[Air-L] Let's Talk About AoIR

[Deller, Ruth A]

Wow, a few days away on annual leave and I come back to find AOIR asploding all over my inbox!  Lots of things to digest here but my twopenn'orth on a few of them (apologies, these thoughts will be conference specific ones not ones pertaining to AOIR in general, although I might come back to that later)

CONFERENCE TEMPLATES

I'll hold my hands up, I really struggled with the format this year both to write and to review.  I'm used to just submitting and reviewing conference abstracts of 250-500 words so a longer one - yet something too short to be a proper paper - was a bit of a shock to the system, and not only that, it had its own particular fonts and styles and layouts!  I found that quite intimidating and unnecessarily formal and I wasn't sure of its purpose.  As others have said, it was too short to be a paper, too long for an abstract and trying to decide exactly what got put into it was hard.  When reviewing, it was problematic using the template because everyone had interpreted it in different ways, some giving mini papers, others extended abstracts, others something else entirely - I genuinely found it hard to judge and I do a lot of reviewing of abstracts and of papers - but this hybrid beast was new to me.  

Having seen Terri's comment about roundtables/panels, I fear I am possibly one of those guilty of confusing them in the reviewing process this year somehow - on last year's system it seemed much clearer whether things were papers, panels, fishbowls etc - although I was on the organising team last year and accessed everything via the back system so maybe it looked different for team members than for actual reviewers.  I do worry that we might have lost some quality papers, panels and roundtables purely because of the formatting issues and people's difficulty in interpreting the brief both as authors and reviewers.   

CONFERENCE FEEL AND SO ON

I think one of the things this issue with the templates highlights is the problems of interdisciplinarity - I am ALL FOR it and think one of our biggest strengths is that we can accommodate scholars from lots of disciplines and countries - but it does mean that, naturally, we all differ a lot in practice and in terms of what is considered 'prestigious' (unlike some people's experiences, my research centre actually thinks a lot of AOIR - probably not enough to fund me to go to Denver but that's just because they don't like spending money).  Therefore, we're probably never going to agree on what the conference should be: a creative exchange where newer, innovative stuff can be shared, or a place for finished products.

I'm not an either/or person, so I would always advocate the both/and way of thinking. Being on the conference team last year I did sometimes find we were restricted in what we could put on the programme and how we could structure plenaries, keynotes etc.  I personally feel that we're researching at the cutting edge and the creative edge.  The internet is always changing and I worry that to fully take on board Nicole's suggestion of only submitting things that had 'findings' would stifle that and lead to more dated things being presented rather than allowing us to be fresh - and I think one of our distinctive markers should be our ability to be up-to-date with developments in our research field.  Academia moves ridiculously slowly, the internet maddeningly quickly - we can't let everything be dictated by the former when we're interested in the latter.  

That said, I also appreciate the concerns over 'rigour' needing to be part of the process.  I wasn't convinced by the arguments that conferences aren't a place for sharing works-in-progress though - every conference I've ever been to (and they've all been interdisciplinary or in media, cultural studies and a bit of sociology and all in either the UK or USA so I acknowledge that different fields and countries will vary) has had a combination of new work, work-in-progress and work completed.  I love that and I think it keeps things fresh as well as encouraging newer work, PhD students etc.  I've heard terrible presentations on completed work and excellent ones on work-in-progress so I don't consider the stage the work is at to be a marker of quality at all.

One option could be to have different streams - completed papers, work-in-progress, whatever.  I'd love us to have more workshops or similar where we get to experiment with different internet platforms and technologies.  I bet several people would love it if they could have an hour to learn about, and get to grips with, 4chan or Tumblr or Vine or whatever it may be.  I would love much more creativity and innovation in the programme - more 'traditional' conference fare is fine, but only to a point.  Conferences for me are much more about connection than anything else - I read articles and books if I want the finished, extensive product.  I want conferences to inspire me and introduce me to exciting people.

OTHER CONFERENCE STUFF

Sarah mentioned the size of the conference (and the expense of it for many).  I don't know if this is worth thinking about, but another organisation I was once part of used to have an annual conference of its members, who were from all over the world.  It got difficult and expensive for many people to meet that way, so they moved to having conferences on each continent instead with a 'global gathering' every two or three years.  So maybe we could look to alternate with a continental/national conference one year and a big global shindig the next?  Or have more web/internet-based ways of sharing and connecting - if not streaming, then weeks/months where we actively work to share stuff via blogs or online repositories or YouTube or Twitter or whatever works best for what we want to share.

Ruth