[MUSIC] I want to ask you a bit about what it's like to be a public academic online on social media, act on the web. So maybe if you wanted to start off by saying something about how you started to be a public academic- Sure. Online. Sure, well I actually became a public academic early on in graduate school, through a fellowship called Instructional Technology Fellowship. Which encouraged graduate students to work with faculty and undergraduate students to produce public facing scholarship. So very early on in my graduate school days, I was already blogging. I was using things like Flickr to think about visual sociology. Got pretty interested in data and the life of data as a graduate student and so really it was a kind of natural transition between doing sociology and thinking about where should my work live? So I would say being online has started to feel quite comfortable and natural for me, although I realize now I am a digital sociologist. I have interests in these platforms, I have interests in public scholarship. And so in many ways, this has just been an evolution. Yeah, and you kept on doing all those things as well. So long beyond that sort of program. So I guess, are there elements of having that kind of presence online that you think have been really kind of useful? Opened up new opportunities you weren't expecting, or that have elements that have been- Absolutely, I mean, I think from blogging along with my fellow graduate students, where we created a working group based on our dissertations, the CUNY Digital Labor Working Group, which got us writing together and thinking together, we were able to share the bibliographies of our dissertations. We actually created an online public library for digital labor. And then we were blogging and writing and thinking together, and that was one phenomenal experience, I think that really helped the four of us in our graduate training. And it opened up new possibilities in terms of conference presentations, and writing together but we could also see that people were reading the blog. I've been contacted several times by people who are working in tech journalism, for instance, who've read a blog post and want to talk to us more closely about that. In addition to the blogging, there's also social media. I mean, I personally don't use Facebook that often, but Twitter has been an invaluable resource, I would say a kind of academic companion even. From going from graduate school now into a lecturer position, it's opened up a whole network of people that I would not have heard from or been able to listen to or interact with had I not gone online. I always say to people that academic Twitter is more diverse than any sort of real life institution is going to be. And for that alone, it's invaluable. I don't know if I would encourage people to sort of jump on and get right in there, but to be aware that it exists and listen to those conversations. The things that you do to curate your presence in those spaces, to make them more effective, or the sort of tactics that you've adopted to make those spaces working well for you. I think the only tactic has been to be very honest, and to go a little slowly. It has not been necessarily to brand oneself, or to create a presence in some ways. All of these faces, like I mentioned, kind of evolved out of the work. And so, the blogging led to Twitter, which led to Flickr, which led to thinking about visualization. The work itself guided where I brought the work. Yeah. And I think being yourself, and being very honest and what I mean by honest is there are going to be limitations to this platform. There are going to be other people there who have different opinions and different styles of how that platform should be used. And you really do have to acclimate yourself to the rules of the space. So going there, kind of, with a curiosity, with a willingness to learn from the space and from other people. And to accept it for what it is at some level, right? I think I have been very eager in many ways as a graduate student to find a kind of kindred community in graduate school. And through that kind of academic conversation, I feel like I've not only developed friends in real life but I've developed some real true academic colleagues. And that is also invaluable. So I think again, being yourself, not having a great agenda, [LAUGH] but really going there and seeing what's going on, seeing where your work fits in, seeing what conversations you can participate in. Seeing how your scholarship can actually help people who are looking for that information. And again, being kind of honest and a bit curious, and staying true to that. [MUSIC]