In higher education today, the intersection of digital technologies and changing work conditions creates intersecting, well-documented trends towards massive course experimentation, shifting funding structures, teaching precarity, and TEDtalk celebrity on the speaking circuit. Against this backdrop, the roles of academics and scholars within the larger public sphere are changing (Siemens, 2008). One way in which scholars navigate these shifts is by forging identities via online networks (Veletsianos, 2013): by building reputations and networks as scholars within the new, open, online public sphere. This paper posits that blogging and social media participation constitute a new indicator of academic influence, both within networked circles and beyond, creating visibility and reputation that funders and media may recognize. But what kinds of identity positions count as influential, credible, and valuable within networked participatory scholarship? How do scholars “read” each other’s signals in this complex new public sphere?

1. Reading each other in networks:
Perspectives on profiles & influence
Bonnie Stewart
University of Prince Edward Island
#smsociety14

2. Networked Scholarship
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3. Networks & institutions
are both reputational economies

4. Those within the academy become
very skilled at judging the stuff of reputations.
Where has the person’s work been published,
what claims of priority in discovery
have they established,
how often have they been cited, how and
where reviewed, what prizes won, what
institutional ties earned, what
organizations led?
Willinsky, J. (2010)

5. We read each other
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6. The study
• ethnography
• 14 (13) participants, 8 exemplars
• 3 months of participant observation on Twitter & blogs
• 10 interviews

7. Why Twitter?
Lupton, D.A. (2014)

8. Immersion required

9. Reading profiles

10. Primary logics for engagement
• 9/10 - Connection
• 7/10 - Collaboration
• 4/10 – Amplification
• 5/10 - Dissemination
• 10/10 - Contribution

11. Is it just a numbers game?
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12. “Sometimes…I’ll choose someone
with twenty followers, because I
come across something they’ve
managed to say in 140 characters
and I think… “oh, look at you crafting
on a grain of rice.”
- @katemfd

13. Networked practice as a
way of being

14. Key: Shared Interests

15. Key: Institutional status

16. “People willing to put any institutional info up
make me more inclined to follow…I find
relative safety in people who are clearly on
Twitter as themselves as academic-y types
and…aren’t likely to be jerks without outing
themselves as jerks who work in specific
places. ”
- @exhaust_fumes

17. Key: Discipline

18. Key: Shared Circles
“I ‘discover’ new people to follow when
someone RTs their tweets, or when someone
starts to follow me…I look at a recent history: if
their tweets are RTd by someone I have respect
for AND I find the tweet
to have some oomph, then I will start to
follow them.”
- @14prinsp

19. Key: Visuals

20. “I check their twitter profile, read recent
tweets, check out their blog or web site… I
try to follow folks who have differing views
or from differing backgrounds to reduce the
echo chamber. I rarely follow anyone who
has an egg image and no profile info,
though, unless I know them already.”
- @miken_bu

21. Elephant in the room: Scale

22. Networks offer voice & influence
BUT…
power relations affect how voices
are heard

23. “It’s the New York Times and the Chronicle of
Higher Ed…I get emails from my Dean
when I show up there. I’ve got a talk coming up
at Duke, and the person who invited me
mentioned that Chronicle article three times.
It’s a form of legitimacy. It shows up in their
office and so they think it’s important.”
- @tressiemcphd

24. What matters most = capacity
for meaningful contribution

25. BUT.

26. Twitter is becoming institutionalized…

27. Thank you.
@bonstewart
bstewart@upei.ca
Research conducted with the support of SSHRC