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‘Research sharing’ using social media: online conferencing and the experience of #BSHSGlobalHist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

JEMMA HOUGHTON ,
ALEXANDER LONGWORTH-DUNBAR  and
NICOLA SUGDEN
JEMMA HOUGHTON
Affiliation:
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, UK. Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].
ALEXANDER LONGWORTH-DUNBAR
Affiliation:
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, UK. Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].
NICOLA SUGDEN
Affiliation:
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, UK. Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].
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Extract

In February 2020, the British Society for the History of Science hosted its first entirely digital conference via Twitter, with the dual goals of improving outreach and engagement with international historians of science, and exploring methods of reducing the carbon footprint of academic activities. In this article we discuss how we planned and organized this conference, and provide a summary of our experience of the conference itself. We also describe in greater detail the motivations behind its organization, and explore the good and bad dimensions of this relatively new kind of conferencing. As the climate crisis becomes more acute and, in turn, the pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of academic activities increases, we argue that digital conferences of this style will necessarily become more central to how academia operates. By sharing our own experiences of running such a conference, we seek to contribute to a rapidly growing body of knowledge on the subject that might be drawn on to improve our practices going forward. We also share some of our own ideas about how best to approach digital conference organization which helped us to make the most of this particular event.

Type
Forum: New Perspectives
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 555 - 573
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science.

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References

1 Houghton, Jemma, ‘Hosting a Twitter conference’, Viewpoint (2020) 121, pp. 113–14Google Scholar. The papers can be found at www.bshs.org.uk/bshsglobalhist-the-papers.

2 Lockley, Pat and Lafferty, Natalie, ‘PressEd: where the conference is the hashtag’, in Rowell, Chris (ed.), Social Media in Higher Education: Case Studies, Reflections and Analysis, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019, pp. 183–95, 184CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Justine Calma, ‘2019 was the year of “climate emergency” declarations’, The Verge, 27 December 2019, at www.theverge.com/2019/12/27/21038949/climate-change-2019-emergency-declaration (accessed 23 August 2020).

4 Camilla Hodgson, ‘Hottest decade ever recorded “driven by man-made climate change”’, Financial Times, 15 January 2020, www.ft.com/content/5f4b30ee-36e6-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4 (accessed 23 August 2020).

5 BSHS climate policy at www.bshs.org.uk/about-society/climate-policy (accessed 31/08/2020).

6 Ken Hiltner, ‘A nearly carbon-neutral conference model’, KenHiltner.com, https://hiltner.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/ncnc-guide (accessed 23 August 2020).

7 Peter Kalmus, ‘A climate scientist who decided not to fly’, Grist, 21 February 2016, https://grist.org/climate-energy/a-climate-scientist-who-decided-not-to-fly (accessed 23 August 2020).

8 Desiere, Sam, ‘The carbon footprint of academic conferences: evidence from the 14th EAAE congress in Slovenia’, EuroChoices (2016) 15, pp. 56–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 There are, of course, significant exceptions to this rule, such as the United States, where internal air travel is commonplace and, in the absence of alternative modes of relatively low-carbon transport such as high-speed rail, often necessary.

10 Amnesty International, ‘Toxic Twitter: a toxic place for women’, amnesty.org (15 March 2018), at www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/03/online-violence-against-women-chapter-1 (accessed 23 August 2020).

11 See Flores, Nina M., ‘Harassment at conferences: will #MeToo momentum translate to real change?’, Gender and Education (2020) 32, pp. 137–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on sexual harassment; and Emma Pettit, ‘After racist incidents mire a conference, classicists point to bigger problems’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 January 2019, https://www.chronicle.com/article/after-racist-incidents-mire-a-conference-classicists-point-to-bigger-problems (accessed 23 August 2020), for a description of how racism manifested during one particular academic conference.

12 For instance, Kimmons, Royce and Veletsianos, George, ‘Education scholars’ evolving use of twitter as a conference backchannel and social commentary platform’, British Journal of Educational Technology (2016) 47, pp. 445–64, 446CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Rosie and Shields, Emily, ‘Using games to disrupt the conference Twittersphere’, Research in Learning Technology (2018) 26, pp. 1–10, 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Williams, Shirley, Terras, Melissa and Warwick, Claire, ‘What do people study when they study Twitter? Classifying Twitter related academic papers’, Journal of Documentation (2013) 69, pp. 386–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carpenter, Jeffrey and Krutka, Daniel, ‘Engagement through microblogging: educator professional development via Twitter’, Professional Development in Education (2015) 41, pp. 707–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Malik, Aqdas, Heyman-Schrum, Cassandra and Johri, Aditya, ‘Use of Twitter across educational settings: a review of the literature’, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (2019) 16, pp. 1–22, 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Malik, Heyman-Schrum and Johri, op. cit. (14), pp. 1–2; Kimmons and Veletsianos, op. cit. (12), p. 450.

16 Malik, Heyman-Schrum and Johri, op. cit. (14), p. 2.

17 Koseoglu, Suzan, ‘Open and networked scholarship’, in Rowell, Chris (ed.), Social Media in Higher Education: Case Studies, Reflections and Analysis, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019, pp. 61–9, 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Jones and Shields, op. cit. (12), p. 1.

19 Kimmons and Veletsianos, op. cit. (12), p. 447.

20 Harriet Palfreyman (@hjpalfreyman), 12 February 2020, Fabulous and thoughtful stuff from @Michaelaclarkba at the #BSHSGlobalHist twitter conference. I love a format which allows for more time to digest fascinating work like this than traditional (rushed) conference Q&As! EMBEDDED TWEET: https://twitter.com/BSHSNews/status/1227508893783330816 [Tweet], retrieved from https://twitter.com/hjpalfreyman/status/1227548622713126912.

21 More information on this conference can be found on their website at https://underpinningsmuseum.com/archive-twitter-conference-12-01-18.

22 A basic summary of shadow banning and a search function to determine whether an account has been banned in this manner can be found at https://shadowban.eu.