[Air-L] The review process for IR15

[Jill Walker Rettberg]

Congratulations and condolences to everyone who's just received acceptances and rejections for their IR15 papers and panels. I got one of each (hooray for our pre-conference selfie workshop!) - and I was hoping to renew the (sorry, I know kind of exhausting) discussions about how an ideal review process would look.

First, thank you to the organisers for seeing through a very complicated process - and getting the notifications out on time, too! I genuinely appreciate that it is a HUGE job organising a conference, and that there probably is no perfect system - especially in a radically cross-disciplinary conference like this. I'm also program chair for another conference next year and obviously would like to make sure that the reviewing process for that goes as well as possible.

My main disappointment was that the two papers I was assigned to review weren't in my area of expertise. I think I made the mistake of checking "digital humanities" among the list of topics and methodologies I could review and I got two papers that had that in their keywords but had absolutely nothing to do with digital humanities at all. I thought that was pretty disappointing, especially since I know many people in the humanities didn't get humanities reviewers, and there I was, a humanist reviewing statistical and sociological methods. Not optimal at all. 

I would prefer an open review process, though I realise traditional blind review might be easier (due to familiarity?) and for an open process you'd have to find ways to avoid people just voting for their friends or people they know of. There are systems for this though, aren't there? And you could even still have semi-blind review where authors were anonymised. 

If that's not going to happen, at the least I think tracks (perhaps especially for the humanities) or, better, allowing reviewers to bid for papers they would like to review (based on the titles or perhaps title + abstract) would make sense. It's such a waste to use me to review statistics and have ethnographers reviewing literary/textual analysis, and that can be avoided with bidding. I think Easychair.org allows this. Also it's really fun as a reviewer to see the titles of ALL the proposed papers. You really get an idea of the field as a whole. I don't see any reason why that should be secret. 

Anyway, in the interest of openness, and because rejection is part of being an academic and one we tend to pretend never happens, I posted my rejected proposal and the reviews it received here: http://jilltxt.net/?p=3963 along with some thoughts about the process both of being a reviewer and of receiving reviews. There are also some interesting comments from others in the Facebook thread I posted here (because nobody comments on blogs anymore) https://www.facebook.com/jill.rettberg/posts/510785413159

I'd really like to hear other peoples' experiences with the process and ideas for how to set up an ideal reviewing process for a cross-disciplinary conference. 

Jill


Jill Walker Rettberg
Professor of Digital Culture
Dept of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies
University of Bergen
Postboks 7800
5020 Bergen

+ 47 55588431

Blog - http://jilltxt.net
Twitter - http://twitter.com/jilltxt

My latest book, Blogging (2nd ed), is available from Polity:
http://www.politybooks.com/book.asp?ref=0745663648