January 9, 2013, 8:00 am
By Brian Croxall
Last weekend, two of the largest academic conferences of the year took place: the annual meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA). A good portion of the ProfHacker team was at one of these two gatherings, giving presentations, listening to talks, and tweeting up a storm.
One of the staples of these two conventions (as well as any other that I have ever attended) is the book exhibit. Academic publishers bring their most recent titles to show off, hoping to sell a few copies that might turn into larger course adoptions. The sales are often made more attractive by the inclusion of a discount of 15%, 20%, or even 30% off list price. As Jason and I wandered around the MLA’s book exhibit on Saturday, we not only took in the amazing demonstration of the ChronoZoom beta by Microsoft Research but also shared something like the following …
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December 4, 2012, 8:00 am
By Prof. Hacker
[This is a guest post by Amanda Phillips, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English with an emphasis in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are in queer, feminist, and race-conscious discourses in and around technoculture, popular media, video games and the digital humanities. She is a founding member of the #transformDH Collective, "a fluid and decentralized network of people and ideas that are invested in the representation and scholarship of marginalized communities in the digital humanities." Follow her on Twitter (@NazcaTheMad), or her blog, Gamer Trouble: The Dynamics of Difference in Video Games]
ProfHacker asked if I’d be willing to write a #transformDH perspective on the 2012 Meeting of the American Studies Assocation, which I had the good fortune to attend last month as an advocate for the hash tag. This is my story….
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October 8, 2012, 8:00 am
By Anastasia Salter
Last week, Adeline chronicled the recent “Twittergate” and considered the best practices for tweeting at conferences. I’m a huge fan of conference backchannels, particularly since my work is very interdisciplinary and it seems there’s an interesting conference every weekend that I wish I could attend. Twitter offers some insight into what happens in those spaces. How much insight? It depends–but not just on those tweeting. The presenters can play a big role in determining how accessible their work is to those looking in.
Why encourage tweeting of your work? There’s been lots of discussion of the value of academic tweeting and open exchange of ideas, which is important philosophically and part of why I tweet a conferences. But there’s also value to you as the presenter–feedback, a chance for extended conversations, and even the potential for finding collaborators, publishers, or new…
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October 3, 2012, 11:00 am
By Adeline Koh
Over the last few days, a big debate over the appropriateness of live-tweeting conference panels has taken place over Twitter under the hashtag #Twittergate. Participants shared concerns of bad backchannel behavior, the accuracy of tweets, and whether tweeted research will be able to find a publisher. On the other hand, others raised points about how livetweeting conference panels increased access to research for those unable to travel to these conferences, and that tweets could work to increase visibility for scholars. Readers may be interested in
While the concerns …
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June 15, 2012, 11:00 am
By Anastasia Salter
Summer is a prime season for conferences—and unconferences—and several of us here at ProfHacker are packing up for a THATCamp this summer. Getting ready for an unconference can feel very different from the usual conference, and not just because of the t-shirt and short dress codes. There’s a final obstacle that’s been on my own to-do list all week: writing a session proposal. In a traditional conference, we write our abstracts or even complete papers and posters months to a year in advance, and our very acceptance depends on the strength of that material. In an unconference, on the other hand, ideas are put out into public forums for discussion, recombination, voting and scheduling long after the decisions on campers are made.
Given this unpredictability, unconferences can be intimidating. George Williams made several great pre-THATCamp suggestions, and there are a number of…
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May 31, 2012, 3:00 pm
By Brian Croxall
A few weeks ago, I wrote to announce the Digital Humanities Winter Institute. While I wanted to make sure as many people know about this training opportunity as possible, I was also personally interested. I’m lucky enough to have some professional development funds for next year, and I thought that this could be a great opportunity to put those funds to use while learning R.
All of that changed, however, when I looked pulled up the DHWI dates on my calendar. Running from 7-11 January, the Institute starts the day after the 2013 MLA ends. Since I’ve already committed to be at the 2013 MLA, and because I’m co-leading a pre-convention workshop, I will be flying to Boston on 2 January; attending the DHWI would mean that I would be away from home for 10 full days. And as a father of three and a husband of one, I knew that such a proposal would not pass the approval process. Just for…
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March 14, 2012, 3:00 pm
By Prof. Hacker
[This is a guest post by Sharon Leon, director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Find her on Twitter as @sleonchnm. -GHW]
When was the last time you met a StarTrek actor and a punk rocker at a professional conference? Last week the attendees of WebWise 2012, a conference sponsored by the Institute for Museum and Library Services for their grantees and other library, archives, and museum professionals, got to do just that. Launching with a preconference day of discussion in an unconference format, as well as workshop sessions on 21st Century Skills and using gaming in teaching and learning, the program covered a significant amount of ground in a short period of time
LeVar Burton kicked off the first full day of the main conference with a keynote address on the power of story and the promise of the digital. The actor and…
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February 3, 2012, 11:00 am
By Jeffrey W. McClurken
As I wrote in a post two years ago, K-12 education matters to those of us in higher education for many reasons, but especially because our missions are at core the same, and because we are reliant on K-12 teachers sending us students prepared for our classes. This past weekend I attended EduCon 2.4, the fifth iteration of this conference that is put on by the students, parents, and teachers of the Science Leadership Academy (SLA), a magnet high school in Philadelphia that is partnered with the Franklin Institute.
EduCon’s guiding “axioms” and the approach they represent explain why as a teacher of undergraduates I find this K-12 education conference so useful:
- Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
- Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen
- Technology must serve pedagogy, …
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September 8, 2011, 11:00 am
By George Williams
This is the third installment in what I used to call “Accessibility in a Digital Environment,” a roundup of links to information about making digital resources accessible to all people. (Here is the first roundup, and here is the second.) For today’s post, I’ve decided to focus on links to information about upcoming meetings devoted to the topic. There are many events scheduled over the next few months:
- The “Boston Accessibility Unconference” takes place next week: September 17, 2011 at the Microsoft NERD Center: “the exact sessions that will take place will only be determined the morning of the event, so long as it relates to technology accessibility (e.g., web, mobile, social media, e-learning, touch screen technology) and users with a variety of disabilities, everything is open to discussion.”
- The “Web Accessibility London Unconference” is scheduled for September 21, 2011 at City…
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July 29, 2011, 11:00 am
By George Williams
[Recently the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) took place in Washington D.C. I’ve been a member of SHARP since I attended the 2001 meeting, and I’ve always found the conference–as well as the SHARP journal Book History–to be extremely rewarding.
This year, Twitter was a powerful presence at the conference, in part because the organization was officially encouraging conference-goers to use the medium for backchannel discussion. SHARP’s president, Leslie Howsham (@lesliehowsham), and vice president, Ian Gadd (@iangadd), are both on Twitter. And it seemed to me that a critical mass of SHARP attendees were already Twitter users. Furthermore, I noticed a number of Twitter users who were not even attending the conference engaging in the #sharp11 Tweetstream. (Below, I’ve included contributions from three of those people, one of…
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