Follow-up: the end of conference plenary with a chat g summary of reflections that people put into the conference app.
Sigh
AFAIK the "conference interview" no longer exists because of interdisciplinarity & not wanting to charge people hundreds of dollars to do a job interview.
Pandemic pushed fwd virtual participation a lot (tho still uneven). The Society for the History of Technology #SHOT is one that really seems to embrace this, I believe partly because they have been seeking non-travel/visa conferences for a while. Their annual conf is all online this year.
Ever since I've been in academia (almost 20 yrs) people have been talking about the end of the traditional academic conference yet they largely persist.
What changes have you seen in conferences that you think make a difference? I'll start
TIL that the term "tarmac" is a shortening of "tarmacadam" referring to tar + a technique of layering crushed stones for hard surfaces (named for engineer McAdam who invented it in 19th c). Basically a precursor to asphalt - but oddly seems mainly to refer to airport paved areas today - right?
0 days since I have heard "I asked [AI tool] about this and.." in a keynote/commencement speech, etc
Coming soon! Reissue of Design for Independent Living, an exceptional document of disabled expertise in collab with architecture students in the 1970s, by Raymond Lifchez and Barbara Winslow. New intro by me, Aimi Hamraie & Ignacio Galán.
www.upress.umn.edu/978151792140...
This post has great alt text that helped me realize that even when names are provided IDK who 80% of these people are. But pretty clothes! Very bad sponsors! (But let's be honest the met & it's sponsors have never been great)
me: oh my next book is going to be way more succinct and won't go down every rabbit hole like my dissertation-to-book
also me: reading entire books to inform 1 to 2 sentences of current hodgepodge of partial drafts