Welcome to my new feature, HaMPO, in which someone who has a PhD and 10 years professional experience in her field cannot answer what should be a pretty simple question:
Is it ok to blog an academic conference?
We are coming up on the National Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association annual meeting. Last year, I blogged several sessions. I ran into a few “issues”:
1. I got a point in one presenter’s paper wrong. I edited the post. But I only knew this because I had sent her a link to the post. She likely would not have seen it otherwise.
2. One presenter took me to task for not getting her permission. I removed my discussion of her paper from the blog at her request.
3. Some of the blog commenters got a little heated/dismissive in their remarks on papers they disagreed with, not exactly keeping to the tone of academic discourse
Last year there was a big issue at Cold Spring Harbor Lab when bloggers live blogged a conference there. Apparently CSHL has a set of clear rules for journalists, which include getting permission from the speakers in advance, but bloggers kind of went in under the radar. Now the rules are the same for bloggers and journalists (a more detailed discussion here). While I think the worries about live blogging even a restricted conference like the Biology of Genomes are overstated, and the benefits of blogging the presentations understated, the issues with presentations at CSHL might be a little different than issues at PCA. In particular, the CSHL conference is billed as a small forum for researchers to present work in progress in a particular kind of supportive environment. I would think you could attend another conference if you didn’t like the restrictions.
But back to PCA. There are no formal rules, so attendees like me will have to figure out for ourselves what is appropriate and what isn’t. Could a Bloggers’ Code of Ethics help?
Well, there’s this section:
Minimize Harm
Ethical bloggers treat sources and subjects as human beings deserving of respect.
Bloggers should:
• Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of information is not a license for arrogance.
• Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.
Here’s an excerpt on harm from another Code, from Upstart: The Magazine for Aspring Journalists
9. Consider the possible effects of every post you make
Bloggers should not set out to be intentionally hurtful to other individuals in the course of their blogging, in fact the ethical blogger should take steps to minimise harm to others wherever possible. Pro-blogger Jaime McD suggests that bloggers should adhere to the Golden Rule when blogging, namely, treat others as you would be treated yourself.
We can note first that both these codes map blogging ethics onto journalist ethics. I am not sure that is appropriate, especially for blogs like this one. So, for example, I may have special duties as a blogging academic that have nothing to do with journalism, or special duties relating to feminism, or literature as a public good, etc.
Could blogging about conference presentations cause harm? Four possibilities come to mind:
1. Maybe someone reading this blog will scoop the presenter’s WIP, stealing her thesis and getting an article into print first. The presenter loses a publication and time spent on research. This could affect her chances for getting tenure (this would not be an issue for presenters who are presenting published or forthcoming work, of course).
2. Blog commenters are harshly critical of the presenter, in a way no one in an academic audience would be. They write things like, “That is just stupid” or “What a dumbass!”. It is hurtful to the presenter — not a reaction she was prepared for, and she worries it will devalue her work if it is the first thing that shows up in a Google search.
3. It is not the presenter’s best work. In fact, it is really not ready for prime time. She hates the idea that it is online for posterity, when she plans to radically alter or abandon the research post conference.
4. The Golden Rule bit from the second code: suppose I gave a paper that, because of 1, 2, or 3, I did not want blogged. Would I expect any bloggers present to obtain my permission?
Moving away from harm, another way of looking at this is in terms of ownership of the material. The “consent” requirement suggests a kind of ownership. That is, as a blogger, I don’t have the right to do with that material what I want. It’s the presenter’s.
Most of these issues could be resolved by obtaining the speakers’ permission. I don’t think, after my experience last year, that I can assume consent. I also don’t think that sitting in the front row and typing furiously alerts the presenters to my intentions clearly enough that I could be confident they that have given tacit consent by not stopping me.
But then, how would consent be obtained? Hand everyone a business card after the conference, telling them about the blog and assuming they will tell me? Ask them directly? Email them?
I confess I hate the consent idea, mostly because it is time consuming enough to write the blogs, never mind chasing all of these people down, and partly because I do feel I shouldn’t have to obtain consent for reporting on something I experienced in a public forum. How is this different from tweeting about a rock concert (“they just played my favorite song, and they botched it!”). can a rock band really say “I was only playing to Providence. I didn’t want the whole world to know how we played that night!”
If I go ahead without consent, should at least give them a card or email them the URL and invite them to make corrections if necessary?
What about counterbalancing ethical concerns? Are there any ethical arguments in favor of blogging the conference? I tend to be skeptical about this in terms of my little blog, but here goes. Possibly the goods of disseminating information, and any ancillary goods that come from that, like contacts being made (someone reads this blog, finds out Julie Juniper is working on her topic, they get in touch, they collaborate or develop some other mutually beneficial exchange), or academics who were not able to attend the conference (maybe they were ill or couldn’t afford it) getting to stay updated in their field a bit, or nonacademics, i.e. most readers of RRR, benefiting by getting a glimpse into a different way of approaching their favorite books, and enjoying this or learning from it.
One penultimate question: I was slightly dismayed by some of the comments last year. This is a “worlds colliding” thing. No comment was beyond the pale in terms of blogging, but when I put my academic hat on, I was uncomfortable. Should I issue a warning on the post? Wade in and defend the presenter? Close comments? (the last of these would defeat most of the purpose of blogging the conference, though).
And a final one two: does it matter how detailed the blog posts are (maybe I can defuse criticism and reap the benefits if I merely summarize briefly)? And does it matter, ethically speaking, if I offer my own critique (positive and negative) of the paper?
PS. I’ve blogged about this before, but as you can see, I am still unsettled. Also, I was joking about HaMPO being a new feature. It’s not. But I would love your opinions on this!
Ok my first thought was, for those posts, you could moderate comments. Thus, taking care of the “what a dumbass” issue.
As for permission, that is complicated – but as you say it’s a conference open to the public. But you make a good point about corrections, etc, so it seems like it would be a good idea to email the presenters a link. Or, to be even more “preemptive” give them a card at the conference, so they can tell you yes or no, before you write the post. However, I will have to say I think the latter will result in more people saying “no don’t blog about my paper.”
I’m slightly uncomfortable with saying the conference is open to the public – sure to academics, etc, but the general public wouldn’t know about it. The google searches do bring in an entirely different dimension. Not to say I don’t think you should blog about the papers.
Now this point is rather off topic but, if the papers are published, don’t they belong to the journal/review that published them? I’m not sure how it works for general academia, but for legal publications – I mean if you’re worried about the ownership issue… (Ok I guess that’s just me being annoying.)
As for worrying about people stealing work… maybe treat published/forthcoming papers are fair game, but use a bit more caution on the WIP. Or, give cards at the conference to those writers [only].
I don’t think you have to worry about violating the codes of ethics on blogs- it’s just not something you’d do. The code is also vague, but I took it to mean “no libel!” So I think you’re good there.
I think your critiques are fine as well. After all, this is a blog. As for detail – again, your discretion. For the latter, I think it really matters to the purpose of your post. Do you want it to be for the more general audience? More summarizing would probably be best -it wouldn’t be pedantic, it’d be more understandable, and… well I personally have no attention span. However if you want to discuss something specifically and focus in depth on it, then quotes, etc, would work. (Just you know, make sure you explain the context of it, which I’m sure you’d do anyway.)
So… those are my scattered little thoughts. Useless, but I guess I was feeling chatty.
You did it again, Jessica: asked a question I needed to know Right AWAY! OK, I have read nothing so (hey, that’s dumb eh) but right off the top of my head, I had heard from new colleagues “Oh, too bad we couldn’t give more publicity for this conference we’re attending but it’s next week” and I said “no problem, just tweet it”. Blank looks. Since some professions have public/private sides to them, this is going to be coming up a lot. So now back to read … I will say, this is GOING to happen, tweet, live blog, I just don’t know how.
And some people are incredibly thin-skinned. I just watched The Good Wife last week and that judge, woo*eee, anyone who tweeted her she would throw in jail for contempt!
Time isn’t on my side right now and I plan to return with a general response, especially about the ethics of blogging an event, but I’d like to make a response to the ‘stealing ideas’ concern in context of blogging.
Stealing concepts
This is one of common fears that needn’t to exist. Let’s lay it out in simple terms: A) No idea is copyrightable nor can it be possessed and/or protected. B) No idea is unique, but an expression of an idea is. C) An expression of the idea is copyrightable and it may be possessed and/or protected. D) One can steal an idea, but one can’t steal a person’s expression of the idea without facing a law or a strong possibility of losing own credibility, but it still depends. (For the sake of simplicity, let’s disregard ‘it still depends’ for now.)
If a blogger has all that in mind while blogging about the contents of a person’s paper, the blogger is actively protecting the person’s right to keep his or her paper from being ‘stolen’ online. Part of that protection is having a blogger publicly acknowledging the concept belongs to the person by outlining who, where, when and how. It’s how much one could reveal the contents of ‘what’ that draws a line.
‘How much is too much?’ is a question that’s been subjected to a raging dispute for a long time. In spite of this, there is a general agreement that one – if he or she didn’t have a press pass (and sometimes, even if s/he had a pass) – should treat it as one would do with writing a review of a film or novel. Examples:
Doesn’t need permission:
“Ivory Towers discusses a concept of whether the moral compass of heroes and heroines in romantic fiction exists. I find her take on this concept interesting because…”
Doesn’t need permission:
“Ivory Towers discusses a concept whether the moral compass of heroes and heroines in romantic fiction exists. There’s a line in her presentation that caught my interest. She said, “Heroines are more likely to be taken to task if she doesn’t follow the traditional moral compass of a typical romance heroine.” I find this interesting because….”
Needs permission:
“Ivory Towers discusses a concept whether the moral compass of heroes and heroines in romantic fiction. Here’s what she says in her presentation: [a partial or full transcript]. I find this interesting because…”
Ideally, it’s best just to summarise a selection of key points (not all key points)– such as, if there are ten key points, use just five or a few that interests the blogger. If it’s impossible to summarise and such, then Blogger could a) contact Ivory Towers for permission to include certain quotations of her presentation, or b) refer readers to the official site of a conference at the start of a blog post and then blog away, summarising the presentation while sharing own thoughts of Ivory’s presentation without any specific quotes. It’s up to readers to contact Ivory Towers and it’s up to her to respond.
If there is only one key point and it’s the one Blogger would like to address specifically but Blogger needs to write exactly what it says in order to be fair (to Ivory Towers) as well as putting Blogger’s response in context, it gets a bit dodgy. IMO, since it’s the core of said paper, it does – I feel – require Blogger to seek permission from Ivory.
Basically, treat an unpublished paper as one would do with a review of a novel or film: it’s riddled with spoilers. Be selective while being reasonably aware of the person’s vulnerability and right to protect his or her unpublished paper.
Unfortunately and admittedly, not all bloggers follow or respect this ideal procedure of blog reportage, which is probably why some conference participants feel a tad wary of having their presentations blogged/reported. Then again, there are some academics that can be overzealous or unreasonably possessive, mostly because they truly believe there’s validity to this ‘stealing ideas’ concern.
Sorry if this is such a mess. I’ve written this in a hurry.
I love this blog post because it’s something that deeply interests me. I’ll return with a general (and hopefully more coherent) response. Thanks.
I agree with a lot of what Limecello and Janet said. Considering I’m someone presenting at the conference you’re talking about and would then be fodder for a blog post, I can’t say that my response will be entirely objective, but here goes.
My first inclination is always to disseminate information widely. I’m a librarian, so allowing as many people to have as much access as possible to information is part of the training in my field. Blog it, tweet it, get the info out there.
That said, I do have some caveats…
I’ll be presenting a WIP I hope to have published, so what Limecello said about idea theft hit home, but fortunately a good number of the romance scholar in the world will be in the room watching me present, so it would be pretty obvious if someone tried to lift the idea and publish it first. Writing in a small, developing field has its advantages. Others aren’t as lucky, so I think it could be a real issue in other disciplines. (Ha, and I’m cross posting with Maili on this issue. I see her point, but not sure I agree entirely. Ah, well.)
As for giving your impressions of the papers presented…I think you should. I’m wincing as I say that, because I don’t want a bad review of my work out there on the internet, and I know no one else does either, but if what you hear is a suckfest or needs a lot of work, then I think it’s fair to say so. I wouldn’t necessarily say that to every blogger, but when it comes to the line between honest critique/feedback and cruelty, I know you wouldn’t cross that line. So, I think you should call it like you see it.
I’m uncomfortable with liveblogging in a number of settings. Not only does it raise the issues you mention (journalism, privacy, pressure to present only a completed oeuvre), but I sometimes distrust the blogger’s sense of the event. One important reason to go to a conference presentation (rather than reading the paper later) is to get a sense of the presenter’s “voice” in a way that helps interpret her work; another is to get a sense of the audience’s rapport with her ideas. Some people can capture all of that from behind a computer screen, but I’ve seen liveblogs that I thought suffered from getting disconnected from the experience of the session. For example, I would be able to capture many of the words accurately, but it would distract me from making that extra mental effort of grappling with and internalizing the speaker’s train of thought, particularly where it differed from my own.
(BTW, that last objection is similar to my feelings about liveblogging reading a book. For me, it wouldn’t be possible to give a book a respectful first read while simultaneously looking for something real-time-blogworthy.)
I think the level of detail is crucial. By blogging in great detail, one increases the chance of getting detail wrong. Also, and potentially more seriously, I think one may take away the speaker’s chance to be the first to articulate her ideas *in writing*.
ETA: That last point may not make sense without the context of my philosophy of conference summaries. I think their greatest utility is as a secondary resource; that is, they should identify people, ideas, and materials of interest, not replace those primary resources.
I agree with much of what Maili and RfP said. A conference, even a public one, is in many academic disciplines a forum for receiving feedback on work in progress. All of my conference papers have a standard line: “do not cite or quote without permission.” This is because I really don’t want my unfinished, un-peer-reviewed work being treated as a finished product. At my stage of career, my vanity is probably more at risk than my reputation, but for junior scholars it can be a quite different story. I don’t think it’s excessive to want to maintain ownership and control of one’s ideas while they are being worked out. Analogously, NSF grants and academic publishers allow you to keep your data private while the grant/book is in process, and usually they allow a couple of years after that.
That said, I think that summarizing contributions on panels without going into a lot of detail is a good idea, as is taking notes and then writing a personal reflection soon after the event. That way, the work and the scholars get a larger potential audience, but a single blogger’s on-the-fly interpretation doesn’t wind up as a top hit on a search of the scholar’s name.
If that approach is too boring, then you could write it as a review: I liked this, I didn’t like that, my interpretation is X. Then the liveblog doesn’t appear to be reporting, but rather opinion, with all the caveats opinion entails.
ETA: I don’t think the concert analogy works here, at least not the way you presented it; you gave examples of opinions, not reportage. A closer analogy would be to offer as part of a blog post seconds-long snippets of bad playing from a concert that mostly had good music, perhaps.
I can only speak as someone firmly in the “other” world — I have never attended an academic conference and likely never will.
What is the purpose of presenting at a conference? To share ideas? to gather critique and feedback? Strictly “in-circle” prestige or reputation-building? I honestly don’t know.
Blogs that bridge two (or more) audiences are in a position to expose one world to the other. If your profession is about ideas, information, learning, and educating, then it seems to me that restricting access to those ideas or information is a position that’s difficult to defend.
If your ideas are misunderstood or misconstrued by a new audience, is that worse than if they were never exposed to them? That’s not rhetorical — I’m honestly interested in the “academic” answer to this.
I do think it would be nice if the managers of a conference would issue a blanket statement on whether it’s OK to discuss the conference events online or not; and if it is OK, they should require all presenters to provide a contact email address.
The program for this conference already includes the email addresses of (all?) the presenters. If I were presenting at the conference I’d be a lot more bothered about that than about a paper of mine being blogged about, because of the possibility of it increasing the amount of spam I receive.
I’ve been thinking about this, and because I feel that any paper presented to a conference should be roughly the same quality as a submission a journal, I don’t feel it’s wrong to blog about it, because in a sense it would feel to me like the equivalent of the peer review process. I would feel differently about something presented to a very small internal seminar. This conference, however, is huge so it doesn’t seem particularly private and if someone’s presenting a paper there it’s quite likely that a significant proportion of their peers in the area are there too, so I don’t see that it’ll make much difference to the presenter’s reputation if a few more people read about it online.
If you’re concerned about spam, you can always create a temporary or secondary address just for conferences.
People from other disciplines may have other answers, but here are the professional/scholarly reasons in my field:
(1) Many departments only reimburse conference expenses if you are a presenter. Some only reimburse if you present a paper, i.e., not if you are a discussant or a chair.
(2) Conferences provide a deadline to force you to get ideas down on paper. Once you have a working draft, you can revise using the comments (assuming they’re useful, a big if) and send the paper out to a journal for review.
(3) Conferences provide the opportunity to see what other people are working on and to interact in person, both professionally and personally, with people whom you may only know through written work. This opportunity is especially useful for scholars at smaller or more isolated institutions, or those with heavier teaching loads.
(4) For a graduate student, a conference provides both socialization and the chance to have your work introduced to more senior people in your field.
(5) Conferences let you catch up with your friends, see baseball games, close bars, visit new restaurants, go shopping, have a mini-vacation.
Most of these reasons apply to major professional meetings. Small conferences are more idiosyncratic, although they tend to have similar benefits, and they tend to be more in-crowd oriented. There is nothing exclusive about hanging out with thousands of people in your discipline. Well, maybe there is for yours, but definitely not for mine.
LauraV, it may be true in your field that conference papers and journal submissions are the same quality; that’s definitely not true in mine, because most of the major conferences only ask for proposals, not full papers. By major conferences I mean annual meetings of professional associations. But even for smaller invited conferences, drafts are the norm. In fact, in small conferences and invited seminars, it is considered bad form to present a paper that’s been accepted to a journal, because there is no way for the seminar process to improve the product. This undoubtedly varies across disciplines, however.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that blogging about a panel is similar to the peer review process. My understanding of live-blogging is that it is a real-time discussion of oral presentations. I’ve read some really interesting and informative accounts of panels, but they in no way resemble a journal review to me. When I review a journal submission, it takes me two to three reads of the paper and then at least two drafts of a review that I compile from the notes I took while reading. Sometimes I consult additional sources or track down citations. The whole process takes concentrated, detailed work. The idea is to be very precise in stating what the strengths and the weaknesses are, so that the author has a road map of what you as a reviewer think would strengthen the work. So for me live-blogging seems like the antithesis of peer review, not in a bad way, but in terms of what it offers. But maybe we’re thinking about different aspects of the blogging and reviewing processes.
Yes, that’s what I’d expect. But by the time of the conference, I’d expect to have a full paper written.
I wouldn’t dream of presenting a paper that had already been accepted for publication.
I have no idea what the process of live-blogging a panel is like, since I’ve never done that (although I have blogged about a conference some days after it had finished). What I meant is that when I’ve presented a paper at a conference, the experience of being on the receiving end of comments and suggestions felt rather similar to how I’ve felt when I’ve received reviews from a journal’s peer reviewers. I wouldn’t mind extending that process to include feedback from bloggers and blog readers whose opinions I respected.
When I’ve written reviews, it’s taken me a lot of work too. But when I’ve been on the receiving end of some reviews, it’s felt more like the barrage of sometimes contradictory comments one gets at a conference. Different reviewers can have such varying opinions of a paper’s strengths, which areas need to be expanded etc.
And my guess is that your paper would be very close to ready to go out for review, because you seem to set and meet high standards, if your more academic posts on TMT are any indication. But there are lots of less polished papers that get presented. I worry a bit about those papers (which of course are presented as 15-minute summaries) being evaluated in blog comments by people who haven’t seen the presentation or read the paper, although maybe the presenters deserve what they get.
Thanks, I understand better now, and I agree. But the people who are blogged about can’t control who blogs or comments unless we require explicit consent, and even with consent, the comments can come from anywhere. And they’re out there forever, in terms of internet time and the wayback machine.
Oh, definitely. I guess I just think that the odds of live-blogging being more like that kind of reviewing, rather than the more helpful kind, are higher. I would rank Jessica as extremely high on the wanting-to-get-things-right scale, and yet she made a couple of errors that I’m guessing were due to trying to take good notes and listen and comprehend in order to keep taking good notes, all at the same time. It’s asking a lot.
I keep coming back to Nicola’s question of why we academics aren’t willing to have this kind of dissemination, if the point of what we do is to educate, learn, and inform, and I realize I’m making the arguments to keep the wall in place. Maybe I’ve been burned too many times by hearing so-called public intellectuals explain complicated issues in ways that reinforce stereotypes and conventional wisdom rather than providing pathways to greater understanding. But I do think that live-blogging, say, the iPad launch, with its mix of salesmanship, bombast, and substance, is easier than live-blogging a 90-minute academic panel that features 4-5 papers which can vary widely, often contain complex and not-entirely-worked-out arguments, and which are all presented in 15-20 minute abstracts.
As an alternative, why not provide a summary of a panel, including brief summaries of individual papers, a review of what you found the most interesting, and then if people want more, invite one or more of the presenters to a chat on the blog at a later date, with the paper available for reading beforehand? I would have loved to have a longer blog on Eric Selinger’s FFTS paper from last year, getting to read the paper beforehand and then having a blog discussion (maybe there was one and I missed it).
I’m an academic, I’m going to PCA and I often blog (occasionally live) about the conferences I attend. I’m far too lazy to go into too much detail, but it’s a godsend for people who can’t attend certain conferences (I’m a medievalist: our two big confs are in Kalamazoo MI and Leeds — few people can attend both).
Stealing ideas?! Forget it — as stated above that kind of concern should be left to loners living in small cabins filled with carrier bags and newspaper clippings. If your work took lots of research to prepare, who’s going to be able to rush it into print?
Academic conferences vary greatly in quality. Panels vary greatly in quality. The odds are that the person who asks a question is just as likely to trot out an often thin connection to their own research as to give helpful or useful feedback. This is because academics often spend months or years on a project that NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT (hello, dissertation on obscure local saints in the Middle Ages!
). Conferences give you the possibility of talking to the handful of people who might listen and even understand.
Of course, you’re likely to get a lot more people interested if you’re writing about romance than you are writing about St Guthlac (tumbleweeds…)
I hope to stop by some of the rom panels — in between my medieval and comics and my grad students’ panels. PCA is a fun conference. Anybody can attend for something like $5 for the day. Do it.
Oh, and re: why don’t academics do it more — they are. Well, some are. Medievalists do just because we’re all geeks (you knew that) and because we work with scarce resources. We are often stranded far from other medievalists, so we get lonely. Thus we embraced the ‘net early on (I teach New Media and Medieval Lit). What could be a better godsend than digitized versions of one-of-a-kind manuscripts, so you don’t have to find the money to travel across several continents just to look something up?
A good example of the kind of this sort of public scholarship is In the Middle.
Type your comment here@Maili: “This is one of common fears that needn’t to exist.”
Er, can I just say that in certain technical aspects, it does. In zoological taxonomy, the first publication of a new scientific name is crucial to establishing its validity, and blogs and conference abstracts have the potential to cloud the issue quite badly.
More than that, I think the misrepresentation of an idea, however innocently, can come to stand in the place of the original author’s presentation – this happens all the time in science reporting.
So, as a non-active-academic but one who’s been on the fringes, and married to someone who *does* participate in conferences etc, I would say blogging needs to be done with a care to the standards and expectations of the discipline involved.
But this? “Blog commenters are harshly critical of the presenter” – is just too bad. If you’re speaking at a conference where the public/non-peers are allowed to attend – including journalists – then it falls to the speaker to make sure they can defend their speech. The individual blogger can moderate the discussion on their space how they wish.
@Nicola O:
I hear what you’re saying, but it *is* a profession and so must both give credit for ideas *and* grant access to foster discourse.
This topic tends to set off my rant about the 1990s techno-libertarian “information wants to be free” argument that’s prevalent in some online communities. I’ll try to not unleash that here, but stick to the narrower points. Basically I think the freedom of ideas and information is a bit of a red herring in this discussion. These days there are commonly-available media that faithfully represent the presenter and how she conveys her ideas. Many conferences post detailed schedules, often including abstracts and slides by the presenters and sometimes including video of the presentation. So less and less that’s presented at conferences is really kept secret by the lack of a liveblogger.
@K. A. Laity:
This really is not my primary concern, but I have to point out that it’s easy to be blithe if it’s never happened to you. And once it does happen, you may never be able to publish that work; or at the very least it puts a cloud over that body of work that probably can’t be completely erased.
All it takes is for someone to make a concerted effort… or for the presenter’s work to get hung up in a journal’s review/lose track/recommence review process for 18 months or more.
As I said, though, it’s not my primary concern. I don’t think theft of scholarship is likely to increase steeply due to liveblogging; and so many conferences now provide abstracts, slides, and video that the issue is really heading in a different direction these days. (A direction, BTW, that I think supports public scholarship. Now, if only more universities recognized its value….)
I’m not an academic but I do attend research conferences and sometimes present papers. Our workplace convention is that we take detailed notes and report at our regular staff meetings on all the sessions we attended. So the notion of the conference staying within the walls/time of the conference doesn’t run.
I agree with Laura – you submit an abstract but need to have a strong paper completed by the time you present.
I think what is interesting here and what the internet/blogging has enabled, is the overlapping of worlds and world views. So maybe what you have here is a dialectical struggle. As fan’s who are committed to our prefered genre and who have faced the disrespect of others in holding to that commitment we are going to hear and react to concepts in a different way than the academic. In 2008 I was the sole ‘reader’ who attended at a cultural studies conference at Monash University that looked at Vampires in Romance novels. It was fun and confronting and I realised my start point was very different because the presenters came from the theory to the story and I came from the story, so to speak…
One of the things I felt was happening was that they valorised stories that were not popular with readers (and I had read every book that was presented on!) because of how they were able to make the story fit their needs/theoretical views eg. as feminists. It felt to me that they were in parallel to the reader experience and understanding of the books and were trying to take ownership of what these books stand for and mean. I raised the issue for me of this being cultural studies conference yet no paper was presented on the reader experience of the books discussed. Without the reader’s perspective being recognised or present, I can imagine responses to the way’s in which an academic discussion comes across very much as happened in the comments on the conference blog.
I don’t have a passion about this argument, honestly (though I do have an opinion), but the anti-blog stance doesn’t seem that strong to me.
For example, it seems to me that if blogging a conference were the standard, it would be HARDER for credit and ideas to get stolen. The abstracts are published, the blogs establish that presenter X talked about the subject, etc.
I mean, I would hate to think that live-blogging would contribute to professional theft… but I kind of think that when you put your idea out at a conference, you’re taking that risk whether it gets blogged about or not.
It seems to me if your ideas were widely misinterpreted or misrepresented, that perhaps it would be worth your while to review whether you’ve presented them clearly.
I don’t get the concern about the presenter’s “best work” at all. Why would you expose half-baked work to your professional peers? ‘Course, I don’t do conferences. If this is the norm, then I guess it’s the norm, but it seems kind of… dumb… to me.
As for “un-academic” critique, I’m also pretty unsympathetic to that worry. If you are going to do creative work, someone is going to critique it, and some of the critiques will probably not be positive. Learning to take criticism is part of growing – professionally, and just plain growing up. It’s a useful thing to learn to distinguish constructive criticism from the not-so-much, and to learn to “consider the source” of criticism. Presumably, if your #1 Google hit is a romance blog where the commentors are clearly non-academics saying “whuh??,” the people whose opinions matter to your career are going to be able to understand the relevance of that.
@Ann:
Conceded. Might not be the best use of the presenter’s time to follow bloggers around trying to ensure that the concepts were properly represented.
I will say that I was *wildly* interested in two of the presenters that Jessica posted about last year, to the extent that I contacted them and hosted two great sessions with them — an absolutely highlight of my blog year. So while I would understand (sort of), if conference-blogging were shut down, my life would be the poorer for it.
@Nicola O.:
Conferences can be about discourse, not simply peacocking. @Sunita described two excellent reasons that fully-baked professionals might choose to present half-baked work:
Often a conference is a first outing for a particular piece of work, and the ideas and their presentation mature through interaction with others. I just attended an event at which top-notch people from several disciplines presented what they know, and what they think the unknowns are, and asked the audience for feedback. They were frank about the limitations of their fields and the contributions of other fields. In writing, it might be difficult for them to pull off that combination of critique and request for collaboration without creating interdisciplinary warfare–the opposite of what they were seeking.
That’s pretty much my ideal outcome of blogging a conference.
Thank you everyone, from Lime, to Laura, to Janet to RfP, to Ann, to Crystal, to anyone else I forgot for chiming in. This has been very very helpful.
@K. A. Laity: thank you for making me laugh out loud with your first comment. when is your memoir of academic life going to be published? Because you nailed it.
But I am still trying to figure out what stereotypes I harbor of New Media and Medieval Studies that make it impossible to wrap my brain around the idea that one person can teach both.
@RfP: There’s something about your comments that makes me see the relevance of the blogger versus “legitimate outlet” (journalist) issue that was at the forefront of the CSHL dispute.
My tendency in this has been not to assert any of my own rights or even legitimate interests because I just don’t think, as a hobby-cum-quasi-nascent-research-interest blogger, I have any.
@Merrian:
I think this is exactly right, and it’s what surprised me when I blogged about panels last year.
You raise a VERY interesting dynamic which was so salient to me last year at the Twilight panels. Panelists’ efforts to distance their readerly, as opposed to critical, interest in the Twilight saga were very intriguing.
On the other hand, speaking as a feminist reader, that IS how I read, whether it is a philosophy text or vampire fiction or reality TV. It’s just who I am, not a cloak I don when I have my academic hat on.
@Nicola O.:
I agree with this, and I want to thank you Nicola for speaking for readers in this thread.
I think I plan to go along with the following plan, which several of you seem to think can best meet the needs of both presenters and blog readers:
@Sunita:
I also think Sunita and others have the right idea when they suggest moderation of comments on those posts.
This way there is less likelihood of me messing up, less likelihood that any of the harms mentioned in the post will befall the presenters as a result of my blog, and reasonably good chance for discussion and follow up.
Thank you thank you! And any others who have anything to add, I am still reading, so please do!
I posted this because I could not find anything online, so hopefully this thread will help anyone who, like me, Googled and searched the journals and came up empty handed.
You’re very welcome, Jessica!
I will add that I was a little disappointed that neither of the scholars that I hosted last year were willing to make their papers available; but with good reason. One thing I do understand about the publishing process (academic or otherwise) is that if large chunks of your piece are posted online, that counts as publishing, and generally makes it ineligible for something like a journal article.
One of the things that surprised me was how sketchy the online information was about the presenters and their work (on the conference site), but I was also shocked at the sheer number of presenters. Must’ve been a TON of work to corral that much information for a short-lived event.