Historical Personalities: Tweeting Standard Narratives in the History of Science

During the Annual History of Science Society 2013 meeting, a round table on social media, ‘The Pleasures and Dangers of Social Media’, was organised as a part of a continuing conversation about the role that social media plays in providing leads for research, in constructing course syllabi, and even for opening conversations about the role of archives in historical research and what that could look like, going forward. Of course, the particular social media of greatest interest is Twitter, due to its flexibility in public outreach and academic networking.1 However, personally, what I find most interesting about Twitter has to do with its capability for the reproduction of archival material, in a manner not unlike the Wunderkammer; Twitter can function as placeholders of time capsules where less well-known historical narratives can be foregrounded into other users’ immediate consciousness. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is relatively less demanding in terms of its rules and regulations pertaining to who or what is entitled to a personal profile. As one does not have to follow an unlocked public profile to track what they tweet about, celebrities and public figures have taken advantage of this feature to engage in a form of ‘selfies’, whereby memento-mori-like events are captured in their Twitter updates. Taking advantage of such capability, certain enterprising individuals have decided to make use of the narrative immediacy of Twitter to set up profiles of famous intellectuals and tweet 140-word aphorisms from the latter’s corpus of writings. This is particularly the case for historical figures, and the number of them ‘joining’ Twitterverse can only increase with time. Twitter encourages narrative continuity, regardless of the gap between the posts, and is suitable for philosophical musings, existential soliloquies, newsbytes and flash fiction. In fact, the juxtaposition of multiple timelines that interlace and interpenetrate between the layers of your personal tweets can conjure an atmosphere that heightens the punch of the tweet even if it were to be drawn from observations that are centuries old. One such example is Samuel Pepys, or more precisely, his diary. Whoever is behind the profile has been dropping choice selections from Pepys’s diary on the latter’s Twitter updates. Ever an artful gossiper, Pepys had a taste for scandal and was not above documenting some of his personal improprieties, bringing archaic, but highly identifiable, humour into the flow of more contemporary tales of scandals and bizarre behaviours. If one is interested enough, one can do a search for history of science personalities with tongue-in-cheek handles (Sir Isaac Newton is known as @MasterofPhysick). However, for others such as Charles Darwin (@cdarwin) and Humphry Davy (@sir humphry davy), the choices of handles are unsurprising. Some of these profiles are given a more personable aspect in that the individual(s) managing the handles engage in contemporary rapport with other ‘normal’ Twitter users in contemporary dialect, or, in the period-based language of the historical personality. Some of the historical handles are merely conduits for publicising the works of the figure. Some of these figures perform Twitter parodies of ‘autobiographical’ updates on