Working Out Loud: Online Identity Building, Digital Networking, and Professional Development and Going Public: Tools for Developing Your Digital Identity are consecutive nontraditional sessions jointly organized by the MLA’s office of scholarly communication and the Committee on Information Technology for the 2017 MLA Convention. Working Out Loud (Friday, 6 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., Grand Ballroom Salon B, Philadelphia Marriott) is a roundtable discussion featuring Lee Skallerup Bessette, Amanda Licastro, Andrew Pilsch, Jentery Sayers, and Liana Silva, and is moderated by Nicky Agate. The session description is below:

Crafting, managing, and promoting a digital identity is a vital—if often misunderstood—element of academic life today. Panelists address strategies for creating and nurturing such an identity, covering professional profiles, social media, Web sites and blogs, networked advocacy, crowdsourced research, and the advantages of openly sharing scholarship and pedagogical materials online.

Going Public (Friday, 6 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Grand Ballroom Salon B, Philadelphia Marriott) is a hands-on, multi-modal workshop with offerings from Nicky Agate, Patricia Hswe, Daniel Powell, Lee Skallerup Bessette, and Zach Whalen. Here’s the session description:

Establishing a digital identity has become essential to managing one’s academic reputation. Discovery of you, as a researcher, is as important as discovery and citation of your research. This workshop addresses approaches to cultivating an online identity and offers guidance on “going public” using tools and strategies for building an audience and community around your research.

“Going Public” will have a highly interactive format: there will be several “pods” or modules, each dedicated to an aspect of building one’s digital identity, such how to lower the barriers to one’s scholarship through open access publishing. The workshop will encompass the following modules:

  • Navigating Open Access (Patricia Hswe)
  • Using Humanities Commons (Nicky Agate)
  • Building an elevator pitch for your project (Daniel Powell)
  • Curating a social media presence (Lee Skallerup Bessette)
  • A domain of one’s own (Zach Whalen)