One of the first tweets I received after I signed up for my brand-new twitter account @SurupaG was one from the Public Diplomacy division of India’s Ministry of External Affairs. Very helpfully, it told me “How #India’s foreign policy documents are being put in the public domain” and offered me a link to the project. I was in instant nerd heaven! Not only did that get me excited about the research and teaching potential of twitter but I could not wait to see what documents I could lay my hands on.
Excitement soon turned into disappointment when I looked at the list of documents that had been catalogued. It was clear that while the documentation project was a commendable effort on part of a couple of dozen retired bureaucrats, the papers that were being made available are from the 1930s and since my research is on current foreign policy – and not on diplomatic history – these documents would be of limited use to me.
This introduction to twitter left me with two valuable take-aways. First, an immediate recognition of how I could use twitter for teaching and scholarship. Even after this initial disappointment, I soon signed up to follow twitter handles that provided news about the BRICS, about the WTO and about US-India relations – three areas in which I conduct research. With some help from colleagues, I was able to figure out how I could use tweet-deck to organize the tweets I want to save and use later. I could have subscribed to some of these feeds on Facebook, which has been my social media of choice for the last five years. But it is easy to see that in Facebook, some of these tweets will get lost in between foodie posts and travel pictures, both of which I wouldn’t want to lose. So, from now on, I have resolved that Facebook will be for social life and Twitter will be for work. A number of my friends and colleagues who don’t have twitter accounts will continue to post their scholarly work on Facebook and I know I can find them there. But whenever and wherever I can, I will separate these two worlds.
The other take-away had to do with the India documents I found out about and that won’t be of use to me. Thus far, the catalogue is a 800+ page pdf file, that is likely to be of limited use to anybody. But that is a digital history project somebody will need to start digging into. And the least I can do is to plug some ideas, make some connections and get others started. Not immediately but sometime soon. First, I have to post a tweet of my own.