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Tech in Conferences: “Post-” COVID, what have we learned? - Ep 196
729 Plays1 year ago
Conferences have pretty much never changed in the archaeology world. We’re still doing the same things we’ve done for decades. Sure, the abstract station is gone and now there is often an app to see what’s up next, but, there’s a lot more that could be done to make the travel to the venue more “worth it”. On this episode we toss out a few ideas and a few crazy ideas for conference organizers to consider.
Transcripts For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/196
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- Chris Webster Twitter: @archeowebby Email: [email protected]
- Paul Zimmerman Twitter: @lugal Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 196
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 196. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman.
Enhancing Conferences with Thoughtful Tech
00:00:15
Speaker
Today, we talk about adding a little or maybe a lot of technology to conferences to make them better. In Paul's words, thoughtful tech. Let's get to it.
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everyone. Paul, how's it going?
Archaeological Work by the Hudson River
00:00:28
Speaker
It's going pretty good. I may be slowing down off that creativity kick that I was telling you about the last few episodes, but not for any bad reason. I've been busy this last week and a half or so digging STPs on a hill overlooking the Hudson River around a historic mansion. It's part of the same project I worked on a little over a year ago.
00:00:49
Speaker
where they're looking at putting in a trail system down by the river. And this historic mansion is going to be the headquarters for the interpretive center and everything with this trail system. So they're planning on doing some work there and they needed STPs to know if there's any archaeology in the area.
00:01:05
Speaker
So, you know, it's fun. It's the weather's been despite the middle of being the middle of winter in New York, the weather hasn't been too bad. The ground hasn't been frozen. So I've been doing that. And then for a little value add, we've been flying the drone drink and making this and making maps. And so I was out there this morning for a little bit to finish up an orthomosaic. And as I was doing it and I'm watching my drone overhead, a bald eagle came and circled around a bunch of times, real low, very close to me.
00:01:34
Speaker
I don't think I got it in any of the drone imagery, which is a bit of a shame, and I couldn't stop my flight plan in order to try to take pictures of it from overhead, which would have been super cool, but still, they are amazing animals. Yeah, for sure.
Chris's Journey to Mexico and Starlink Discussion
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's always cool to see one of those. Well, there's no bald eagles down where I'm at right now, and that's what I've seen. Where are you now?
00:01:54
Speaker
I am in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and it may be a park you've never heard of before. And that's because it's far south of Phoenix and far west of Tucson. And in fact, if I look out my front window of my RV, I can see Mexico because we're only a couple of miles from the Mexican border.
00:02:15
Speaker
We are staging here this week. We got here yesterday. It's, uh, today's Thursday and we got here Wednesday. There's a whole bunch of other people filtering into the park and we're going down with a bunch of our veers to Rocky point. The Mexican name is, uh, Porto Penasco for the month of February. So, well, starting Saturday, so just kind of into January, ended January there. So yeah, we're going to be out on a beach in.
00:02:38
Speaker
you know, Mexico for four weeks. And this is the, uh, this is the jumping off point for it. So it was pretty cool. That sounds very nice. Does your star link going to work down there? It will, because you can use Starlink. It's a little confusing on the website and in the forums because they're not very clear about what you need to do, but Starlink says that you can use.
00:02:58
Speaker
your dish in another country on the same continent for up to two months. Now it doesn't say whether or not that's two months in a calendar year, two consecutive months or two months in, since you got there, like does your two months start? Like we were in Canada over the summer for a month. So if we decided to stay in Mexico for longer than a month, would Starlink stop working, right? What they do say is after those two months, you have to move your residential address to that country.
00:03:25
Speaker
it'll force you to do that. But you can't actually change your address before that. Like, I mean, sure you could call Starlink and say, or get online and say, hey, I want to do this, but there's no easy way to do it in your account. Like we change our address, our residential address, because we don't have the RV version. We actually still have the residential version. So we change the address and get into the cell that we're going to be in everywhere we go, if we possibly can, because you just get better service that's not deprioritized.
00:03:51
Speaker
But they basically convert you to a deprioritized service when you leave the country and you go somewhere else. So if there's too many dishes there, you'll have degraded service. But yeah, otherwise it should work. And people are saying like, well, if you just stay a little longer, it doesn't seem like anybody really cares about it unless it really becomes a problem. So just kind of like literature they put on their website for probably legal reasons. But
00:04:14
Speaker
It doesn't seem like they're really enforcing it too much. But yeah, the short story is it will work just fine down there. Let's hope it enables you to continue with the podcasting while you're doing that because that could be a challenge.
00:04:26
Speaker
Well, podcasting work, like literally everything I do is based around having video calls and yeah, like totally everything. So, uh, I'll be spending some time in a Mexican coffee shop or a Mexican McDonald's if, uh, you know, Starlink doesn't work. So we'll figure that out. But yeah, the other cool thing is that's the farthest South.
00:04:46
Speaker
will have ever been in the RV right now is probably the farthest south except for like the Everglades but that was our old RV not this one so we've got just under 1200 watts of solar on the roof of this new rig and we were getting peak today we crested over 800 and we're between like 850 and 900 watts total
00:05:05
Speaker
coming in, which is just like super good efficiency. And we're going to be an hour and a half further south. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how close we can get to that maximum efficiency. Now, of course, that's during peak solar of the day and only for like, you know, an hour, it gets worse on either side. But I mean, we gained, we gained, uh, and we're still coming up because it's still sunny out, but we gained
00:05:26
Speaker
I think 25-30% just with solar power. We didn't turn the generator on at all today. And it's been pretty great. We may not have to turn the generator on at all. We probably will tomorrow because the charge curve is coming down a little bit, but only for a little while just to give us a little bit of a boost. But otherwise, yeah, it's working really great. Awesome. Yeah.
Reflections on the Recent Conference Season
00:05:49
Speaker
So I was wondering, what topic do you have queued up for us today?
00:05:54
Speaker
So we're getting into conference season, right? And for some people, we're already knee-deep in conference season because as we're recording this, the SHA, the Society of Historical Archaeology, took place in Lisbon, Portugal a couple of weeks ago. And over on the CRM Archaeology Podcast, we talked about that with Bill White, who was there for the first segment of episode 256, I think it was, which I kept thinking is some sort of memory
00:06:24
Speaker
Anytime I saw 256, I was like, ah, there's got to be a clever name I can come up with here, but there wasn't. But anyway, so yeah, we talked about that for the first part, but over on the Sierra Mark podcast, we have talked about doing conferences differently, what conferences themselves can do differently to really enhance the conference experience and just make it more functional.
00:06:44
Speaker
And I don't think we've ever talked about it over here because, you know, while I've mentioned offhand over there in the CRMARK podcast, the just completely different ways of doing podcasts, never really gotten into it. It's always centered around, oh, I'd like to have more of these types of events at the conference, right? So not necessarily changing how the conference is run fundamentally, but just adding different things and doing stuff like that. But I want to talk about on this show,
00:07:10
Speaker
first, how we can improve physical conferences with technology, and then how we can really go off the rails and do some fun stuff later on in the show. So yeah, that's where I want to go with this one. When I say that, what first comes to your mind? Two different things. The first is that we learned a lot about doing things remotely over COVID. And I know we're not really over COVID, and we'll probably never be over, over COVID.
00:07:34
Speaker
Yeah, but we can take the lessons that we learned and apply them to now and to the future and hopefully make better, more accessible areas, places, conferences, things for people to interact.
Impact of COVID-19 on Conferences and Learning
00:07:48
Speaker
Places that people can disseminate knowledge.
00:07:53
Speaker
a positive we also learned to some extent what doesn't work and then the other thing that that strikes me is that i'm gonna be talking about conferences and i haven't been to a conference since twenty ten i did a lot of remote learning stuff working in uh in ed tech over covid over the worst of it
00:08:12
Speaker
And I've been involved in different lectures and running lectures and online conferences and such ever since then. But I haven't been to a conference in so long that I don't know that I've got a whole lot of firsthand experience that I can bring to bear in terms of conferences, not just in terms of remote learning or something like that that's adjacent.
00:08:35
Speaker
Well, as far as archeology conferences go, literally nothing has changed. So, you know, in the way that they're run, the way papers are presented, the way, you know, you get to the conference. I mean, the only thing that may have changed since you were going to conferences last was there's often an app now, right? There's often some sort of conference app where you can find out stuff. Uh, another thing that has changed is there's often a Twitter or WhatsApp, depending on what you're doing discussion happening in the background with the conference hashtags, you know? So.
00:09:04
Speaker
You know what? As you said, an app. Like, oh yeah, I've used those before. Wow. So disregard what I just said about not being doing a conference since 2010, because we used to go every summer to a conference for the company that hosted our learning platform, you know, to handle all the scheduling, all the grading, all that stuff. So a big company and we'd go there and actually I presented.
00:09:31
Speaker
at said conference the last time I went. It wasn't an archaeological conference. My mind was stuck when he said conferences. Right. But that's really good. That's really good actually though, right? Because
00:09:46
Speaker
Until I went to a non-archeology conference, and probably 95% of the conferences I've ever been to in my life were archeology conferences, right? Because I didn't really start going to conferences until I got into archeology. My first one was the Plains anthropology conference, Plains anthropological conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I think. I was in Minneapolis, somewhere around there.
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah. Good call. So that's how I went to that one when I was in college. And that was probably around 2003 or four, whenever that one was somewhere, somewhere around in that timeframe, that was my first conference. And I, I didn't go to a non archeology conference until
00:10:27
Speaker
I think about three or four years ago when I went to a podcast movement down in Los Angeles somewhere. And in fact, it was just outside Disneyland, so not quite Los Angeles. But anyway, it was a podcast-related conference, obviously. But it was, I didn't know what I planned to expect there, or what I expected to see. But it was unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life, conference-wise. And I was talking to some other people, because one of the really cool things about that conference was
00:10:54
Speaker
the unifying aspect of that conference was podcasting, but the industries and the backgrounds and the people that came in were wildly different. I mean, wildly different. Like when you go to an anthro, an archeology conference, I mean, everybody's got an archeology background. I mean, sure those are different, but it's all like kind of the same.
00:11:11
Speaker
So, you know, you have different, similar interests, all that stuff. But, you know, I remember sitting, sitting at a bar or something, having a drink, and I was talking to a couple of guys who, you know, seemed like they were middle-aged lawyers that just walked off the street, but they do like a biker podcast about like, like Harleys and stuff like that. And, and one of the guys does a, another podcast called Rock and Roll Archaeology. And that's why he was interested in talking to me.
00:11:36
Speaker
And it was really just digging into the history of music and different songs and things like that. So the backgrounds and stuff was just phenomenal. And opening yourself up to exposing, I should say, exposing yourself to these different types of conferences really makes you show how far behind the curve we are with these academic, paper-related, and focus-type conferences and really how bad those things are at presenting information and making you think about it and remember it.
00:12:05
Speaker
Well, now that you're mentioning it, that's why I wasn't thinking about the conferences that I was at up until I think 2019 as conferences because they were, in some respect, they were trade shows and they were organized around one particular company and their suite of products.
00:12:21
Speaker
And so there was a little bit of advertisement. It was a lot of very specific how you get one part of their product to work in the way that you need to for your school, which is something that's very unlike almost anything that you see at an archaeological conference. The how-to stuff tends to be relegated to poster sessions. And I don't know that I've ever been to a talk
00:12:50
Speaker
that was in an archaeological conference, there was a how-to. It was how we did and what we did and here look at our stuff and what I'm working on and blah, blah, blah, but very rarely is it how-to. So that was our big takeaway. We would go to this conference because we could book time with some of their techies
00:13:08
Speaker
and explain our very specific problems. And we could talk to other people from other schools that occupied the same space and had the same problems. And we're also very like-minded in a lot of ways, including their approach to programming solutions. And then we would just sit down with a bunch of beers in some common space and
00:13:31
Speaker
code and upload and do a lot of data processing, which is, well, maybe there are a lot of beers at an archaeological conference, but it tends to be around the social events. This was specifically for the us to sit down and brainstorm and do a lot of tedious work. So it was the reason why I was thinking about it as a conference, per se, is because it's so radically different. So that's interesting that you have this
00:13:57
Speaker
a similar, I mean maybe if it's a continuum between a typical archaeological conference on one end and this industry conference that I'm talking about at the other end, what you're talking about with the podcast conference sits somewhere in the middle with the added bonus that neither of the extremes I'm talking about, which have very like-minded people, archaeologists or computer techies at schools, you had this wide range of people that
00:14:21
Speaker
we're all bound together and coming to the same place for this shared interest in podcasting. So that's curious to me. Yeah. And a couple of things that stand out too, like, well, first off, you mentioned how none of the presentations you've been to were more how-to, it's more results oriented, which is fine. It's like, here's what we did and here's what we got. But again, the problem is,
00:14:43
Speaker
We've got 15, maybe 20 minutes. The session is already probably running late, so people are tapping their watches going, you don't have any time left. And people spend way too long doing the setup. And then they're like, oh, if you want to see the results, email me and I'll send you the paper or the presentation. And they never actually get to the reason why they came to the conference.
00:15:04
Speaker
I don't know how many times I've been frustrated by that because of poor time management and then not having enough time to begin with to actually do what you want to do. So one of the things that really sticks out with me with these podcast conferences is the couple that I've been to, these sessions were like 45 minutes long and that included the extra 15 minutes to just clear out the room and get other people in there, right? And people are just hanging out and talking and asking questions. But
00:15:29
Speaker
somebody was always doing some kind of a presentation, whether it was a panel or it was a single person. So they had slides, they had things, they were teaching you something, but there was a lot more answering capability, a lot more question and answer, a lot more audience interaction. And they had a lot more time to just sit there and, you know, get out what they wanted to say without rushing through it and then being rushed off the stage. So somebody else could come in and that was,
00:15:53
Speaker
fundamentally one of the more interesting things to me is just more time. And somebody might argue with something like the SAA is that, well, we've got so many more people that need to present. I'm like,
00:16:02
Speaker
Do you? Like if you actually like rejected a third of those or even two thirds of those and said, listen, sessions are 45 minutes long or half an hour long or something like that. You're instantly going to eliminate out the people that just can't handle that much time, right? They just, they're just going to cut them right out and you're going to have a better quality presentation. You might have fewer of them, but I feel like people would get more out of it at the same time. You know what I mean?
00:16:27
Speaker
So anyway, all right. Well, let's take a break real quick and let's come out on the other side and talk about how physical conferences can maybe be made better or enhanced by some tech or some virtual components back in a minute.
00:16:41
Speaker
Welcome back to the archaeotech podcast episode one 96. And we're talking about conferences and how we can, you know, maybe use a little bit of technology to make these things better. And you know, the first thing that comes to my mind, aside from, I already mentioned people are using apps, which I think is a great advancement forward. I'll never forget some of my first essay is where, you know, there was the bank of computers where you could go look at abstracts and I'm like, wow, I'm glad we're beyond those days. But, uh,
00:17:08
Speaker
Having the app is really handy. You've got the map and stuff in there. But again, it doesn't really do much for the people that either can't attend the conference or for accessibility or for just the fact that you've got overlapping presentations all the time. Stuff that you want to see that's happening at literally the same time. Or maybe you just don't have enough time to see everything you want to go to. You want to spend time networking and doing things and maybe seeing fewer papers.
00:17:30
Speaker
So all the podcasting conferences I've gone to included a virtual ticket. And what that is, especially for Podfest, which is happening literally right now in Orlando, and I really wish I could be there, but I'll take Mexico instead. Anyway, Podfest in Orlando, what I like about that and Podcast Movement, which is probably the biggest podcast conference in the country,
00:17:51
Speaker
They both do similar things. They both have a virtual ticket and they both do Graduated ticket sale prices, which what that means is if you buy say next year's ticket at this year's conference It's practically 75% off and but they get a gauge on
00:18:07
Speaker
the numbers of people that are coming and what they need to expect as far as the venue and all the stuff that they're going to need. And then as you get closer, every three months or so through that year, they will start increasing the price. And then the last 30 days, the price just starts escalating and escalating. And so that encourages people to get one ahead of time. And then you've got the whole thing with the virtual tickets here, but go ahead. Yeah. Well, you've used the term virtual ticket and I have no idea what that is.
00:18:35
Speaker
Yes. Well, that's what I'm getting to now. So virtual ticket. Yeah. Is, um, basically they film everything high quality production, right? They've got real cameras in the back of the room, real microphones, a person in every room. And you can do this when your presentations are 45 minutes and you've only got 10 rooms. The SAAs has said they can't do it because they've got 40 rooms and it would be, you know, $4 million to get all this stuff, you know, produced and edited. Right.
00:19:01
Speaker
But that's because they have too many presentations. That's the problem there. Right. So if you eliminate that or call out a few styles of presentations to say these are longer, these will be filmed, and these will be available on the SA website or SHA website or AAA website, whatever the case may be.
00:19:18
Speaker
you know, at a certain date in the future. So I could have bought a Podfest virtual ticket and I still can actually, I can still buy a virtual ticket, which means in three or four weeks when all of this is produced, I will have access to every single presentation that was done at Podfest. And that is fantastic without me having to go to Orlando. So I've got two questions about this. It makes sense to me, but the filming, this is for viewing afterwards, right? This isn't necessarily to be streamed live.
00:19:45
Speaker
Okay. It's not streaming. Yeah. Okay. That, that brings up another point that we'll get to later. Well, conference attendance. Yeah.
00:19:53
Speaker
Well, yeah, confidence in attendance, but also streaming and hybrid and it becomes complicated. But if something like the SAA that has that huge, huge number of different sessions and pages are being presented, I wonder if they could do something like just poll the attendees beforehand.
00:20:15
Speaker
Yeah. And try to identify where the conflicts are going to be. People want to go to this session or session A or session B, but they can't because they're the same time. And find those ones that have the highest number of conflicts or the highest level of interest if you fortunately don't have a lot of conflicts. And focus then on recording those ones and not the others.
00:20:38
Speaker
Or maybe the other way around, I don't know what the right answer would be.
Innovations in Conference Accessibility
00:20:42
Speaker
But it seems to me like you don't have to do it for everything. You could be smart about it and choose which ones you're going to record. Because if you poll people beforehand, you might get a pretty good explanation from them about what they want to see.
00:20:58
Speaker
Well, and they can do that. You're right. And, you know, surveys are always tough because they don't know who's going to respond and how many people, but they already have that data, right? They already have the data because they have somebody that is monitoring every single room, whether somebody's in charge of 10 rooms or one room, doesn't matter. But.
00:21:15
Speaker
They're going back and forth between the rooms as the sessions are happening, making sure the AV equipment is okay and everybody has what they need. And they could easily just, you know, even take out a headcount that's not even that accurate. But if there's four people in the room versus 40, you're going to know about it, right? So, you know, they could, they could get an idea of what types of sessions, because like the paleo sessions at any conference, anytime I go to the essay and there's something about, you know, pre Clovis, it's standing room only. You know what I mean?
00:21:42
Speaker
And, and I already know that I know that that's what that's going to be. And I got to get there early if I want to be able to, you know, actually see something. And there's definitely other types of presentations that are like that. And then there's some that are just, you know, the only people in the room are the grad students, professor and his friends, right? That could, that could happen to make it so.
00:22:00
Speaker
You're right. They don't need to film everything in that case. But again, I think just reducing the number of those types of presentations. And sure, that removes some opportunity, but they don't care about it when it comes to journal articles. They still have limited space and limited number of issues. They haven't increased the number of American antiquity issues to weekly to allow more people in, have they? It's still pretty exclusive. You still have to get into it. Why not make the conference a similar thing, but provide more value?
00:22:27
Speaker
And you've heard the complaints before, too, of if you provide a virtual ticket or you provide videos of everything, then nobody will go to the conference and then they can't afford the venue and they can't hold the conference. But they can't afford the video. Right. And then they can't afford the video. But that's why places like Podfest and Podcast Movement and other conferences start selling tickets the day that the conference starts. They start selling tickets for next year and people want that lower price. So they make sure that lower price, like if
00:22:55
Speaker
They make sure that lower prices to the point where if half the people bought their tickets that day, they can still afford to do the conference. Because these conferences are expensive. Podcast movement was $1,200 for three days. And I think Podfest, on the average, depending on when you bought your ticket, was anywhere from $800 to $1,500. And there was a
00:23:13
Speaker
like a network. The one I wanted to really go to at Podfest was there was a whole network track for network people who run podcast networks to network with other people. It was $3,000 and included catered meals and private rooms to talk in and things like that. And they really did it up for those people, but it was a high, high value. And you would walk away from that with
00:23:34
Speaker
some really actionable things that you could do and new knowledge and friendships and networks that you created. And then that's the other thing that these conferences are doing. They're not creating space enough for that kind of stuff to happen. Well, related to that, and also related to your point about letting everybody in, is that one of the functions that an academic conference serves is to allow people to get their academic baudevilles, especially early career scholars. Sure.
00:24:02
Speaker
And I don't have a particular point here, but it was brought up in the CRM archaeology podcast about teachers, professors taking their students to a conference to learn the etiquette and to learn how these things function and such.
00:24:18
Speaker
I wonder if those two ideas could be kind of melded in some way so that you don't have to provide a speaking venue necessarily for everybody that potentially could be talking, but you can still provide a space for people to come and learn and network and do all that. And I guess to a certain extent, that's what the poster sessions have traditionally filled. But I've always felt like the poster sessions are a little kind of the redheaded stepchild of the rest of the conference.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah, it can seem that way. But that being said though, every time I go to a poster session, it's usually packed for a little while. So at least there, at least people are making their way through there, but I don't know how many they're stopping at and looking at. Then your experience is different than mine because I usually find them to be kind of a desert wasteland.
00:25:04
Speaker
Right. I'm not saying the information there's always good, but people are curious to see what's there. Oh, and I'm not saying that it's bad. I just, I tend to find that there aren't many people there. Yeah, for sure. That I go there or, you know, maybe things have changed in the last decade and a half or whatever, since I've gone to archeological conferences, but that's been my experience.
00:25:27
Speaker
And speaking to your point of, you know, people needing to present at conferences for certain academic reasons or, you know, what have you, it seems to me like you could take something like the flagship conferences, like the big, you know, the big ones that happen, the S.A.T.A., S.H.A., AAAIA, those conferences, the big four.
00:25:45
Speaker
it seems like you could take those and again, make them more focused around the physical attributes of being there, right?
Rethinking Academic Contributions
00:25:52
Speaker
So the longer presentations with more interactivity, the more networking events, you know, maybe even special tickets, like I was mentioning for that one, for people that want to do different things and having the space for them to do that, you know, whatever that may be. And then having more frequent
00:26:08
Speaker
but fully virtual conferences like the cultural share events that we're doing that people can get those credentials and present at those those areas. But universities need to recognize that kind of stuff as an actual presentation. So our minds are going in the same place here with this because I was just thinking that it reminds me a lot of the discussion, very valid discussions happening about academic publishing.
00:26:31
Speaker
especially in this age where everybody's at least paying lip service to community engagement and reaching beyond the borders of academia, how do you weigh
00:26:43
Speaker
an actively read blog or a very active Twitter feed, especially if it's got a lot of good educational material in it, if it cites its sources or something, versus an article in a prestige journal. Right now, universities are not set up to weigh those ones, not even equally
00:27:03
Speaker
One counts, the other doesn't. And people recognize this as a problem. But I'm not sure what kind of solutions are being had. But I think that what you're suggesting here, I think I agree with, is expanded. So it's not just the print publication and what counts as a valid print publication, but what counts as a valid venue for a lecture. It doesn't have to be the SHA, the SAA, whatever.
00:27:29
Speaker
Why doesn't your local archaeological society count the same as that? Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. It depends on your university. Why doesn't a third party one like you're talking about with Kulturo, why doesn't that count in the same way?
00:27:44
Speaker
I think that there's a certain amount of gatekeeping. There's a certain amount of expectation, I guess, that if you're doing it at the bigger venue, whether it's a bigger publication or a bigger conference, that there's a minimum quality requirement that can't necessarily be guaranteed at the laurels. But we've all been to real stinkers of talks. I mean, in fact, the reason why I haven't been to a conference since 2010 was because I gave one of those stinkers of me a talk.
00:28:14
Speaker
Nice, nice. Yeah. I've, uh, I've definitely seen some very, very terrible presentations, but here's the thing, like the university that you're doing that for is not sitting in the room. The fact that you were even listed in the book is really all that counts. You don't even have to go to the conference, right? Once you, once you say you're submitting a paper, like that's your proof, you're in the abstract book, that's it done, you know? So,
00:28:38
Speaker
It's all smoke and mirrors and you're right, if they could just acknowledge these other sources. I remember with blogging when I used to do that heavily before the Archaeology Podcast Network, I wrote over 250 blog posts and I would talk to other people that were in archaeology blogging and doing different things and they'd all talk about how they can't spend more time on blogging because their university doesn't recognize it as an academic
00:29:00
Speaker
you know, outlet or product. And we all would talk about how blogging is way more peer reviewed than any paper you're going to submit where like two or three reviewers look at it. Like literally the whole archeological community on like Twitter and other sources are tearing you to shreds. Like that's, you know, and making you think about it. Like that's, that's, that's real peer review right there. And you know, it actually causes you to rethink your approach and what you're doing and things like that. And yeah, it's just unfortunate that that,
00:29:30
Speaker
is not as recognized. Although I have heard in recent years that some universities, especially as those people that were blogging 10 years ago, come into these leadership positions and come into these positions at the universities that is starting to shift, I think. Like Bill White, Bill White is now at Berkeley. I'm sure he would look at blogging a lot differently than anybody else because he's written hundreds of blog posts. And he's been on the podcast, the CRMR podcast for 10 years now. And so he's got a very different idea
00:29:58
Speaker
of what academic presentation looks like. Yeah, no. And so it may be a case of that old notion with academia that you don't get any real change until one generation dies out and the next generation takes their place. And maybe we're getting to that point. But I think that these are very important discussions and they interrelate. And now that we've got this couple years of a lot of remote stuff under our belt,
00:30:27
Speaker
we not only have the ability to think differently, we have some technical expertise about how to implement things differently. And there's increasingly become a sense that we have an ethical obligation to reconsider some of these. So maybe let's take a break and come back in the next section and see if
00:30:47
Speaker
You and I can brainstorm some ways of bringing tech to bear to democratize and improve our experience around conferences, not just by throwing tech at it, but by throwing thoughtful tech at it.
00:31:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archiotech podcast, episode 196. We're talking about improving conferences with a little bit of, as Paul said, thoughtful technology. I love that. So I want to get into some just wacky conference ideas. But one thing I did want to mention first about physical conferences, again, is one thing I really like that the Society for Historical Archaeology does is they have the tech room.
Enhancing Conferences with Tech Rooms
00:31:23
Speaker
And one of the cool things about the tech room is it's a place where you're not being presented something. You get there and you get to play with something, right? Like I've brought tablets into the tech room and wild note. I've done podcasting with the APN in there where I actually sit there and record with different people and show them, Hey, it's pretty easy to do a podcast. You have to learn a bit of editing, but it's pretty easy to do a podcast, right? So
00:31:44
Speaker
it's just really cool. And people have brought virtual reality headsets in so you can put it on and see what it looks like. And you know, drones and it's hard to fly drones in most conference venues, but it's not impossible. I'm here to tell you that. And, uh, it's just, it's just a really cool idea. And I would love to see more of that at conferences where people can just really get their hands on something they wouldn't normally get to use and really play with it. And outside of a sales pitch in the book room. So, you know,
00:32:12
Speaker
That's interesting. I didn't know about this, but that sounds to me a lot like what I was talking about at this trade conference that we'd go to in EdTech. We went there specifically for the hands-on, the ability to pick the brain at a sit-down session, pick the brain of an expert at something at a sit-down session.
00:32:34
Speaker
and then take a little time to work on our own problems, you know, under the supervision, under the assistance of other people who either know the solutions themselves or are working through the same issues themselves. That good idea, I think, just as a general purpose for any general archaeological conference, right? So, you know, it might not necessarily look at your state archaeological conference, maybe it would, I don't know, but for something big like the SAJ, SAA, whatever,
00:33:02
Speaker
That might be a good way of breaking out some of that and introducing some of that how to that I was lamenting earlier in the first segment, I think that doesn't really exist, at least in my experience at these big conferences.
00:33:15
Speaker
Right. And now conference organizers that may be listening to this show are going, hold on a minute. We've got workshops. We've got workshops that are full day, half day workshops that you can pay a little bit of extra money for and do it. But they always happen the day before the conference really starts. Right. So you've got to spend extra money, show up early. And it's not presented as a feature of the conference. It's not presented as this is part of the conference. It's outside of the conference and it's before and it's just,
00:33:45
Speaker
Again, it's inaccessible to a lot of people. It's already $2,000 to go to the conference with airfare, hotel, and conference fees. Now we got to show up a day early just to learn something? Come on. Right. Yeah, no. And the book room, I think, is actually a great model for that because the book room is something that exists through most of the time of the lectures of the conference and people that are passing between one lecture or another, or there just doesn't happen to be a session that interests them for the next half hour.
00:34:11
Speaker
We'll go to the book room. So if you open up a tech venue like that, that might work. The downside that I see immediately about this is that one of the big advantages of tech, especially like I keep on saying post COVID, is the ability to displace the conference spatially. So I wonder if there's a good way of doing that
00:34:35
Speaker
that kind of tech learning room so that somebody that's not physically at the conference but is still participating maybe with their virtual ticket or whatever can be involved in that, can grab somebody's attention and assistance for a little bit. Yeah, and that is obviously the challenge, right? That is a bigger challenge. But I do think that there are ways to do that. It would take a little bit more
00:35:00
Speaker
development knowledge on certain people's skill sets to be able to do so. But that's what I wanted to talk about really at the end of this was how can we just really blow up the whole idea of the conference and become the anthropologist that we all say we are and treat the environment better, be more inclusive, all these things we complain about that conferences
00:35:19
Speaker
do, I mean, there isn't an essay that goes by that somebody doesn't have some sort of either either gender or, you know, me too moment or something like that, right? It's just all these things always happen and people are up in arms about it, but they're not really talking about the fact that there's a massive section of people that couldn't even go to that conference because, you know, maybe they're wheelchair bound and it's just while they're accessible, if you can get there, it's hard to get there, right? It's expensive to get there.
00:35:47
Speaker
Maybe they've got other issues that prevent them from fully immersing themselves in the conference. So I want to talk about the virtual conference idea, which is, again, I don't think is that wacky, but yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, I was going to say, you're saying people who are wheelchair bound were trying to find it really extenuating circumstances. Well, one thing that prevents a lot of people from being able to go to conferences is they have families, right? Oh, yeah. If you're an early career professor,
00:36:15
Speaker
You're right in that young child age. You're already tired and stressed out and chances are your spouse, your partner is also tired and stressed out and being able to take a few days off over a weekend in order to go across the country to a conference is not feasible.
00:36:34
Speaker
including those kinds of people, I think would be a huge boon for everybody too. And again, that's not to make the physical handicap seems something weird, but this is something that societally people expect as something you should somehow be doing. And we as academics don't acknowledge that as problematic.
00:36:57
Speaker
And, and just to add to the cost too, that I didn't even think about that you brought up is, you know, as archeologists, most of us are probably living where the work is or where the job is, right? So we're not more than likely living where there's family and, and people, you know, maybe you have close friends that could do this, but you know, on top of the several thousand dollars you're going to have to pay to go to the conference, even if you've got a partner that can maybe take care of the kids, a partner probably also has a job. So during the day now,
00:37:22
Speaker
you've got daycare that you're having to pay for, or maybe you're having to pay for it for the whole time if you're a single parent. And you've got to, I don't know, you can board your dogs. I don't even know what you do if your kids, if you've got to be gone for like three or four days. Cause a lot of these conferences don't have like a great way to take care of children, but it's also, even if they do have childcare on site, that's probably going to cost you money. And even if it's free, it's just something you're just thinking about while you're at the conference and you're not able to focus, you know. So
00:37:50
Speaker
What I hear a saying is, we've had a couple ideas about restructuring how conferences are done, but we haven't brought a whole lot of tech to it. The one tech that we've kind of been skirting around here is hybrid, and I'm going to have to go based off of what I've heard from a lot of people, hybrid is a nay. It's nay, yay or nay, it's a nay.
00:38:13
Speaker
A lot of schools, for example, have dropped the hybrid component of classes and it became too hard. Now, part of the reason why it became too hard is because students, you know, your typical 19 year old, given the option of staying in bed and going to class or going to class and going to class, it chooses to stay in bed. You know, that's unfair to 19 year olds, I know. But the reality is that it's
00:38:37
Speaker
become a burden on a lot of teachers that they haven't figured out how to overcome and maybe can't be overcome with the current set of tools. But a lot of what you and I have been talking about here would probably be facilitated by having a hybrid component
00:38:55
Speaker
if not to the entire conference, at least the certain sessions of it. And I'm torn because it appeals to me intuitively. But I also, I've heard horror stories. I've heard horror stories from real conferences where they try to do this and they tear down the entire network at the conference venue because it can't handle all those lectures happening at once, all streaming out all at the same time. It just isn't there.
00:39:20
Speaker
or they can do it and it jacks up the price of the entire rental of the venue space to such a high amount that they can't do it functionally. It becomes a thing that the only businesses and trade shows kind of conferences can do, but not your average academic conference. So I don't know, where do you sit on hybrid?
00:39:43
Speaker
I think the only reason that I actually don't think hybrid is a good idea is because I think the time for it has passed to be honest with you. I think if we were going to do this virtual ticket kind of thing and the hybrid streaming model, we should have started doing that 10 years ago. But now everybody's other conferences are just starting to move beyond that, right? There, there's still physical conferences because people get a lot of value from being together in a space and being to do that. But as you said, COVID has changed a lot of things on our perception of what's possible, right? So,
00:40:13
Speaker
One thing that always sticks in my head, and it's one of the bullet points that I wrote down here, is Second Life. If you've never heard of Second Life, I don't know how they stay in business. They've got five people that are still paying them to be on the platform. In fact,
00:40:29
Speaker
I can't remember what it's called, but if you search like the Second Life documentary or something, there's something on Netflix or Hulu. Yeah, where people met in Second Life and then got married in Second Life and then they stay in Second Life. They still don't even live together. Some of them do live together and those relationships in some cases fell apart because they
00:40:47
Speaker
They really could only exist virtually together. The whole thing about it is not Second Life or the platform or whatever you might think about that, but the thing about Second Life is it's 100% inclusive for people that can manipulate a computer and see the screen. There's obviously people that would have a challenge with that.
00:41:05
Speaker
What's cool about it and what's cool about that leading into other virtual reality stuff like I have an Oculus Quest 2 and there's a lot of venues inside of the Oculus Quest 2 where you can meet up with other people and what's cool about both of these systems is the proximity algorithms that they have in there.
The Future of Virtual Conferences
00:41:21
Speaker
So when you're in say Second Life and you're facing somebody who's speaking,
00:41:25
Speaker
You hear them speaking. When you turn to the side, they're coming out of your right ear. They're coming out of your right earpiece. When you walk away from them around a certain radius, you can no longer hear them. So you can still generate those group conversations in Second Life and in Oculus, different Oculus environments. You can put presentations up on the screen.
00:41:46
Speaker
You can still have a PowerPoint if you want to and people can gather around and watch it and then they can ask questions and you can you can retire to another room or section or a mountaintop covered in snow. Who cares, right? Like you can fly around and hover up 10,000 feet above the conference and have a conversation and nobody can hear you.
00:42:02
Speaker
It's those kinds of things and stuff that you can't even do at conferences. I can say, listen, lock this conversation down between me and Paul. I don't want anybody else to be able to hear this. I want to talk only to Paul. You can't do that at a conference unless you literally go to another room.
00:42:17
Speaker
The capabilities there, people just need to stop being afraid of that kind of stuff and start realizing that virtual conference doesn't mean a freaking zoom call where only one person can talk at one time, right? That's what people think of as virtual conferences right now. They think zoom calls and that's stupid. That's a good step in the right direction, but it's stupid, right? We should not do conferences that way.
00:42:38
Speaker
I'm not doing a very good job of promoting cultural share, but you know, which is basically a fancy zoom call, but we do specifically on these cultural share events and we'll, we'll link to culturalmedia.com and the show notes, but we're trying to do these quarterly events. The next one's coming up probably about the time that you're hearing this or a little bit after that. So check it out. It's free, but it's more interactive. So go ahead.
00:43:01
Speaker
Yeah, well, what you're talking about here is the the the knob of what a lot of people bring up anytime you talk about how to reform or recompose conferences is that social aspect, the networking, the proximity, what you gain from being in the same space and having nice organic conversations with people, which is different than what your conversations are like when they're mediated through zoom. Yeah.
00:43:26
Speaker
So maybe we'll just leave this out there food for thought. How do you do that? You suggested possibly through Second Life. But the real question isn't that the particular tech that you're going to apply to it, but trying to imagine what that kind of a space would be where you and I, Chris, are thousands of miles apart
00:43:47
Speaker
But we're actually talking to each other, not talking at each other, which is what happens in a Zoom call. And frankly, what happens at a lecture at a conference. And that's not why people are going to the conference. They're going for the stuff between the lectures. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And that is another thing that I like about, let's say, a second life type of environment or, you know, some one of the Oculus environments or something like that, is that when the conference is over, nobody's kicking you out.
00:44:17
Speaker
right you know the hotel's not saying you have to leave you can continue to meet in the same space for as long as you want you can show up next week you can show up tomorrow morning when everybody would normally be on an airplane ready to go you can you can literally do whatever you want you can keep that conversation going you can have that venue
00:44:35
Speaker
to do that in the same exact way. And it doesn't have to end that way. It doesn't have to end there, whereas conferences always end. And you're always energized after a conference if you did it right. And you've got all these ideas. You've got people that you met. You've got things that are maybe in motion.
00:44:50
Speaker
But then like 90% of them die unless one person keeps it going, right? So if you had this constant space that didn't feel like I'm out of the conference now and therefore I'm out of this headspace, if you were just lived in that space, I feel like you'd get a lot more done and you'd have a lot more productivity. So.
00:45:08
Speaker
Yeah, I work in my Oculus all the time in just a virtual desktop environment. And there's other people I like, I do like the solitary environments they have, but I sometimes I just go to like the coffee shop, they call it the immersed cafe. It's immersed VR is what I use. And they go to the immersed cafe and there's other people just working. And if you're unmuted, you can see they're unmuted and you can be like, you know, Hey, how are you doing? What's going on? You know, just like you would at maybe a normal coffee shop, you know, you can introduce yourself or also like a normal coffee shop. You can put it in your headphones and not talk to anyone.
00:45:39
Speaker
So it's your choice, but it's so socially interactive. And the only reason I'm not promoting the Oculus more is because of the barrier to entry, right? It's way less than a conference, but it's still 300 bucks or more, depending on what you're getting.
00:45:53
Speaker
There's definitely a barrier to entry there of the equipment, whereas most people have access to a rudimentary computer, which will definitely run Second Life for free. You don't have to pay for Second Life. You just download it and run it. It's resource intensive if you got everything turned up, but you can turn everything down graphics wise and still have the same experience as everybody else. You just may see more 8-bit graphics then.
00:46:20
Speaker
So yeah, but I think that's where we want to go. And I'm going to make a pledge right now that.
00:46:26
Speaker
By the end of 2024, I want to say by the end of 2023, but I'll shoot myself in the foot. By the end of 2024, we will have held a conference in virtual reality through cultural media. And I want to do it by the end of this year. But 100% by the end of 2024, we'll have held a conference in virtual reality. I don't know what that's going to look like or what that means. It might just be second life for the inclusivity aspect of it and the low barrier to entry. But it's going to be something. And we'll do it. Cool. Sounds like fun. Indeed.
00:46:56
Speaker
All right. Any final thoughts on crazy conferences? No, I think I'm just getting ramped up now. I've got initial thoughts. Where should we start? No, I know. You've got a meeting to go to, another virtual meeting. Indeed. I have a whiny dog that needs to be fed. We should probably wrap this up.
00:47:18
Speaker
All right. All right. Well, thanks, Paul. And listen, I want to hear everybody's ideas. Reach out to us through the contact and the show notes. Look down at your device and go to arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech. And you can see the episode show notes if you're listening to this some other way. But let's hear your conference ideas. If you're on our Slack team, I already know a few people that are going to chime up and say, here's what I would like to see and do. And I'm really looking forward to those discussions. So.
00:47:41
Speaker
Let's have that discussion and keep it going. And maybe some people who are in a position to do something about it will hear these conversations and they will start making the moves. So cool. All right. Thanks, Paul. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Chris. Take care.
00:47:59
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:48:25
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.