How much can you know about a person from her public digital footprints? Someone tweeting as @foxyfolklorist and writing for the blog My Sex Professor, must at least be blessed with a decent sense of humor, which is quite certain:
Thanks to a very drunk Polish gentleman, I now know how to open a bottle of wine using a shoe (apparently the cork needs to be natural).
It was fascinating to learn from Jeana’s research blog how folk narrative and fairy tale scholars set out to summarise the reoccurring tale plots in tweets of 140 characters or less to create a whole new typology:
Little Red Riding Hood: Curiosity tastes better than mom's baking; didn't mean to eat grandma or get eaten by wolf; not little anymore #TwTy
Research in this manner sounds like a lot of fun, and, well, not only just fun. Jeana has been tweeting a lot about the process of writing her PhD dissertation to be defended at Indiana University this spring. The pain of this tedious process should not be underestimated:
I have begun the ritual of the New Dissertation Chapter: opening a blank Word document & staring at it. Soon the words will come.
A person exercising one’s body and mind so intensely definitely needs proper food. Jeana’s food-related tweets can easily make anyone salivate, and they are plentiful. Yes, she is a foodie:
Will homemade marinated local mushrooms taste good in risotto? Tonight, we find out! (I guess you'd call it Estonian-Italian fusion cooking)
When Jeana isn’t working on her dissertation, running, belly dancing, hooping, cooking, eating, drinking, or tweeting, she is, most obviously – unless bothered by insomnia – sleeping. Jeana’s dreams are sometimes a continuation of her adventurous research life:
Dreamt I was giving 2 big folklore talks (1 in India, 1 in Germany) & was totally unprepared. At least it wasn't another job-search dream.
Is there anything else you might want to know about Jeana? She is currently a visiting PhD student hosted by the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folkloristics at the University of Tartu. Go find her blogging or tweeting in the virtual space, or out dancing in the real world.
