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This past week, Medill welcomed NPR’s Andy Carvin as Hearst Visiting Professional through the good offices of my colleague Prof. Loren Ghiglione. Given the sheer volume of his tweets, their reliability, and their pertinence, having @acarvin on campus for a few days was a chance for Medillians to press their noses right up against the window that he opens on the world.
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@acarvin – 128192 Tweets, 66992 Followers, 2161 Following.
Senior strategist at NPR. Online community organizer since 1994. Former director of the Digital Divide Network. Writer. Photographer. Dad.0
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Good news, Twitter nerds! NPR’s @acarvin is on campus. Go to Fisk 311 at noon for lunch and a talk about tweeting the Arab Spring.0
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Indeed, “Tweeting the Arab Spring: Capturing History, 140 characters at a time” was the title of the Wednesday talk that would be his last “official” act on this return visit to campus (Carvin is a 1993 communications graduate). And the students were standing by:
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Hoping @acarvin will livetweet his own talk, but I’d settle for audience updates. This would solve my #MedillProblems. Don’t let me down.0
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Ah, ’twas not to be. Harsh reality, at least on Carvin’s own part:
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@DanHillReports Nope; when I’m talking solo I don’t tweet. Otherwise I’d stop talking and that gets pretty awkward. 🙂0
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But I had already decided that it seemed appropriate to cover his talk in the way that seemed most appropriate: by livetweeting myself. Not that every I captured every worthwhile sound bite, nor that I ever dreamed of maintaining an @acarvin-like pace during his presentation. And so, after a healthy lunch of brownies and chocolate chip cookies, it was time to fire up TweetDeck on my iPad and go.What was I looking for among the anecdotes, illustrations and history? Judging by my tweets, I think I was looking for some wisdom about his particular brand of journalism.But you can judge for yourself.
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@acarvin at #Medill: I’m NPR’s guinea pig-in-residence0
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@acarvin: during #arabspring ‘my Twitter followers were functioning as interns’ #Medill0
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@acarvin: ‘My Twitter account became an amorphous decentralized media literacy experiment’ #arabspring #Medill0
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@acarvin: ‘What I’m doing should never ever be viewed as a replacement’ for the work of journalists on the ground #arabspring #Medill0
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@acarvin: My Twitter account is a news process, not a news product. It’s my newsroom. #Medill0
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@acarvin: If you did a word cloud of my tweets, biggest words would probably be ‘Confirmed?’ and ‘Source?’ #Medill0
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At 13:30 he was off, freed to tweet again. And again, and again….
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I’m at Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD) (Chicago, IL) w/ 178 others http://4sq.com/JVzhc40
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….sometimes on war and its casualties, and sometimes on survivors.
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“Owing to a lack of mirrors on the ocean floor, the calico lobster was very likely unaware of its own rarity.” http://n.pr/KttbDP0
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