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posted by [identity profile] svb1972.livejournal.com at 11:55pm on 06/08/2004
honestly, it would depend what my goal for the conference was.
I would either do 1 or 2.. depending, but most likely I would reject (as nicely as possible) most of them.. unless you got a ton of earth shattering in your field papers :)
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owlfish: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] owlfish at 05:17am on 07/08/2004
Just because the conference abstracts sound good, doesn't mean they're earth-shattering by any stretch of the imagination. 1 and 2 are done most frequently, and for very good reasons: one enforces quality, the other gives audience members both a choice and a chance to walk around between rooms on a regular basis.

Fortunately, I'm not actually involved in organizing a conference right now, just at one.
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ext_6283: Brush the wandering hedgehog by the fire (Default)

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posted by [identity profile] oursin.livejournal.com at 07:10am on 07/08/2004
Parallel sessions: this is okay if one can session-hop into different strands, but less good if one is stuck in the same place simply because there was one must-hear paper.
I am not sure what the relationship between initial abstract and paper is (or whether one could work this out, in terms of relative quality), but in my experience, the final paper doesn't always bear much resemblance to the initial proposal!
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owlfish: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] owlfish at 08:12pm on 07/08/2004
Most conferences I go to don't even provide abstracts of papers at the actual conference. Whether this is laziness or knowing how many people will change their papers, I don't know. This weekend's conference did provide the abstracts. While I never had time to read them, and chose my sessions based on titles, themes, and authors, I did talk to several people who recognized my talk subject from having read the abstract.

To make up a statistic, I would say that one out of every seven conference papers I've attended at history conference has changed scope, title, or even topic is some significant way since the abstract was submitted months earlier.

I've heard of small conferences where all papers are circulated in advance, or at least, at the conference. It would make papers easier to follow; on the other hand, so much of a paper is in the presentation, in the way the plot is structured, that I would think it would ruin most of the punchlines and plot twists along the way.
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ext_6283: Brush the wandering hedgehog by the fire (urchin)

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] oursin.livejournal.com at 05:06am on 08/08/2004
What has worked very well with relatively small, dedicated, workshop-style conferences, is to precirculate the papers, have each person speak very briefly about their paper (hitting the main headings, or whatever) and then open discussion. But this does have an upper limit on size. It also depends rather heavily on the participants getting their papers to the organiser in sufficient time for them to be circulated!
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owlfish: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] owlfish at 06:41am on 08/08/2004
I like the sound of a conference organized that way. It makes much more sense than precirculating and then reading the entire paper out loud, which, apparently, was how the Popular Science conference last weekend was run. The attendee I talked to was very enthusiastic about this approach, but it seems somewhat redundant to me. Precirculating would allow for more in-depth and thus more satisfying feedback for a paper.
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