Earlier this summer, I had the honor of offering the closing keynote address of the 2019 Association of University Presses annual conference held in Detroit. The address was entitled The Transformative Power of Publishing, and it argued that the values that shape our publishing practices have the capacity to transform the culture of higher education.
Values of openness and dialogue always inform my work and I have long sought to put these values into practice in the modes by which I share and present my ideas. This commitment to performative consistency led me to develop the keynote address in the form of a Tweetstorm, a mode of presentation that enabled me to share my ideas with a wider public and invited broad engagement with themes I introduced.
A Few Words about the Tweetstorm Process
A number of people have asked me about my process in developing this Tweetstorm presentation, so I thought I would say a few words about it here before embedding the presentation and responses below.
Using the iPad Twitter application, I drafted twelve tweets, each with up to four pictures which were to serve as slides for the presentation. As I developed the tweets, I saved them as drafts in a thread in the Twitter application. (The key is not to accidentally send the thread before you have completed the series!) I used Keynote to develop some of the slides, saving them as images that could then be attached to tweets. The nice thing about using images in this way is that you can tag up to 10 people who have been engaged with the theme of a tweet in the image itself. So, as I developed the presentation, I was able to mention and give credit to colleagues who helped shape some of ideas central to the presentation. Doing this intentionally enabled me to live out a commitment to collegiality through the presentation itself.
Drafting the presentation in this way requires you to consider both how you want to present ideas to those in the audience and how you want those who are not physically present to experience the address. Attending to the multiple dimensions a Tweetstorm presentation opens an opportunity to reflect more intentionally on how the mode of presentation relates to the ideas expressed. How will what you say in person add value to what you show on screen? How will someone unable to hear the oral presentation experience the themes online? How can a presentation about the transformative power of publishing become a catalyst of transformation itself by virtue of the manner in which it is made public?
Affordances and Limitations of a Tweetstorm Presentation
This last question is at the heart of my interest in performative publishing. How ideas are made public shapes the capacity of the ideas themselves to transform publics in meaningful ways. The Tweetstorm form opens opportunities for engagement unavailable to traditional presentations. There are, of course, affordances and limitations to the Tweetstorm form. Chief among the limitations, from my perspective, is that Twitter is a for-profit company oriented toward generating revenue based on advertising. Their algorithms are oriented toward maximizing revenue, rather than to enriching communities of scholarship. For me, however, the affordances of broad public exposure and multi-modal expression outweigh these limitations. Still, even as I share the presentation here on my blog, I am aware of the extent to which enduring access to this work depends ultimately on a platform that might disappear if it proves no longer to be financially viable.
Until then, I have curated the Tweetstorm presentation into a Twitter Moment and share it here for ongoing discussion.
