Twitterchat

This week’s blog post isn’t here, it’s over on the Research Whisperer blog – the link will take you there. I explain how to host a successful chat on Twitter. This post contains a couple of supplementary points.

First, I’m grateful to Tom Worthington who commented over at the Research Whisperer to ask why you might want to hold a Twitter chat – I should have thought to include that! He suggested two possible reasons:

To collect data for research
To promote the results of research already conducted

I added some others:

To raise your profile
To find international collaborators
To raise awareness of an issue
To increase the number of your Twitter followers
To find out about the latest thinking on a topic
To support activism

Kay Guccione tweeted to suggest this further point:

To shape work planning/prioritisation eg Tweet chats around popular post-PhD career aspirations

No doubt there are others too; if you have any to add, please contribute them in the comments there or here. And of course a Twitter chat may serve more than one issue.

Second, something else I found out this very day is that it’s really important to use initial capitals in Twitter hashtags because it makes them more accessible for people with visual impairments. So we need to take the time to write #CRMethods and #CRMethodsChat rather than #crmethods and #crmethodschat. I will be reminding people of this in every chat I host from now on.

This blog is funded by my beloved patrons. It takes me around one working day per month to post here each week. At the time of writing I’m receiving funding of $34 per month. If you think a day of my time is worth more than $34 – you can help! Ongoing support would be fantastic but you can also make a one-time donation through the PayPal button on this blog if that works better for you. Support from Patrons and donors also enables me to keep this blog ad-free. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!

Newsflash! I’m announcing new Twitter hashtags for a creative research methods chat which I will be hosting on the second Tuesday of every month. Starting today! At 8 pm BST – and if that’s not a convenient time for you, don’t worry; I plan to vary the time of day across different months to help as many people as possible to join in.

But, I hear you asking, Helen, what is the new hashtag? In fact there are two: #crmethods, which we can use for general discussion on the topic in between the monthly chats, and #crmethodschat for the actual chat itself. These hashtags have not yet been used on Twitter.

There’s another new hashtag which may be of interest to some readers: #alt_dissertations which was started by @balloonleap. It’s certainly of interest to me; as regular readers will know, I’ve written some posts on creative dissertation and thesis writing, and I’m hoping the hashtag will help me write more in future.

If you’re not on Twitter, maybe sign up and give it a try? Unless you’re in a country where it’s blocked, in which case, I’m sorry but you won’t be able to join in with the chats. However, I plan to make a Wakelet of each chat, which will have a non-Twitter URL, so I hope you will at least be able to follow along. And of course this will also be useful for people who can’t make the date/time of any given chat.

So, are you going to join me in a few hours’ time? I’m excited to see who will be there! Or, if you can’t make it and want notification of the Wakelet URL, please leave your Twitter ID (or, if you don’t have one, your email address) in the comments below.

This blog, and the Twitterchat, are funded by my beloved patrons. It takes me around one working day per month to post here each week. At the time of writing I’m receiving funding of $34 per month. If you think a day of my time is worth more than $34 – you can help! Ongoing support would be fantastic but you can also make a one-time donation through the PayPal button on this blog if that works better for you. Support from Patrons and donors also enables me to keep this blog ad-free. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!