[Air-l] on conferences

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

On Apr 26, 2007, at 1:08 AM, Amy S. Bruckman wrote:

>> 3. This, btw, is my big beef at AoIR conferences -- not enough  
>> refereeing.
>> It's not nice to waste people's time with poorly researched and  
>> poorly
>> written papers.
>
> I'm so glad you said this Barry--I agree.  It would be easy to fix: we
> just need to require full papers rather than abstracts, and actually
> have folks review them.
>
I've proposed this a few times, I think it could help resolve some of  
the issues.  However, it will create at least one more problem in  
terms of academic labor.

> Of course we still have issues to resolve based on the fact that
> people come from different home disciplines and have different
> expectations of what a conference paper is and what it counts for.
> (Does it 'count' for tenure?

Perhaps, but it is not a Computer Science conference, so most likely  
not.  Granted, I don't think some of the conference spam type of  
conferences with full proceedings should count for tenure either.  To  
the extend that going to a conferences and presenting a paper counts  
toward tenure in your field, then I'd suggest that it would.

>   Can you expand it into a journal
> article, or does it count as already published?)

nope, AoIR does not currently publish, archiving papers is opt-in and  
not publishing.  Will it publish?  I hope it will someday. If it were  
full paper-peer review then i suspect the proceedings could be  
published without much issue.
>   Those are important
> to address.  But eventually we will become people's home discipline,
> and I'd rather see the bar set higher for what a conference paper is
> supposed to be.

I'd just like to see conference papers with multidisciplinary peer  
review.  We would need many more reviewers though, which would be an  
issue.

>
> YMMV,
>
> Amy
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Jeremy Hunsinger
Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research,  
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee  
(www.cipr.uwm.edu)

Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a  
thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions,  
think. --Byron