Nov 5, 2009

Twitter science list categories

Posted in Geek, Science at 8:45 am by David Bradley -- 15 Comments; add your comment

List categories expanded:

# archaeo – archaeology (thanks to @r8lobster for the suggestion and tweeps)
# bio – medicine, physicians, health, psychologists, psychiatrists, bioinformatics, pharma
# chem – chemical sciences, materials, nanotechnology
# earth – geology, geography, environment, climate, oceans, marine science
# physics – physics, particles, maths
# sci-comms – science communicators, educators, editors, writers, bloggers, marketing, publicity, government
# tech – science computing, software, hardware, technology, engineering
# space – astronomy, space travel, stars, planets, cosmology

The manually compiled Scientwists list of science people on Twitter grew from around 100 of my contacts in January 2009 to almost 700 members, who asked to join or who retweeted the link as of October.

Justin Reid helped automate the inclusion of bios and photos and 2020science did some amazing analyses to show how all those science types were interconnected. The scientwist list is now on Listorious and doing very well in the Top 140 of all lists listed, the more followers the better, would love to make the Top 10 by the end of the year, get science in its rightful place – so please do follow the scientwists list and help make that happen!

A lot of work went into building up the resource, especially when I felt compelled to migrate it all to TweepML.org to allow users to more easily follow members.

Meanwhile, Twitter was working on its own lists feature, which is now open to everyone. I recreated the scientwists list using their system, but they limit membership to just 500 and that was full very quickly. Pressure was then on from various contacts to categorise all those science types and call me stupid and imagine that I have nothing better to do, but I’ve now done that. I’ve also added lots of new science types along the way as they emerged from different corners of the twitterhood.

I’ve categorised people as best I could, some are not on the original scientwists list because of space limitations. Those tweeps, however, will be be listed in two lists as appropriate. Those on the scientwists list will have one additional listing depending on what appears to be their main focus.

The TweepML version of the scientwists list (I’ll add you here too, if you ask):

0 to B | C to D | E to I | J to L | M to O | P to R | S to S | T to Z