Cli-fi and the use of Twitter as a research tool

Someone asked me the other day how I use my time as editor of The Cli-Fi Report to monitor the rise of the cli-fi genre worldwide using the tools of the internet. It's a long story but ''long story short,'' here is how I spend my days 24/7 mostly at a local internet cafe substituting as a home office, since I don't own and never have owned a computer:

First I go online and check the Google News search windows for words such as cli-fi, climate fiction, global warming novels, climate fiction novels, climate change fiction novels. 

And then I go into Twitter.com and search the Twitter search window every morning for these words: cli-fi, climate fiction, the hashtag term #CliFi. 

What I have found is that Twitter is the most important tool for my cli-fi research and outreach. Google News links to cli-fi mentions on websites, but Twitter links to tweets by academics, writers, literary critics and readers and fans who tweet about their interest in cli-fi. 

So from Twitter, I find links that are nowhere else on the internet. Twitter is the best monitoring tool I have found so far. 

Facebook is useful for a Cli-fi Facebook group page that I administer and it's useful with over 1000 members worldwide. But not everyone posts all the time, and most people don't post at all. So Facebook is a slow crawl compared to Google searches and especially Twitter. 

Give me Twitter or give me death.

Here is a sampling of some Tweets I have come across on a daily basis. Twitter rocks for a researcher like me.

@Lifesapodcast ''There's something in the weather this week... As we're pitching Cli-Fi (Climate Fiction) movies! Give us your best, made-up CLI-FI MOVIE Titles!!''

Julie Carrick Dalton‏ @juliecardalt 14 小時前

The surge of #ClimateFiction is rising — just like sea levels. My latest @WriterUnboxed post takes a deep dive into the world of #Clifi. It’s Time to Call Cli-Fi (Climate Fiction) a Genre http://writerunboxed.com/2018/04/30/is-cli-fi-climate-fiction-a-genre/ … #amwriting #amreading #climatechange

@blog.oup Science and spectacle: exposing climate change through the arts OUPblog (blog) A relatively new genre of fiction—climate fiction, also known as cli-fi—is helping to break the silence surrounding climate change. Cli-fi stories often involve apocalyptic events or dystopian futures