DH, Disciplinarity, and the Republic of Tweets

Since Twitter's creation in 2006, the social media platform has become a high-profile conduit for backchannel conversations and the public dissemination of information during academic conferences and events. While some tweets simply vanish into the internet void, others provoke lively conversation within the conference community or are retweeted to signal boost them into adjacent or similar communities.  The networks formed by these conference tweets—a 21st-century Republic of Letters written 140 or 280 characters at a time—can be put in conversation with one another to reveal interdisciplinary patterns of associations among digital humanists.