MLA Goes Tweet

Just ran into Amanda French at the IHE booth, over in the exhibit hall. She helped elucidate something that has puzzled me since yesterday -- namely, that blog postings about this year's MLA seem few and far between.

I wondered if it were a matter of some delay in things being picked up by the Google Blog search engine, or not enough people being able to afford to fly to the Pacific coast, or what.

Amanda's response makes sense: It may be that most of it is taking place via microblogging, and Twitter in particular.

I signed up for Twitter earlier this year but have tended to ignore it, on the principle any more fragmentation of my attention would reduce it to the scale of subatomic particles; for example, quarks. But evidently other folks are MLA are able to handle it better.

Amanda explained that if you want to keep track with how MLA is being Twittered, you go to this site and do a search for MLA08.

By the way, our booth at MLA is being maintained by editorial assistant Serena Golden, whose career background "includes stints at a hedge fund, as a nanny, and one ill-fated month as a waitress." So one learns from the IHE staff page. She has not sworn at anyone at MLA, to the best of my knowledge, and it is difficult to imagine her doing so. The name "Serena" seems very suited to her.

She has posted an old-school, non-microblog post about the first day of this, her first trip to MLA, which you may read here.

UPDATE: Check out Microblogging the MLA. It includes a description of the MLA panel today on Twitter, which I missed. Damnit.