The European Fandom & Fan Studies Conference in tweets
The European Fandom & Fan Studies Conference took place on November 10, 2012 at the University of Amsterdam. It was a relatively small one-day conference, but great in terms of content and people present. I was especially pleased to see so many researchers going beyond English-language online fandoms, tackling offline fan activities or doing comparative studies with other online fandoms that communicate in different languages. There was also a strong emphasis on how fans interact with media industries and deal with fannish activities that involve money, which is one of my favorite topics. I heard a ton of interesting ideas, and others clearly did too.
But I'll let our past selves speak for themselves. Here's a Storify with all the tweets from the #eurofandom tag, grouped by presentation as much as possible.
There were a couple of participants tweeting at least semi-regularly, and I'm surprised at how much of what happened at the conference comes across pretty well by looking at the tweets. With just a handful of Twitter-happy attendees plus Storify, it's very easy to leave a permanent record of the goings-on at any conference for anyone who wants or needs to see what was said there.
It's not a perfect system. The technology has to work, obviously; I attend plenty of conferences were wifi is still not assumed to be necessary, and even at this one, the network was a bit troublesome. Conferences with parallel panels also need at least a small group to cover everything more or less thoroughly. There were a couple of presentations during which all the really active tweeters happened to be in a different room, or temporarily comatose because of jetlag in my case, and these presentations are conspicuously absent from the timeline. Perhaps conferences should make a bigger deal out of live-tweeting to encourage more people to pick up the slack? And designate a conference historian to make the Storify later on.
(Crossposted from the Symposium blog) This entry was originally posted at http://unjapanologist.dreamwidth.org/64833.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
But I'll let our past selves speak for themselves. Here's a Storify with all the tweets from the #eurofandom tag, grouped by presentation as much as possible.
There were a couple of participants tweeting at least semi-regularly, and I'm surprised at how much of what happened at the conference comes across pretty well by looking at the tweets. With just a handful of Twitter-happy attendees plus Storify, it's very easy to leave a permanent record of the goings-on at any conference for anyone who wants or needs to see what was said there.
It's not a perfect system. The technology has to work, obviously; I attend plenty of conferences were wifi is still not assumed to be necessary, and even at this one, the network was a bit troublesome. Conferences with parallel panels also need at least a small group to cover everything more or less thoroughly. There were a couple of presentations during which all the really active tweeters happened to be in a different room, or temporarily comatose because of jetlag in my case, and these presentations are conspicuously absent from the timeline. Perhaps conferences should make a bigger deal out of live-tweeting to encourage more people to pick up the slack? And designate a conference historian to make the Storify later on.
(Crossposted from the Symposium blog) This entry was originally posted at http://unjapanologist.dreamwidth.org/64833.html. Please comment there using OpenID.