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I joined twitter one and a half years ago, after having a hand written RSS feed for years. And gosh, I did not have the slightest idea to what kind of journey I was embarking! While my handwritten feed was limited to published papers, I soon learned to love the social aspect of twitter. At a sudden, folks would react to my news posts, like when I got in contact with Kent Beck regarding the code maps of JUnit. However, I have to admit that since the user explosion in 2009, twitter has become much less personal.

One of the success factors of twitter is that everyone can (and has to) find its personal usage model.

Here is how I use twitter for me and my research:

One of my motivations is to “maximize the value of your keystrokes”. For example, whenever I recommend a paper to a friend in private, I repeat this on twitter, etc. I first read of this on Jeff Atwood’s blog, but I guess the idea goes back to Jon Udell.

Often however, we cannot maximize our keystrokes because research 1.0 does not allow us to do so (or at least we fear that we cannot do so). In these cases I try to find solutions like publishing the wordle cloud of a paper under submission, which I have seen first being done on Tom Zimmermann’s blog.

A nice use case of twitter is to follow the hashtag of a conference. Alas most sci conference do not have good coverage (or none at all). There is e.g. not much point in tweeting from a talk without mentioning the speaker! In my experience technology and software conference get better coverage than research conference, but things started to change (see eg the recent MODELS/GPCE conference… or today’s one-man tour-de-force of realtime tweeting from the #archiPL workshop).

Of course, I also follow the tweets of over 200 researchers and practitioners (hey, the whole C2 crowd again united in one place!) Many of them new to me. Alas, since twitter broke replies, its much harder to stumble upon new folks.

Creating twitter accounts for your research projects. Both of my current research projects have their own twitter account. I did this after reading about the mars phoenix account by one NASA engineer, but stopped to blog in first person as if being the project after some time. In the beginning the project accounts were limited to updates and communication with users, but over time I started to post anything related to the project’s topic that I’d stumple upon (maximize the value of your keystrokes, again). One of the downsides that I see with splitting off these two accounts is that folks that visit my main account will not learn about my major fields of research, which I try to relax with occasional retweets. Some folks in our lab use the feed of their research project to post all SVN commit message. I am unsure about this practice, putting unfiltered streams from other sources on twitter does not seem to live up the full potential of this platform.

Recently I created a twitter account for a lecture that I coach as teaching assistant. I cannot yet tell where this leads, the lecture starts in February. However, I have used a blog in the last years and I assume it will lead me in a similar direction, ie posting links to additional reading material as well as useful tools and Eclipse plugins. Lukas and Erwann use twitter as well in the current software engineering lecture. However, their use is very specific to that specific lecture since the students are building a twitter client, and thus not suitable for other lectures.

I also created an account for our upcoming ICSE workshop on software search engines, but again I cannot yet tell where this will lead. We will certainly find better use than just posting deadlines…

Over time, my whole research group joined twitter as well, including Oscar. Most of them joined after I told them about maximizing keystrokes and how awesome following a conference is. (In the meantime, I even stopped being the most active twitterer in the group.) We found that the recent twitter list feature is a great way to present your research group on twitter. We created a new account for the group including lists for staff, alumni, students, projects, etc…

See you on twitter :)

While browsing the proceedings of this year’s OOPSLA, I thought, hey let’s create a themescape of the proceedings. So I fired up SoftwareCartographer and created a “code map” of all PDFs found in the CD. Normally I use SoftwareCartographer to analyse the vocabulary of software systems, but since it operates on vocabulary only, it can be applied on normal text files aswell.

But before we dive into software cartography, the word cloud of all proceeding documents:

Obviously, there are many Java programmers fighting with their type systems at OOPSLA. In the cloud above, the terms are weighted by number of occurrences in the proceeding documents. I guess on a cloud weighted by fun, Smalltalk Superpowers and Animal Verbing would show up the largest.

On the picture above, we see the “CodeMap” of OOPSLA together with the word cloud of selected papers (click for larger version). CodeMap is a visualization to show source code files (here PDF files) and how similar they are in terms of vocabulary [WCRE 2008]. Each file is rendered as a hill, file size is used as the hill’s height. Location of the files reflects topical similarity. Files that use the same vocabulary are close to each other, files that use different vocabulary are far apart of each other.

SoftwareCartographer is written in Smalltalk, if you have VW installed you can download the WCRE demo and apply it your own software systems or conference papers. Software-Cartographer uses Hapax and Pimon, but not Moose.