Tweeting LSA2017

Conferences
Twitter
Author

Joey Stanley

Published

January 13, 2017

Modified

September 26, 2023

In addition to the awesome experiences I had overall at the LSA2017 conference (which you can read about here), I made an effort to be active on Twitter during the conference.

I’ve followed conferences in the past (such as LSA and NWAV last year) when I wasn’t able to attend them, and really enjoy them. I livetweeted the Linguistics Conference at the University of Georgia (LCUGA) in October, which was my first experience as a livetweeter, though I didn’t do much other than introduce who was presenting next. So this year, not only did I follow the twitter feed, but I also contributed as much as I could myself. Here are some of my more popular tweets:

This one got a surprising amount of traffic (over 800 people saw it on Twitter) for being self promotion, but it’s because the LSA account retweeted it. I don’t think they retweet everyone’s self-advertising tweets though, so I wonder why mine made the cut… Either way, I didn’t mind the advertising!

This one was one of many tweets during Erik Thomas and Tyler Kendall’s presentation, a direct quote from one of their last slides. It’s a really good quote overall and a lot of people seemed to like it.

This was one of many things that Lamont Antieau found in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies. Having lived in Utah, most of his results were surprising to me, but this one was especially so. Apparently others thought so too.

Brent Woo from the University of Washington is doing some really interesting research. We met when he presented at the Linguistics Conference at the University of Georgia in October. He must have some dedicated twitter followers though because anything I tweet at him gets a lot of traffic. I mean, his findings are pretty cool though.

This was a random side comment Dennis Preston made after explaining the color scheme in is graphs. Instead of red, green, and blue or something, he used lavender, forest green, chartreuse, and a couple others. After explaining which colors represented which variable, he said that line. Even though it had a typo (hasn’t costed me my masculinity), a lot of people liked it. I mean, Dennis Preston seems like a pretty funny guy, so this was great.

At the end of conferences, there’s a lot of “I’m so sad the conference is over” tweets. As I’ve mentioned above, I put as much as I could into the conference, and I did feel exhausted. I was intimidated because seeing what great stuff other grad students are doing I suddenly feel less employable. But I was inspired to do more and better research. This tweet succinctly summed up what my conference experience, and it looks like others felt the same way too.

This was part of a small thread that was going. Basically, people were thanking all the livetweeters out there, and I got a mention. I thought I’d thank the other livetweeters as well, now that I know how hard it is.

All this tweeting paid off though because I think people are noticing me on twitter now, and I think I’m seen as “one of the live-tweeters”. Not a bad reputation to have. I’m about to get my hundredth follower, now that I’ve gotten about 10 more since this conference. (I got about 10 just by following NWAV and liking tweets, and another half dozen when I tweeted very basic things at the LCUGA conference.) My goal is for my followers to outnumber the people I follow, but I don’t know if that’ll happen anytime soon. I’m not very active on twitter outside of conferences, other than shameless self-promotion. Maybe I should get better at that.

If you’re interested in getting more into twitter, I’d recommend this guide:

I enjoy being active on twitter for lots of reasons, most of them completely selfish, but starting to get a small following is pretty exciting and it’s a fun group to be a part of.