My week as RLadies curator

I was the curator for April 4 to April 9th, 2022. I read the RLadies guide on what to expect and what to do or not to do, and how it works but found the details I needed lacking, so I provide them for the next person.

The steps post signup

I have documented the steps for how to get started after you have signed up and it is now your week to be curator.

Step 0: The email

Upon your week of being curator, you will receive an email from RLadies Global that reads: We have added you as a contributor to the @WeAreRLadies account. While logged into twitter, visit: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ and you should see @WeAreRLadies under your “Accounts” (at the bottom left part of the menu).. This was the detail missing in the guide on how the transfer of power takes place. Now to the next step, the TweetDeck app.

Step 1: TweetDeck

I normally have my Twitter open in a tab on my browser during my day, so I was able to easily log into TweetDeck and see my image and account information. Note, I have 2 Twitter accounts and when using TweetDeck in another tab, if I switch to my non-signed up RLadies Twitter the TweetDeck you will see a warning banner on the top but will switch over to the other account.

When you log into TweetDeck, you should see 4 panel columns, navigate to the 2 person icon on the left, this is what it looks like before you officially takeover and that is when RLadies Global Tweets your curator image out, then your image is the larger one.

The image on the right is the top left corner of TweetDeck.

Step 2: Tweet

This step is shown in the guide but I will provide some feedback on this step.

On the left side panel you click the Tweet button we are familiar with as Twitter users, but one thing to watch out for is your logo as to which account you will be tweeting from. I would suggest changing your personal one if you are like me and use the same image everywhere, as to cut down on the chances of tweeting non-RLadies content.

This is the official takeover and same image logo for accounts.

There is a safety check box for ensuring if you are ready to tweet. Adding images is not like your regular Twitter where you can drag & drop your data visualization, but to use a file directory.

Step 3: See your tweet fly

Once you click tweet, you will see it show up on panel 2 (unless you rearranged the panels). You will see the R community like and retweet your tweet in all of its glory.

official RLadies tweet

The week of curating

Unlike previous curators, I did not schedule and plan my tweets, nor have any particular goal other than not to upset RLadies Global or fail at the task at hand. I read Shannon Pileggi’s ( @PipingHotData ) post on her experience being curator and was expecting my time to be a full time task. I honestly had anxiety and doubt of wanting to do this curating for a week. Unlike all previous curators, I am not a graduate student, nor working in a career, nor a PhD working professional, so I feel the impostor syndrome become real.

The initial RLadies Global curating tweet got much attention to my surprise and saw the community that sees these tweets is larger than I am used to.

Day 1

Day one was mostly uneventful as I was focused on the TransTech Summit still taking place on the Sunday, so aside from the initial curating tweet I did not tweet anything.

Day 2

Starting off with day 2 I was curious to know if I was the first Transgender person to do this curating, as usually I do not see others like me in the Slack channels. So I went through the excel sheet RLadies curator archive and checked each Twitter profile looking for pride flag emojis and/or pronouns that signal LGBTQ membership.

After checking each profile, the number of Transgender curators were 3 in total for the 4 years (2018-2021). That is to say that Transgender curators make up 3.52% of all previous curators (n = 85). As for cisgender lesbians/ gays/ bisexuals counted 2 for each year except for 2021 where there was only 1 person. I posted my findings and added the descriptive text, to later see that it received a modest amount of attention.

Day 3

I went to the Meetup website to find up-coming RLadies events as to help spread the word. Then later on that day I responded to a tagged query in which I followed the instructions of retweeting the query, but forgot to tag the person, but in the comments section I did. My initial reaction was to post a comment.

Day 4

I posted my repository spellingBee, which is for finding out possible words to the New York Times spelling bee app. I was pleased to see a few people like my tweet.

Day 5

Posted a @RLadiesPhilly meetup, shared Outstanding User Interfaces with Shiny book, and shared the Javascript for R book resources.

Day 6

Curated data from ACLU on the anti-Transgender legislative bills. Posted my bar chart showing the US states that have proposed anti-Transgender healthcare bills, which is a sample of the total anti-Transgender/ anti-LGBTQ legislative bills.

Day 7

Shared the RLadies Cologne meetup for using regular expressions, and Salt Lake R users group meetup on random forests.

Conclusion

This week of being curator was a privilege to tweet to the 26.2k followers. I am glad I had I had this opportunity. Scrolling through the timeline of RLadies account, my interactions and visibility seemed to be similar to previous curators in terms of likes and retweets. I would have posted and retweeted @RStudio posts but was unsure if that falls under “sponsor” since it is a company, but did see previous curators do it.

I would love to see more posts in the RLadies community about Transgender issues, the once a year tweet is nice but would be better if there were inclusion of Transgender people in the datasets used in RLadies meetups. I have only seen @RLadiesFreiburg do this once using #TidyTuesday “Ask a Manager” salary data.

  • Thanks to curator Andrea (@me_andrea) for March 31, 2022 who posted Transgender Day of Visibility and retweeted National Center for Transgender Equality.