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By Nuné NikoghosyanTribute acts are a growing reality today not only in number, but also in terms of the domains where we find them. The most known are in music, where we find tribute bands of virtually every more or less famous singer or band, from Led Zeppelin to Madonna to Coldplay. They not only recreate the music live on stage, but also at times replicate visual and other aspects of the original artist’s show. But TV shows, films and other cultural products are also becoming no exception. If you are a Fawlty Towers fan, with just one letter of a difference (and a few small details) your next restaurant outing can be at the Faulty Towers Dining : “an interactive show where impersonators of Sybil, Basil and Manuel fight it out once again”. The examples are numerous.What’s more: you can now find tribute acts in academia, too. In fact, academia has had a culture of “covers” since the beginning of time. Using quotes, that is, with due references to the original author. We’ve all been taught not to ever forget to reference properly, or else we slip into a trap and our work gets dismissed as “plagiarism”. Whether you like it or not, every time you quote an author, you literally “pay tribute” to his or her work, suggesting that it is not only worth a read, but also a mention. After all, how many times have you quoted an author whose work you find of little value? Perhaps not as many as the authors that you’d like your work to be associated with. Isn’t the use of quotes a tribute to an author, in a way?Then there are the more obvious tributes, like a publication “in homage to” an author, a founder of a discipline, etc. But there can also be “homage” to our own research subject, by the sheer attention it requires, not the least in our own opinion.And then there are tributes more like what we see in the music industry. On Twitter, you can stumble on a conversation like this:&#160;In fact, publicly open accounts with the names of famous academics are more than numerous. Searching for “Emile Durkheim” on Twitter, you can count up to about 40 accounts with his name and profile picture. You can thus see Durkheim announcing his books or tweeting some of his main arguments.&#160;&#160;The same goes for Karl Marx... &#160;We must, however, mention that most of these accounts are now inactive with their last tweets dating from a few years back, and are mostly linked to each other, suggesting they’re the result of an experiment or perhaps even a class assignment for students. Sometimes Karl Marx tweets about being excited to watch Superbowl. (I tried getting in touch with the owners of these accounts, alas without much luck.)There are, however, other such accounts that we could even qualify as more serious. One of the most known ones is the automated account (“bot”) Bruno Latourbot, with some 5000 followers, regularly tweeting random sentences from Bruno Latour’s published works. “No one can make us believe the world is made of words and all of that,” the bot reminds its readers. As the curator of the account says, it frequently gets mistaken for being the official Bruno Latour account[1].Others, though, are even more successful in number. A certain Pierre Bourdieu, based in Mexico City, has some 7000 tweets and 39,200 followers worldwide. Most of these followers are sociologists, other academics, or working in the social sector, according to their brief profile descriptions. With tweets in Spanish, English and French, posting announcements of sociological conferences, links to journal articles and more, be they “bourdieusian” or not, Bourdieu seems to have brought sociologists under one roof, with an account created 5 years after his death.&#160;Immanuel Kant is no exception, tweeting quotes from his publications to some 17,400 followers. In fact, most more or less famous authors have at least one such account dedicated to them. You name the author: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky, Lewis A. Coser, Max Weber, etc. Even Søren Kierkegaard has his own account, tweeting his famous quotes to some 34,500 followers and keeping the philosophy field up to date with news, events, and publications. Let us not forget, however, that one of the most famous parody accounts on Twitter is directly linked to him, too: a mix of Kim Kardashian news and Kierkegaard philosophy being tweeted to about 220,000 followers via KimKierkegaardashian.Whether for parody, fun or serious academic work, these accounts remind too strongly of the tribute band phenomenon on the music scene: representing the work of someone else to an audience (hopefully) conscious of it being a “cover”, without the participation or even agreement of the original author. In all cases, though, it certainly has one main effect, among others, just as in the case of musical tribute bands: pay homage, keep the names and works alive in memories (and other works), thus contributing to the making of “classics” (much like “legends” in pop/rock music). On the other hand, it is perhaps no accident that only the already “classical” authors have such tribute accounts – they attract more attention and seem somehow more credible, much like tribute bands to the most famous rock and pop stars. In fact, this may be another gentle reminder to us how much academia is based on a star-system, revolving around academic celebrities [2].The question is: how long will this phenomenon continue, how far can it and will it go, how young (and alive) will the tributed academics be and, most of all, how trivial may it or will it become in our everyday academic lives and works?To be continued…&#160;Notes:[1] Johnson, Amy (2015) “Twitter and Public Scholarship”, Anthropology now, 7(1), 70-79.[2] Walsh, Peter (2015) "On Academic Celebrity", The sociological review, blog.&#160;All images in text are screenshots from the publicly open Twitter accounts mentioned.Featured image source: Fabrice Florin, "Ubu's Dreams - Shadow Puppet Test",  2016, Flickr. 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