cultural history, or race–

JOANNE: In what direction are they going to fly if they’ve grabbed onto that idea.

TYINA STEPTOE: Right.

JOANNE: Do you think– and I guess there’s a lot of qualifiers in this question, because it’s technology, it’s social media. In two years, it’s going to be eight new forms of social media, and they’ll be like us on Twitter, and nobody under the age of 20.

But taking that aside, whatever the form of the social media is, do you think that social media is going to change in any way, the way that we do history, the way that we engage in the public in any kind of a big way?

ERIKA LEE: I think it already has. And I think it will be hard to go back to the Ivory Tower. It certainly has changed the way that I do history, that I think about history, and how I communicate history. So whether it’s Twitter or some other form, I think it’s just going to be part of our practice.

And I know that graduate students are increasingly being trained to be able to speak to diverse public, the term– engage with the public in diverse ways. And social media, whatever form that is, will continue to be part of that training. And I think increasingly part of the expectation, as college and university communications departments are giving their faculty members this directive to do so, which is an interesting development as well.

TYINA STEPTOE: I think things like the “Charleston Syllabus” is a great example.

JOANNE: And maybe explain what that is.

TYINA STEPTOE: Historians, Keisha Blain and some others had a hashtag in the wake of the Charleston shooting. And it was a way for people, especially historians, to use the hashtag to suggest reading to people who were interested in what happened and who wanted context for it. And so a lot of us started using that, started sending out books.

And there have been others since then, like the “Say Her Name Syllabus” following things like what happened with Sandra Bland. I used it to with tweet books in women’s history. So I thought, OK, if you’re interested in what happened with Sandra Bland, what are books that you might want to go to?

So I immediately thought of people like Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom. And so I just started tweeting the name, and adding the historians if they’re on Twitter as well. And so some of those tweets, really those are maybe some of the most retweeted tweets that I’ve had, when I’ve been part of those kinds of hashtags. And so the “Charleston Syllabus” is now going to be a book. So literally a hashtag is going to turn into scholarship. So just that right there.

JOANNE: Right. And you start this group sourced thing in a way that– how would you normally do that?

TYINA STEPTOE: Right, so I think that things like that are just wonderful, that they’re actual projects that can come out of it. And so once you start practicing history in that way, even if Twitter goes away, I think that it’ll have to be replaced by something that still allows us to do that, because so many of us are doing it, that it would sort of be an empty space. Then how do we still do this? We’ll have to find it in some other ways.

JOANNE: I was speaking to Tyina Steptoe and Erika Lee. You can find them both on Twitter. Now, while you’re there, you might want to follow BackStory radio. Modesty forbids me from telling you to follow me @jbf1755, so I’m not going to tell you to follow me @jbf1755.

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JOANNE: Well, that’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Angeli Bishosh, Sequoia Carrillo, Courtney Spania, Aaron Teiling Korean Thomas, and Gabriel Hunter Chang.

Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Podington Bear and Jahzzar. Special thanks this week to With Good Reason, and as always, to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost’s Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Conley is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.