by Jon Lackman | 13 March 2009 | Conferences
We’d like to take note of one other post to the official CAA conference blog, one by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker:
… the core of the conference – the Program Sessions — follow a model that has remained virtually unchanged since the nineteenth century. Papers are prepared in advance, read, and if the session is well structured, there might be an active question and answer period afterward, perhaps with a discussant leading the way. It seems that for most sessions, the vast majority of time is taken up with the reading of carefully prepared papers with significantly less time allotted to either a discussant or active Q&A.
They suggest experimenting with new technologies such as Commentpress or Voicethread.
Does their blog post have a comments section? I couldn’t find it. If it doesn’t, that strikes me as a funny example of what’s wrong with ArtHist conferences. We say we’d like feedback, but we really don’t. We want you to be quiet and listen and maybe say something nice at the end.
I do realize I could just be missing the comments field. So, a potential apology in advance.
That said, I also find it strange that they suggest we tinker with new technology beforehand in order to innovate the ArtHist conference model. In the sciences (or, at least, Stats and Econ, in which my husband is a prof), people don’t read aloud from papers; they talk and engage with their audience. Shouldn’t we just try that first?
Indeed, for some mysterious reason the decision was made to have comments turned off on the blog…
However, that particular post was republished here with comments open:
http://smarthistory.org/blog/308/what-we-blogged-for-caa-rethinking-the-conference/
My gratitude to AHN for this discussion. I wanted to respond to ArtHist’s comment just to add that when Beth and I wrote the original post for the CAA conference blog we felt very much as you do and ended with the following statement:
The conversation about how best to do this might have taken place here on this blog, unfortunately at some point (and we just found this out), the comment function was intentionally disabled. This means that the format of this blog mirrors the principle format of the sessions themselves – something rather one-way, when it seems to us the point of us being is together is rather different…
Yes — many thanks for continuing the discussion — we repeated the CAA post on our blog (www.smarthistory.org/blog in the hope of continuing the discussion there — but here is good too! Our technology suggestions were not meant to be specific, we meant that we can use technology for even simple things like distributing the papers ahead of time with pdfs, etc. — in case that’s a model we want to continue…
Thank you for your responses. Beth, I agree that the use of new technologies would be a good way to facilitate a more open kind of ArtHist conference. And I do like the idea of distributing images or papers ahead of time. Maybe that might even encourage people to go off-the-cuff IRL: it might indicate that the speaker *has* does the legwork beforehand and written a full paper and is now ready to enter a discussion about it.
I honestly believe that the only way the model will change is if CAA (or another forum) holds a few experimental sessions in which speakers are prohibited from reading aloud. They must submit a written paper to the session chairs ahead of time, but then must speak with a Powerpoint presentation as their only aid. I would love to attend a session like that–preferably one that featured people who were capable of extemporizing well.
Am I the only one who likes the current system?
I have been asked to submit a talk in writing but have to present it without reading. I’ll let you know how it goes.