Could students soon be citing Twitter as a source for academic work?

According to a report in the  Tennessean, that questions is already being asked on college campuses.  Two years ago Tennessee State University  junior Kristi Roberts wanted to cite a tweet in a paper about  the poem, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”  However, she eventually decided not to do it.

“At that point, it wasn’t really recognized as bona fide source material, as legitimate as a personal blog or an opinion in a newspaper,” she said. “My professor agreed.”

But now, the Modern Language Association, one of three major style sources for academic writing, released formal guidelines on how to cite tweets.

Rosemary Feal, the New York-based group’s executive director and herself an active Twitter user, won’t take credit for legitimizing tweets as source material. She said her group merely decided the right way to do something students and academics were doing all along.

The explosion of interest after MLA’s online post with the rule stunned her.
“News breaks there first. Opinions are generated there that aren’t printed elsewhere,” said Feal, who maintains @MLAconvention and a personal account “People were asking me all the time, ‘How do I cite Twitter?’ ”

She said the best part of the publicity is getting a fresh conversation started about sources in general: whether they’re credible and original and how citations help readers find them for themselves.

Researchers and scholars who study a lot of work that’s “born digital” are likely to use the new rule most, said Derek Bruff, director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University. He recently wrote an article analyzing how Twitter was used for back-channel communication at a convention he attended — providing interesting tidbits that people who attended and those who didn’t might enjoy.

He said academics are more eager than their students to cite Twitter in research.

About a third to half of the students surveyed by the Center for Teaching have Twitter accounts, he said, and most use them for entertainment or keeping up with friends. But more Vanderbilt professors are requiring students to create accounts for assignments, such as following five science journalists or posting interesting bird sightings under #birdclass.

That could spark greater interest in students’ citing tweets in papers. If they don’t see them immediately, they can find them through the Library of Congress, which is archiving every public tweet since Twitter launched in 2006.

Samantha Morgan-Curtis, an associate professor who directs the WRITE program at Tennessee State University, called Twitter’s rise from entertaining forum to legitimate academic source part of the “bottom basement culture” theory: Each new medium arrives on the scene with little respect. The next medium MLA decides how to cite, she said, will be determined by what new technology is introduced.

Six years after its launch, there’s still a lot on Twitter that isn’t academic. “At the same time we are looking at dissidents overturning a tyrannical regime, we’re finding out where Snooki was drunk,” Morgan-Curtis said.

And that’s why Belmont University senior Alex Priore, a songwriting major, says she won’t be citing Twitter in her papers, no matter who thinks it’s legit.

“The fact that it could be used in a college paper is absurd,” said Priore, who doesn’t have an account but updates her band’s, @Paper_Lantern. “I don’t feel the need to talk about myself every five minutes.”