[Air-L] Let's Talk About AoIR

Fri May 31 08:27:10 PDT 2013

Ruth Deller commented:
*So maybe we could look to alternate with a continental/national
conferenceone 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.*

A cute idea.  A panel, held via email, discussion board or chatroom.  It
happens at a particular time. Maybe the presentation is streamed, or maybe
the paper is available in longhand before the time starts.  Then for half
an hour, people can ask the author questions about the paper, to which the
author has to answer in real time.
As an Australian who pays for most of her own conference attendances
including the thousands of dollars in airfares to other continents, the
idea has its merits.  Mainly for the author, who gets instant feedback from
a variety of sources.  And your responses don't disappear into the air, you
already wrote them down.  That would give me a lot of useful grist for the
mill.  Perhaps it would be good to be in a chatroom or on a discussion
board, for the sake of the layout.  But if it happened say, via the air-l
list, the discussion might prompt people who didn't intend to attend, to
chuck in a comment.

Probably this happens in your world all the time, but its a fascinating new
idea to me.

xn

On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Deller, Ruth A <R.A.Deller at shu.ac.uk>wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Natalya Godbold
PhD Candidate (Human Information Behaviour / Health Communication)
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney

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