Then there are those that spring out of the ether. That appears to be the case with a wonderful Twitter flow that began building Monday around the hashtag #IAmAScientistBecause and has continued unabated. Here is one of my favorites, posted by Andrew Warren (@andybugguy):
#IAmAScientistBecause I’m incessantly curious about nature! Hag Moth caterpillar Phobetron sp. Paraná, Brazil
After I saw his Twitter item, I sifted a bit and found that Warren’s friends — as The Times noted in 2013 — call him “lord of the butterflies” and he is senior collections manager for the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Michael Halpern (@halpsci) at the Union of Concerned Scientists used Storify to curate his own collection of favorites.
The convention of using a hashtag (pound sign) ahead of a term or acronym to coordinate a focused discussion in cyberspace was invented in 2007, on Twitter of course, by Chris Messina, then at Mozilla. He explained the value of hashtags in a Google Hangout with my Pace University blogging students:
What I like about the practice, despite efforts to commercialize it, is how a hashtag can create communities focused on important questions — sifting signal out of all the Kardashian March Madness Bieber noise in social and online media.
Dip in on #enviroed (environmental education), #edtech (technology in the classroom), #wjchat (Web journalism), #birdclass (a University of Connecticut course in bird biology and behavior) to get the idea.
As far as I can tell (I’m checking), #IAmAScientistBecause started last August with Sarah E. Gossan (@PrincessSuperno), a doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology who describes herself as “ a gravitational wave astrophysicist in training“:
Gossan says the idea for the scribbled notes explaining one’s interest in science came in a chat with a longtime friend Julie Gould, who runs the jobs blog at Nature, among other endeavors. “We wanted to get people talking about all of the great reasons why they became scientists, and show people that scientists are just normal people,” Gossan wrote in an email. She pointed me to a blog post by Gould on the project.
Twitter is an ideal platform for continuing this discussion. Search scientists’ posts there and point to your favorites. Just include a link in your comments. I can embed them in the body of the post later.
The Twitter roundup from the Union of Concerned Scientists was by Michael Halpern, not Mark, as initially written.