Guidelines for tweeting and tooting at SRS Conferences

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Mastodon are great mediums through which to involve people who are not physically present in our dialogues; one aim of live tweeting/tooting at a conference is to let these people follow our ideas and join in or create a conversation about these ideas if they so wish. Thus, a conference feed allows our discussions to reach beyond the confines of the lecture room and the conference venue.

Some scholars, however, are not comfortable with broadcasting the ideas they formulate as a conference paper so widely before committing them to publication, or are concerned their ideas can be misrepresented in other people’s tweets/toots; it is important that when tweeting/tooting a conference, we take such concerns into account. Any speaker who does not want to be tweeted/tooted can make this be known at any time. We will be advising chairs of the individual sessions to double-check with speakers whether they are comfortable with being tweeted/tooted.

We ask tweeters/tooters at the SRS Conference to adhere to the following set of guidelines:

  • If a session chair, speaker or other attendee asks you to stop live tweeting/tooting, please stop.
  • Always tweet/toot using the conference hashtag; this will make sure your tweets/toots are seen by everyone following the hashtag, and can also be used to compile an archive of the conference tweets/toots.
  • Attribute correctly and clearly: begin tweets/toots of a paper with either the name or the initials of the speaker, so that readers of the tweet/toot can recognize whose ideas are being reported.
  • Do ask permission before posting photographs.
  • If you know the speaker’s twitter (e.g., @SRSRenSoc) or mastodon handle (e.g., @SRSRenSoc@hcommons.social), include it, so that people can connect to them if they wish.
  • If you, as a speaker, want people to connect with you on twitter or mastodon to discuss your ideas, please include your twitter or mastodon handle on your paper slides.
  • Be considerate to other attendees: ensure your device’s sounds are off
  • If a follower asks a question, feel free to relay that question to the speaker during the question session, and report the answer back; questions from people in the room should, however, always take precedence.
  • Tweet/toot about whichever aspect of the conference you like, taking into account what people may find interesting; remember to uphold a high standard of collegiality and professionalism, particularly keeping in mind the very public nature of twitter as a medium.

Modified from the blog of SRS Book Prize 2012 winner Sjoerd Levelt (@SLevelt Twitter; @slevelt@hcommons.social Mastodon), with thanks to Sjoerd for allowing us to repost.