When History Meets Technology
100 Historical Things, Number 14
On Friday, I did my very best to take part in a conference remotely. The conference was on the theme of Multiple Mediterranean Realities - Spaces, Resources and Connectivity, and was held at the Ruhr Universitaet, Bochum, Germany. To open the meeting up to the wider community, they decided to stream it live and also to provide a chat facility so that people watching remotely could send in questions to be put to the speakers at the end of their papers.
I'll write something on the Mediterranean another time, but for now let's just say that it was a diverse conference, looking at various periods and taking various approaches to 'Mediterraneanism', and I was tuning in primarily for a talk by Bernard Knapp on Cyprus as a crossroads of interaction in the ancient Mediterranean.
So how did it go? Well, as they streamed it, first the sound didn't work at all, and then in did put it was extremely patchy. Like listening to a Dalek in a blender. Then it turned out that Bernard Knapp couldn't attend the conference in person, so instead he sent someone to read out his paper (which I could hardly hear properly - though I could see the powerpoint!). And the person who read his paper said he wouldn't answer any questions. So I entered it into the chat thread that I would have had a question, and said what the question was, and it provoked a small exchange with another remote attendee, but it couldn't be put to the person I wanted it put to. And in any case, almost everything the chat facility was used for seemed to be for people to report that they couldn't hear anything, while the organisers used it to promise they were going to fix it. Which they really didn't. Later on, they couldn't even show people's powerpoints.
I'm glad I did my best to 'attend', but it's not the best experience I've had of a conference. Still, I admire their aim to stream it live, even if they didn't quite manage it!
On Friday, I did my very best to take part in a conference remotely. The conference was on the theme of Multiple Mediterranean Realities - Spaces, Resources and Connectivity, and was held at the Ruhr Universitaet, Bochum, Germany. To open the meeting up to the wider community, they decided to stream it live and also to provide a chat facility so that people watching remotely could send in questions to be put to the speakers at the end of their papers.
I'll write something on the Mediterranean another time, but for now let's just say that it was a diverse conference, looking at various periods and taking various approaches to 'Mediterraneanism', and I was tuning in primarily for a talk by Bernard Knapp on Cyprus as a crossroads of interaction in the ancient Mediterranean.
So how did it go? Well, as they streamed it, first the sound didn't work at all, and then in did put it was extremely patchy. Like listening to a Dalek in a blender. Then it turned out that Bernard Knapp couldn't attend the conference in person, so instead he sent someone to read out his paper (which I could hardly hear properly - though I could see the powerpoint!). And the person who read his paper said he wouldn't answer any questions. So I entered it into the chat thread that I would have had a question, and said what the question was, and it provoked a small exchange with another remote attendee, but it couldn't be put to the person I wanted it put to. And in any case, almost everything the chat facility was used for seemed to be for people to report that they couldn't hear anything, while the organisers used it to promise they were going to fix it. Which they really didn't. Later on, they couldn't even show people's powerpoints.
I'm glad I did my best to 'attend', but it's not the best experience I've had of a conference. Still, I admire their aim to stream it live, even if they didn't quite manage it!