Academic Tweeting

When writing a paper or struggling through a dense reading, sometimes it is helpful to turn to another resource for assistance. Unfortunately for me, that resource is often Facebook or Twitter, and very rarely do I find a profile picture or trending topic that allows me to better understand what role the Kansas-Nebraska Act had in the Whig Party’s demise or how James K. Polk’s aggressive expansionist tendencies disrupted the drowning economy of Mexico. However, occasionally social media comes to my aid. 

This past summer, I stayed in Grinnell and completed a mentored advanced project (MAP) under the supervision of my adviser, Sarah Purcell ’92. The focus of my MAP was Civil War and the Digital Humanities, meaning I studied the Civil War era — in my case, the interaction of two political parties in antebellum America — but also explored a digital aspect of historical research. And although my research consisted of hundreds of newspaper articles, speeches, personal letters, and secondary sources, Twitter proved to hold one of the keys to my project.

I wanted to use a social network analysis program called NodeXL for my research, but could not figure out how to operate it. Social network analysis is a tool used to demonstrate interactions between people using points and lines. For my purposes, I hoped to create a map with NodeXL that showed how often members of the Know-Nothing political party and members of the Republican Party crossed paths in the mid-1850s. However, the tutorials online were not relevant for my goals, and no one in Grinnell was familiar with the program.

Instead of continuing to search for tutorials, I decided to procrastinate on Twitter — where I was hit with an epiphany. I’d received responses from a couple of my favorite athletes and musical artists on Twitter; why not take a shot at a leading researcher? So, I tweeted Marc Smith, whose YouTube tutorials I had watched and whom I would later find out was the inventor of the NodeXL program, asking for some guidance. I had started doing some other research when I was disrupted by my phone. I expected to see that someone had “favorited” or “retweeted” one of my poorly structured attempts at humor that I call my tweets, but instead had a response from Marc Smith saying he could help. We exchanged email addresses, and within 24 hours, he had given me step-by-step instructions to achieve what I wanted with his program. Although Smith lived in California and had no idea who I was, he was friendly and willing to help me from across the country — we even discussed his recent trip to my hometown. For once, Twitter proved to be the opposite of a black hole for productivity.

With the help of my newfound proficiency in NodeXL, I was able to create a NodeXL map, as well as a 30-some-page research paper titled “Republicans and Know-Nothings: The Courtship that Never Happened.” The piece argued that the Republicans did not concede any of their ideology to attract Know-Nothing voters. 

By the end of the summer, I had spent 10 weeks reading and analyzing a couple of years in American political history by immersing myself in the literature on the topic and forming opinions based on my knowledge. Multiple times, my research led to frustrating dead ends, but much more often, my findings kept me wanting to continue to read and explore. 

It may seem monotonous to spend a summer in a small town at a small college that is not currently in session, but it was far from mundane. My successful research was only one of the reasons why my “Iowa Summer” was an amazing experience. I also enjoyed learning about my peers’ MAPs, touring various Grinnell restaurants with my adviser and MAP group, playing pickup basketball with the locals of Grinnell, perusing primary documents in between rounds of sharks-and-minnows at the Grinnell community pool, leisurely enjoying classics such as The Catcher in the Rye on the front porch of our house overlooking Park Street, insisting my housemates read Perks of Being a Wallflower so we could discuss it, and taking weekend trips to Midwestern cities for ballgames and concerts, all the while tweeting along the way. 

On June 2, 2013, I drove from my home of Lexington, Ky., to Grinnell to begin my summer in Iowa. When I took exit 182 off I-80, drove four miles down Highway 146 and pulled up to the house where I would stay all summer, I was hit with an intense feeling of giddy anticipation of the summer ahead of me. I remember drafting a tweet — “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer” — a quote from The Great Gatsby. Twitter’s character count prevented me from tweeting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, but it did not stop the prophecy of a memorable summer from happening. My summer in Grinnell was one full of research discoveries, but also one full of appreciation for the College, the town, and the academic experience with which I was provided; also, for the knowledge that anything — even Twitter — can be used as a tool to advance your knowledge.