alternate title: we’ve always been doing it, just the tools have changed, yo.
[note: these are just fractured thoughts as I had them... forgive if they do not provide enough context or depth. I am happy to discuss further in the comments =)]
I read parts of Ann Blair‘s book – Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age - for a class, and I found a few interesting metaphors for Twitter and tweets. I intend to read further and will hopefully continue to post notes here.
in her book, Blair lays out a historical view of how and when information management began in the middle ages and describes the different methods by which people recorded and shared information. this includes descriptions of how texts and information were copied by hand and recorded, shared, or preserved in libraries. we still do exactly this with our information, only, the tools we use are different. Twitter fits into this paradigm as an information management tool because of the volumes of information that are tweeted and how these tweets are composed, shared, and as of April 14th, 2010, stored at the Library of Congress.
Blair talks about an interesting concept: florilegium.
“… which, rather than summarizing, selected the best passages or “flowers” from authoritative sources.”
Tweets can be thought of as forced florilegium – the constraint of 140 characters forces us to distill the important or best information (our own or from others) and share it. the idea that each tweet is a specially picked flower puts the onus on the author of the tweet to be trusted to have picked the ‘best flower’ to share. this also points to the role of curator that individuals often play – we choose what to tweet based on how we would like ourselves and the communities we are affiliated with to be represented.
in a great section on note-taking (in the book as well as this article (.pdf file)), Blair traces a practice that is centuries old having been used across genres; like by merchants for book-keeping and students for learning together. She also discusses note-taking as a memory aid and a writing aid and talks about the different ways in which note-takers figured out ways to manage their notes; like using a ‘literary closet’ in which one could store slips of paper in alphabetical order based on topics.
Blair describes Harrison and Placcius’ vision of the closet as a collaborative note-taking tool… Twitter feels like an updated version of this closet:
“… both Harrison and Placcius emphasized the virtues if the closet for what they called “public use,” that is, for sharing with others the burdens and the rewards of note-taking.”
“Harrison further envisioned group use of the closet: a group of students in a college or a literary society, say, six or more, could distribute among themselves books to read or arguments to read for and keep the excerpted passages in common in the closet. At a moment’s notice they could all and all at once examine and compare opinions and authorities on any topic, gathered from a great mass of books.”
there are several more examples of note-takers, note-takings, and types of notes in the book and article – those of you interested in this sort of thing will enjoy the detail and history of this activity.
Twitter allows for varied forms of note-taking, some covered by Blair, but also beyond those examples partly because of the affordances of the new tools. a type of collaborative note-taking manifests in the ‘chat’ communities on Twitter during their scheduled meetings. notes from these meetings are often archived and made available to the broader community via a wiki. people also use Twitter to record notes for class, connect with and share resources with their class, notes on books they are reading, proceedings of a conferences, and even just short interactions that can be Storified. While it might be hard to organize these notes alphabetically (if one wanted to, that is), it is possible to categorize tweets or notes using hashtags, and then searching and sorting using those hashtags.
do you use Twitter for note-taking? how do you save your notes? how do you share?
how do you use hashtags?
as teachers or learners, do you use Twitter or hashtags in your classroom? what has your experience with this been?
do you use Twitter to connect with your community?
share your stories and questions and thoughts in the comments… I’d love to hear from you.
also, ask me stuff… I have more examples and resources – just don’t want to add clutter here!
[many thanks to Noel Kirkpatrick for invaluable inputs and reviewing, among other things.]
Tim Carmody (@tcarmody)
January 27, 2012
There’s an interesting overlap between note-taking, which is ostensibly private, and live-tweeting, which is ostensibly public. Sometimes when I’m at an event, I’ll live-tweet things that happen, partly so other people can follow along, but primarily to help shape my own thought process and to have something to refer back to later.
I should say, to refer back to almost immediately later, because using Twitter alone as a note archive is in almost all cases a bad idea. It just doesn’t store old tweets well; its search functions are meager, etc. But using Twitter as a mobile, 140-character pipe into some other kind of storage solution is very smart.
I should say something about note-taking entirely apart as an exercise in data recording or retrieval. When you take notes, sometimes you’re recording, either verbatim or in paraphrase, what someone’s said or what happened. But other times you’re completely rewriting an idea, or recording your own thoughts or feeling about it.
The externalization that comes with writing down an idea is more powerful than just thinking it; the immediacy of relating your ideas in text in response to something that’s just happened or that you’ve just seen/read is more powerful than recalling your ideas afterwards. And being forced to compress your idea, emotion or reaction into chains of 140 character messages exerts an extra kind of discipline over those thoughts that may be better than just written notetaking alone, public or private.
savasavasava
January 27, 2012
I had an interesting discussion around public vs private note-taking with a student of mine, and then on twitter. she likened it to “passing notes in class” and someone pointed out that even though that might be a fitting description, it is incomplete because those notes passed in class are private. but… I think I still use it to “pass notes in class” sometimes, either on open twitter – when I’d like to believe that the person I’m talking to and I are the only people “in” on what I’m saying – or in DMs.
live-tweeting is a specific use of twitter and is almost exclusively for conference, talks, and the like (yes, tv shows, but that’s a different sort). so the recording of proceedings is closer to note-taking than other forms of tweets because the audience is different, and a lot of the content is reporting, if you will. most conferences are now able to provide an archive of the backchannel – I believe there are still some tools that are allowed to do this – and that serves as a great resource for both conference attendees and those of us who are often enviously following along from afar.
when I reflect on my twitter use, it is life-tweeting, or making notes on my life (enjoyable to some, annoying to others), but I also sometimes make observations and tweet thoughts and ‘favorite’ these and other things – one way of keeping track of notes, I suppose.
thank you for what you said about note-taking… it resonates with me a lot. not because I am a note-taker, but quite the opposite – I’m trying to be more of a note-taker. I rarely, if ever, take notes. I think a LOT of things, and talk about a LOT of things, but always fail to record any of these things, and then they are lost forever or partially remembered. I think I need to learn how to take notes! the few times I have taken some notes, it has helped me immensely in ordering my thoughts or even just brainstorming. I don’t know why I don’t do it more often.
in addition to the character limit, I think awareness of our audience also exerts a type of discipline on how and what we tweet – like “passing notes”!
I can’t think about this without considering how the tool controls the manner in which we take notes… effectively changing our behavior around note-taking and the expectations of how this should and could work. but this takes us to a completely different conversation…
Matt Thomas
January 28, 2012
Great post. I find hashtagged live-tweets invaluable for following things like academic conference sessions I can’t attend in person, but a funny thing happens when I try to actually live-tweet something myself. Namely, I find myself listening for tweetable sound bites, then trying to accurately transcribe those sound bites, then tweeting them, then conversing with people on Twitter about them, and then doing the whole thing all over again 90 seconds later. The actual talk I’m supposed to be listening to recedes and Twitter takes its place. Bizarrely, I feel like there are talks I’ve copiously live-tweeted that I’ve completely missed.
Yet, when I take old-fashioned handwritten notes at such things, my subjective experience is completely different. Scribbling gives me a better overall picture of the talk. I feel present in the room. I ask better questions afterwards. The downside to this is that I may not ever really look at my handwritten notes again, whereas my live-tweets are archivable and searchable and get circulated and responded to. Saving a tweet – even one of your own tweets – for future reference is as simple as favoriting it. So each way has pluses and minuses. I confess to being torn about what to do sometimes. I’m still figuring out which one works best for me and in what situations and I’ve been on Twitter since 2007.
savasavasava
January 29, 2012
thank you so much for stopping by Matt, and more thanks for your thoughtful comment.
my first reaction is: OMG ME TOO! I love tweeting at conferences – I think of it as a way to share what I’m experiencing and I know that there are some followers (not all) who really appreciate it. but you are exactly right – and this is something I actually tweeted during a conference – we seek out the “sexy” soundbite to share. the more popular live-tweeting has become, the more I also feel like people are trying to get to that soundbite before anyone else, and then get retweeted like crazy. and, what you say is not bizarre at all – I have felt the same way. I know I’m at a super-interesting and relevant talk, and then I’m sucked into tweeting and at the end of it I’m like… uh… what just happened? I’ve taken to not tweeting at all during some talks – and I don’t feel so bad because there are enough people now who are doing it, so I can just retweet =)
an interesting thing happened at last year’s DML – a few of the attendees started up an IRC backchannel and dared me to go there. this was a completely different experience from the Twitter backchannel – mainly because the level of snark went through the roof. I think that had a lot to do with the fact that it wasn’t as “public” any more. in one conversation, we discussed how the interestingness of the talk/person was inversely proportional to how much we tweeted or chatted in IRC – the more interesting the person was, the less we found ourselves tweeting/snarking.
as I said before… I really need to learn how to take notes – pen-and-paper notes. I want to be able to do this, and I want to be able to do it in a useful, meaningful way. and I love notebooks and pens and sharpies.
oh, and you’re not alone in your confusion – I’m confused about Twitter as well. I’m well aware of my dependence and near-addiction to it. it is my drug and my antidote. finding that balance is difficult when our pleasure centers are so easily triggered – all it takes is one tweet and one response…