 We're live now as usual, we'll wait just a second to make sure that we get everybody moved from one session room to another to that looks good. I think I think we're all here. So welcome back to the next talk, the fourth talk of today. I am pleased and honored to present Sarah Davies who is a professor of techno science materiality and digital cultures I just said super cool job title at at the University of Vienna, and I'll be talking to us about academic Twitter social media practices and the enactment of contemporary academic work so more picking back up on some of these social media from earlier in the day I'm really excited to see to see how this how this unfolds thanks so much please please take it away. So thank you. Um, so of course I want to start by saying thank you to Charles for organizing such a fantastic conference I've really been enjoying listening to engaging with works that I would not normally come across. This has been very enlightening for me. I particularly enjoyed the visualizations yesterday. I'm really beautiful. I sadly cannot compete, I have no visualizations, but I do have grumpy cow. So I offer that to you, as at least some kind of visual entertainment for this talk. Okay, so I am as you saw on the first slide based in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna, and I want to talk to you about work that is looking at broadly a digitization within scientific practice, and particularly thinking about social media and what is happening in some of these social media spaces. So in the sense of where I will be going. I want to essentially make two arguments, and I will do this in four parts. So the arguments that I want to share with you to suggest. Firstly, I want to start by saying that we cannot clearly distinguish between epistemic and other kinds of practices, including digital practices. I think that there is continuity between epistemic work and the other kinds of work, the other kinds of activities that go on within the university within academia. And I will of course say more about that in a moment. The other argument, the other claim that I want to just to make is that academic social media in actually academy in particular ways. So this is from looking at social media from looking at Twitter specifically, we see imaginations performances of the University of research and academic life that are done in specific kinds of ways and again, I will flash those, those ways out for you in a moment. So my, the things I want you to take home from this presentation, and we'll do this in four parts. Firstly, it's starting by thinking about some background digital practices and the contemporary academy. I will briefly introduce the study on which I'm drawing. I'll then talk about empirical findings from that. And I want to circle back to some of these wider claims or discussions that I want to speak to. So to look at the more specific empirical findings in the context of thinking about digital science. Charles I should have said this to you before I really encourage a strongly interventionist approach in timekeeping on your part. I'm afraid I'm not quite sure how long this will take. I'm happy to give you I'm happy to give you a warning or two not a problem. That would be great. Thank you. So what is my starting point here. I'm coming from science and technology studies STS. Really, I think a fairly unproblematic claim in that domain is that we cannot readily distinguish between epistemic and other kinds of practices. Such production is always entangled with other ways of being other kinds of contexts and cultures, such as different kinds of value systems or different forms of sociality. So this is my starting point. This particular and drawing on work within STS that has been concerned with the conditions of contemporary academic work. The contemporary university and has thought about how these conditions are interacting with shaping epistemic practice and knowledge production in all kinds of different ways. And there has been work that has looked at new regimes of accountability and evaluations that are emerging, the way in which we are work is measured performance is evaluated. So that's one, one way that perhaps goes into shaping the conditions of work and the way in which we can produce knowledge. And at the same time, there are also things like the rise of internationalization, increasing precarity in academic labor, and very particular and distinct imaginations of what it means to be a good academic, and to have a good or right kind of academic career that come perhaps from policy and funding frameworks. So all of these things make up the context in which we live and work within the Academy, and I would suggest a shaping how we can produce knowledge, and also the kind of knowledge that is that comes out of universities. The way of thinking about this is using the concept of epistemic living spaces, which was developed by two of my colleagues here in Vienna, Ilyfeld and Max Vochler. And with this notion of the epistemic living space, they really try to make clear the constant intertwining of epistemic with other kinds of aspects of academic experience. And as they say, by epistemic living space, we mean a researcher's perceptions and narrative reconstructions of all the structures, context, rationales, actors and values, which mode guiding to limit their potential actions. And this kind of process of molding guiding delimiting. This is about what these researchers know what they imagine being able to know, as well as how they act in social context. So again, just to make the point one more time. This means that within STS recently, a central question has been how are the conditions of academic life intertwined with its products. How research is epistemic living spaces, changing and developing within the current way that the Academy is developing is managed is organized and sort of out. So what does this, how does this relate to the digital. And of course, digital practices and digital science, a one key aspect of contemporary academic experience. And this means I would argue that when we think about digital science. We should be concerned with the full range of the diverse ways that digital practices are present within academia. We should think about digital science. We should think about digital methods, but we should see those within a wider context in which diverse forms of digital practices present diverse forms of other kinds of social and cultural practices for also present. What does this mean in practice what am I interested in specifically. To take an example from my own work, my own experience. This means that I think we should consider the way in which digital tools and methods involved in epistemic practice and a knowledge production. For me, for instance, I use the qualitative analysis software Max QDA. This is one way in which my knowledge, my knowledge making my research is shaped and structured and develops. So we should think about these tools and methods. We should also I think think about consider the way in which interactions are structured through digital platforms, such as the one that we are on right now. The way in this is the ways in which this may be shaping how we engage with each other how we collaborate. So for instance, if this is a screenshot from a research group meeting that I'm involved in. What difference does that make to the way in which we as colleagues interact and produce knowledge together. So my great job title includes the word materiality. I also want to suggest then that as we think about these digital platforms as we think about digital tools, we should also see them within particular material contexts. So this is my desk at which I am currently standing. So when we investigate digital practices, we should see them as particular configurations of devices and bodies and spaces. Again, we should contextualize digital practices and digital methods within the space in which researchers are working. Finally, or one other example of what it means to think about digital science in this broader context is to include social media practices. So to acknowledge that much research engagement, but also much sense making about the contemporary digital economy goes on through social media to different kinds of platforms and ways of contacting and being in touch with each other. So this, for instance, is a screenshot from the shit academics say Facebook page. If we draw this together, the central question that I am concerned with, not only in this talk but as a part of a broader research agenda is how to develop diverse digital practices intersect to instantiate the contemporary conditions and knowledge of academic life. So what are the interactions between all these different engagements with the digital that I've just talked about, and the kind of knowledge that is made, as well as the experience of being being a researcher. In the context of this presentation here. I want to narrow down on a more specific aspect of this to drill down a little bit into social media practices as an example of this wider engagement with the diverse and kind of multifarious aspects of digital science. So here I want to ask the question, what can social media practices tell us about the contemporary conditions and knowledge products of academic life. The way that I will reflect on this question is using a data set from academic Twitter that was drawn from almost exactly a year ago. So here I am using the pandemic or specifically the first months of the pandemic as a moment of crisis or breakdown that allows us to study exactly what it is that is framed as in crisis or breaking down. So the pandemic can be understood as a lens through which to consider what we see as normal, what is being disrupted. And I am interested in how academia and academic life were performed on academic Twitter during, as I say the early months of the pandemic. I take an analytical approach that is ethnographically oriented. So I'm interested in actor terms and meanings engaging with the ways in which particular cultures and making sense of particular things. So this is qualitative research and I view social media material as kind of records of digital practices. In practice, this means that I am working with a relatively small data set from Twitter. It had to be relatively small because I wanted to do fine grained qualitative analysis. So a year ago, I used the tool Tweet Archive to download tweets and to create a data set of tweets that use the hashtags academic Twitter or academic chapter, and which were published between March and July. So this data set was then curated to focus on tweets that were popular that had been favorited 25 or more times, and that focus particularly on the pandemic. And this data set which came to between three and 400 tweets. I'm afraid I can't remember the exact number right now. We're subject to a thematic analysis so looking at patterns and themes, as well as a more focused multimodal analysis where I was interested in the use of images and memes and video and also something about contextualization of particular tweets. I should acknowledge right at the start that this is a data set that is limited along multiple dimensions. It was a response to a particular moment, and actually to my own observations of the way in which social media was being used this time a year ago. And it means the terms that I focused on or that I came to focus on academic Twitter and academic chapter. This is the kind of community within Twitter but of course excludes other communities. The hashtag black in the ivory tower for instance, and also PhD chat. So this is a very kind of delimited data set that has been subject to fine grained analysis. So I don't want to make too, too strong claims for this. It's about the way in particular group within the Academy choose to speak to each other. So, there are problems also with using material from Twitter, without any kind of informed consent procedure. In the past, I think this kind of social media material has been treated as in the public domain, but more recently this has been prioritized, rightly so I think. So here I don't want to directly quote too much. I will reference only a content that I view as viral that has achieved kind of hundreds and thousands of likes or favorites. Otherwise, I tend to paraphrase the material that I'm drawing on. So what comes out of this data set as I say I was interested in how academia, how academic life with being performed discussed represented within this material. I'm curious about both the themes and patterns that emerged, as well as the way in which these themes and patterns were instantiated through for instance, the use of visuals. So the first kind of theme or idea I want to to mention is the notion of disruption. Of course, I think this is not so surprising to us. This is something that probably we all remember. And is definitely true far beyond academia. So a lot of the content was talking about disruption chaos crisis. But the interesting question becomes then what is it that is being disrupted. What is the normality that is being disturbed through the pandemic and the various lockdowns and other effects that I had. The second kind is a picture of normal academic life being disturbed through things like home working and homeschooling, also through the sudden removal of conferences, and the lack of face to face contact so this was something, something that was seen as normal, valuable in academic life that was being stopped disruptive. What is more surprising or more interesting is that there was also a sense that what was being disrupted by the pandemic was production, essentially productivity. So one thing that people spoke about was a concern often that being productive being efficient and effective this was being disrupted through working from home not being able to access the lab for instance. So there's a sense that normality at least should aspirationally involve being productive, kind of systematic and efficient continuous production of data sets or texts or results of some kind. But I think what is also interesting is that this, these notions of productivity or complaints about these disruptions were articulated in particular ways, often using humor and jokes and memes so this wasn't something that was simply described. It was instantiated through these kinds of forms and genres. And this does particular work in terms of, in terms of the language in terms of the way in which these subjects approached the use of this kind of light hearted ironic attitude. This both somehow reinforces particular imaginations of academic life, while also being able to gently subvert and distance oneself from them. So this is just one example for you one additional bit of visual stimuli simulation. This was definitely something that went viral in terms of popularity and reach, I guess, many of you may well be familiar with it. The interpretation of what is known as the unfinished horse drawing meme applied to teaching university teaching in 2020 so the sudden move to remote learning, I guess, many of us had to go through a year or so ago. So this meme really catches I think these dynamics that there is humor is some kind of ironic reflection on the fact that you may have had grand plans for the semester, but these have just kind of fallen to pieces and become more and more rudimentary. So here you exactly see this reference to kind of academic ideals. All of our teaching should look so to speak like the back end of that horse. It should be this polished, effective dynamic form. This idea is being referenced but you also have a kind of acknowledgement of the ways in which these are not being lived up to. So it's a first theme is something about the normality that is being disrupted. The second theme is one that's the focus is on care and portrays the academy as a space that is deficient in care, essentially. This material frequently features expressions of compassion, emotional honesty care, and also involves offers or requests for support, empathy, or advice. Again, this was a very popular tweet, advising faculty members to check in on your PhD students. If they live alone, we supervise other closest they have to a family. So encouragement to express care to look after people. And what you get from these kinds of expressions, these kinds of articulations of care is essentially that they this encouragement to care is required. So academic life, normal academic life is lacking in these kinds of activities, these kinds of neutral support and encouragement. So by referencing care so much, you build up a picture of the university as not often, including that or needing some stimulation for that to happen. The next jokes and means were perhaps unsurprisingly less important less dominant. Instead, content had quite a distinctive emotional repertoire. So you have not only these articulations of care, compassion, the desire to look after each other, but you also saw things like gratitude celebration and motivational language. These are a couple of examples, not from my data set, things that I have taken from more recent tweets. Again, I have been a favorited many times that captures some of this kind of some of this style, some of this way of talking and interacting. So at piece of advice, we're all smart here distinguish yourself by being kind, and also kind of acknowledging and celebrating the decision that the decision to quit academia, maybe a good one. So again, I did like encouragement, focusing on the right kind of interpersonal relationships. These are exemplary of the way in which these tweets in my data set. Also, the language that they used. Let you know you've about about 20 minutes left in the whole session for a time point. This is my last empirical point. So, suggesting a kind of deficiency of care. There was another theme, which was more kind of politically conscious. And this came through as the promotion of or discussion of critique. This also drew attention to inequity and injustice. This wasn't just about caring. It was about pointing out the different kinds of structures that was seen as responsible for this inequity. So for instances came through in things like the different access that students had to technology for home learning and diverse home situations. These were major challenges of working and teaching from home cases where mainstream media focused on work by men ignoring women and during attention to the ways in which casual academic staff were particularly badly affected. Interestingly, the notion of productivity also reemerged here because these ideas of the necessity or the importance of productivity was seen as a key site where inequity became apparent. In the sense that if you are living in a situation where you have a very poor internet connection where you're caring for for many people where you're trying to homeschool your your children. You're simply not able to view the pandemic as a holiday from the lab and be super productive and effective. This is a thread of critique and this material performs the Academy as being flawed not only through this deficiency of care, but through a kind of entanglement with wider social inequality. Okay, so very very briefly, I want to circle back around to the wider context with which I started. I want to sum up for you that the themes that I've talked about, and also the ways in which they were instantiated in the material. So I think what we can say then is this material does sell it tell us something about how the conditions of academic life are enacted by this specific community, and also the styles and norms through which they, they talk about academic life. The Academy is framed as deficient in care as focusing perhaps too much on productivity and as being entangled in social inequity. And it does this using these kinds of particular emotional repertoire, as well as this distanced ironic humor. So this is something about the kind of very specific and detailed work that is done in this particular social media space. As I say I also wanted to start to think about what this means for how we think about digital science, digital research, digital researchers, more generally. I don't have any answers. I only really have more questions in thinking about this. The first of which is how do these kinds of practices relate to other digital practices in science or more specifically, how do these genres and norms, the ways in which people interact and talk, how do they travel, how do they intersect with other kinds of spaces and interactions within academia. I think we should also reflect on if the Academy is enacted in these ways as oriented to productivity is deficient in care. What does this mean then for this question of knowledge production, how does it conditions, or how do these trade conditions come to matter in terms of the kind of knowledge that can be produced, the ways in which it is done so, and the kinds also of relationships that are in collaborations that become possible. And finally, just to reflect a bit on this use of productivity as a central frame in this academic practice becomes about producing things, often things that are evaluatable, right, that can be used to produce metrics whether that is an H index, or a positive 10 year review evaluation. So if we think about this notion of productivity is somehow dominating people's experiences or how they talk about the university. Again, what does this mean. What does it mean for knowledge production. What does it mean for what is not being valued what is not being encouraged or allowed to be visible within the university. I apologize for the rushed presentation and the lack of cat memes. I very much look forward to questions and comments. Fantastic. Thank you so much. One question already here I have, I have a lot of my own but I'll start not not not that way. So first we're the just a bit of a data set clarification so we're the tweets only in English and also do you have an idea of their geographic distribution. I think they were only in English. So the hashtags that I use academic Twitter and academic chapter, obviously in English, sometimes other. I mean if you look, if you look now at those hashtags, occasionally, people will use those and tweet in other languages, but at least in the data set that I was looking at which had these 25 or more favorites. So they were more kind of visible. They were all in in English. Oh and geographic. I'm afraid that is of course in the giant Excel spreadsheet that I have, but I haven't looked at this at all systematically. My impression, or my. Yeah, yeah, my impression from the data is that it was largely kind of US based with a few with a few other places included but this is not from any kind of systematic analysis. Did you look into a question from from rose Trump is this did you look into gender with the care tweets of the of the tweet authors or is that too hard with the data set you have. I mean no, I haven't. Again, it would be possible, but I haven't got to that kind of stage of the analysis. Yes, I would also. Yeah, I can also kind of send out a plea. I am a ethnographer a qualitative researcher by training and background. And this has been even this kind of analysis working with material downloaded has been a learning curve for me, and I have felt very limited by my kind of lack of methodological expertise. If people have ideas they want to share with me, or interested in collaborating I would be really delighted to to hear from you because this has been something that I, you know I have this I think very rich material but it's been hard for me to, to know how to work with this, for instance in looking at these categories, most systematically. That's actually a nice segue into it so so I wanted to ask a slightly slightly broader question, just because I imagine that I'm not the only person who's in who's in the something like the following position so there are interesting questions that I think I might be able to to get interesting and analytic traction on using social media data. What have been some of the kind of unexpected troubles that you've run into what's what are what are if someone's thinking about picking up an analysis like this and I think this might be especially valuable feedback from you as you say you're coming to this as well from sort of the outside. I wonder what I wonder what kinds of things you ran into that you weren't expecting or or along those lines. Yeah, I mean one piece of advice is not to do this in a pandemic on the spur of the moment. I mean I really would have benefited from more research and thought in advance, I had to kind of develop a method very quickly. So of course I think there are lots of resources out there. This has surprised me. Again, coming from a qualitative background, naively, I just thought, Okay, there will be this tool and it will magically download all this data and it will be very tidy in this beautiful spreadsheet and and then I'll just put it into another software. And it will just be very smooth and seamless. I mean this relates a bit to the presentation, I think, yesterday about masking and matter data, because I was really surprised I have to admit how much curation this material required and how much work it was to get a data set that it was, it was kind of standardized and possible to work with and didn't crush my computer when I opened the Excel file. So this is something definitely that surprised me and I, yeah. I just want to, there's actually, this isn't even really a question I just want to list that there's really cool stuff happening in the chat so let me just kind of share what people are saying so yeah rose. Sorry, Arlie, Arlie Bilbo picked up with saying, yeah demographics of the care that is that would be super interesting, especially if you were doing a kind of comparative approach for instance with, say the black and the ivory hashtag or the native Twitter hashtag right to see if there's, there's interesting shifts going on across those different communities. So Petrovic adds adds that that that also might be an interesting way to to assess if the data sets somehow biased by by by language by geography by scientific field if there's ways that these that these that these categories are cross cutting. And, and Arlie Bilbo adds there was a really cool conversation about fatherhood happening in one of our zoom breakout rooms during our social hour last night. Apparently, I missed that unfortunately, but yeah, but they're, she says I bet they're really mentioned this ever was mentioning trends happening. So, so that that that yeah I think there's there's there's an appetite for this. And that's, I think I think it's really it's really interesting to really interesting to see what may be possible with it. A more, a more precise question here here as well. Another follow up from rose who says, I forgot, oh says first of all I forgot to say really nice work. And then adds, I'd be interested if you've got me opinion about maybe if there's stuff that doesn't get said in the tweets that doesn't get tweeted about like quiet thanks to great universities that extended deadlines are made clear clear decisions early right where people maybe feel awkward about saying that out loud. Yes, thank you. Really nice points. I mean, actually, thanks is one thing that I think does come up a lot because of the genre norm norms about gratitude and motivation and positivity. And people do in this material anyway, kind of say thanks to the supervisor or to acknowledge the good work that a particular institution is doing, but I think more broadly, one thing that is extremely interesting is how these norms. There's an instance around the use of humor and this ironic distance, and also this repertoire that is all about gratitude and positivity, and thanks and care. I mean, these norms do I think shape what is what is sayable. Again, this is not something I've been able to develop. But I am curious for instance in the comparison between coffee room conversation in a department or a university, how does that look different. What is talked about differently in these different kinds of spaces. I mean one thing that is interesting also this critique notion. This is generally, again in this material critiques that is directed at the superstructures of institutional life. So it is about the university the government's Trump, you know, really kind of quite high level critique about inequity. What happens much less. And this might also be to do with the fact that I'm looking at frequently favorited treats. And much less is kind of personal complaints, like my department X has treated me why really badly and I'm pissed off. I mean this doesn't appear so much. So I also think there's something about these norms that perhaps being presenting yourself as complaining or it is satisfied that somehow doesn't fit into what is the standard practice within the space. Yeah that that actually connects to something that I was that I was wondering about that I have no clear opinion on this but I wonder how to. So of course, especially Twitter I feel like you know Twitter culture is sort of infamous right that there are there are some of these norms are platform organic instead of being academia organic and then trying to think about, you know, disentangling those in these in these kinds of contexts. This especially occurred to me with you know the first the first set of points about about the kind of. We have to be lighthearted semi funny but ironically detached from everything and I was sort of thinking to myself like, yeah so like when you tweet about anything that's sort of how you have to be right that's sort of what everyone is expecting a view. So I wonder about about that about that interface. I wonder also about how to separate those those variables for lack of a better way to put it. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure how to separate them essentially but I would agree this is a genre that is about Twitter. It's a genre as much as academia. And this again is partly why I'm interested, or I'm very curious about the ways in which these social media forms of interaction and now becoming part of other spaces right. So for instance I think we use the language of hashtags outside of Twitter. Now, people, you know, uses ironically hashtag whatever. There are some lines being on and offline. This of course is a much bigger kind of linguistic project. But it's one thing that I'm curious about in the context of academia specifically. Do we now start to do our coffee room conversations now start to take on some of these dynamics that come from social media. Yeah, I'm not sure. This is very much a kind of speculative and open question. Really, yeah, yeah, that's a that's a really provocative way to think about it. These, the, the, the living spaces cross cross cutting and interacting. Oh yeah and actually and Stefan Hesbuergen adds that some of these social media norms in particular about about certain kinds of, of, I don't know where the tape delay is but I assume he's mentioning sort of direct attack on your university for instance. These are some of the things that are enshrined in universities or social media policies that are regulating the behavior of employees, at least on occasion, I don't know, I don't, I probably know how widespread those are, but. Yeah, I mean I think they are increasingly widespread I have to say I'm not sure what I'm not sure about is how enforced they are. Yeah, you're right this could involve yeah this could result in a hesitation about being too, too specific. Let me see if there are any other. Let the let the tape delay run run down again for a second and see if there are any other comments, questions. I have too many I'll, I'll, I'll help myself to one more. Let me say that. How to put it to what extent could you use sort of see. It's a better way to phrase this sorry. How driven was the academic discussion by the sort of blow by blow day to day. Today X country closed its borders, why country, you know, why university shut down etc etc was the was the cycle sort of news forced in that way or was there was it more kind of organically arising from the academic community. I would say, and again, in this data set there was more kind of organic and more at a matter level. It was kind of people commenting on experiences of disruption rather than the kind of step by step processes of disruption. And this I would just say and acknowledge again is another kind of gap in my analysis because I haven't looked in any detail at the kind of temporal aspects and, and the way in which particular themes emerge, partly because it's a kind of small data set and I'm not sure there's enough to, to look at that. It should be extremely interesting to do so. But I think this is also perhaps something about this, this, these norms. So, rather than just reporting what is happening, you have to make some kind of, again, this ironic distance commentary. So you make a video promoting your new online ledger course in the style of a Hollywood video, or you tell a joke about your kids coming in and disturbing your, your zoom meeting. So it is at this kind of level and somewhat taking for granted the actual step by step development of the pandemic. Yeah, the library take out theme song from the Duke University Libraries, absolute jam, if you haven't seen it, it's a, it's a jam. And yeah, that kind of that kind of that kind of production it really it really is something with that we are we are at time so thank you very much this is a fantastic talk I'm really interested to see. I can't see what what what what else you're going to be able to do with this data set I think it's a really cool opportunity. As you say it's a it's a great moment and I will have a lot a lot to learn from and I think. So thank you so much for sharing it with us. Yeah, thank you so much and thank you everybody for their comments. With that, we have a 10 minute break now so I'll see you back in 10 minutes for the last for the last block of two talks. Okay, so I can leave right.