Life in Thesis-land : conference

Conference Papers: the Theatrical Version

Karen.Hall — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 06:53:00 GMT

Some very good advice on presentations:

In short, make your presentations a little more like a play or a film.

So, if your next conference paper was a play, film, or tv show, what would it be?

Conference Presentations workshop for Arts Postgrads

Karen.Hall — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 05:32:00 GMT

Successful presentations at conferences require planning and practice. This workshop – specifically for Arts, Humanities and Social Science postgraduates – will cover topics including defining a topic of suitable scope, conveying your argument clearly to the audience, using powerpoint effectively, and general public speaking skills. The workshop will help you to gain confidence and perform well at conferences: useful skills with the Social and Cultural Studies Graduate Conference coming up (and the chance to win prizes for presentation skills).
The workshop will be held on Friday 7 September, 2-4pm, in Guild Seminar Room 1. Register to attend.

That's the official blurb, anyway. More informally, this will be a workshop for all those people who think that a conference presentation should be more than regurgitating a series of powerpoint dot points, who want to give a vibrant and engaging presentation even if the norm in their area of study is reading out written papers, and who generally want to share their interest in their topic with an audience!

Limina Conference: 25 May

Karen.Hall — Wed, 02 May 2007 08:11:00 GMT

Warning: Gratuitous Hijacking of myresearchspace for advertising purposes.

Limina presents a conference titled 'Strange Attractors: Unpredictable Combinations in Historical and Cultural Contexts' on Friday 25 May.

It's a one day conference held at the University Club, with papers from a range of disciplines - from history to literature to maths to music. This is a good chance to see the kinds of work that postgraduates are doing and to see interdisciplinarity in practice. More details available here - I hope to see you there!

Long Histories

Karen.Hall — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:17:00 GMT

In my conferencing week, I attended AVSA and ANZAMEMS: from medieval and early modern studies in Adelaide to Victorian studies in Perth. It isn't the world's most obvious cross-over (I've heard of this thing - the eighteenth century - that might sit in the middle), and timing-wise, it wasn't easy. The conferences ran at basically the same dates, so I left ANZAMEMS early and only had a day at AVSA.

As a result of this conference juggling, I've been reflecting on long histories and the crossing of temporal boundaries. Long histories, which range over traditional boundaries of periodisation and attempt to unsettle such markers, offer a rich mode of engagement with the past: they require an engagement with historicism and historiography. To research, think and argue in terms of long histories not only requires a deep and sustained knowledge of the past, it also needs a critical awareness of the terms on which we frame and study these pasts. This can produce complex and innovative research as well as highly competent researchers.

Nonetheless, working in terms of long histories, especially as a postgraduate, can be a challenge. The push to define research topics early, to avoid sidetracks and tangents in favour of timely completion can lead to narrow specialisation that forecloses such possibilities. Working across boundaries of periodisation is assisted by academic environments where staff are supportive of such enterprises and, indeed, where there there simply are enough staff with a wide enough range of expertise to sustain and supervise this kind of work.

What was exciting for me, at both conference, was to see and hear people working in this way: where the necessarily tight focus of the conference paper format was informed by a broader awareness of the location of the subject matter and an explicitly critical awareness of how the past, periodisation and temporality is constructed.

My conference papers, on medievalism as a visual trope in Victorian photography, were informed by my interest in long histories, representations of the past and understandings of temporality. I don't know if I succeeded in pulling together all the layers of my argument: analysis of the photographs themselves (such as Henry Peach Robinson's The Lady of Shalott, 1861, detail above), the claim that such photographs unsettled emergent ways of understanding photography through the conjuntion of artifice and presence, and the possible implications for the fields of Victorian, medievalism and media studies. (On reflection, probably not - that's a lot to get through!). Here's a sample of the paper:

As obvious fictions and reproduced histories, Victorian medievalist photographs literally display a paradoxical relationship to the past: they offer a complex vision of temporality that is marked by contemporary novelty and desire for representations of the past under a realist banner. The colonisation of the new medium of photography by medievalist images raises questions of how to read the originality and the desire for origins inherent in new forms of media.

What am I trying to say here? Firstly, that I think long histories offer a very useful framework for generating new research, analysis and theory. Secondly, that if the first is true, then universities and disciplines need to find ways to support researchers in using this approach. If all else fails, pretty pictures are good.

Reflections on Chairing: Post Conference Rambling Part One

Karen.Hall — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 08:01:00 GMT

From my brief period of conference excess (two in one week), I'm hoping to post reflections on different aspects of the charming, but also strange, bubble-world that is academic conferencing. Today's post is brought to you by the kharma of public transport, which provided by with a train seat and minimal level of elbow room in which to draft my reflections on chairing.

Conference chairing is a rather particular ritual that is confined to the conference bubble, and in may way naturalised there - it is unremarkable until things go wrong. But for people that don;t have previous exposure to conferences, here is my guide to the ritual - from both sides of the experience.

Being Chaired:

- Be on time for your presentation session, or even early, It saves your chair from anguish.
- Be tolerant of chairs who may not be a linguistically ept as you. (I had to deal with Ancient Greek, Latin and Italian - and my high school language training in Japanese really didn't help). Be prepared to offer your chair phonetic versions as well as correct spelling.
- Have a biographical statement prepared - either written out or clearly in your head to tell your chair. Sometimes chairs are swapped at the last minute, they may not know you or have time to find out about you - so having a brief spiel ready to go can be very handy.
- have any audio-visual presentations ready to go, and have some idea about how to work the equipment (it may be worth doing an advance run-through, if that can be arranged).
- stick to the time limit - don't force your chair to become the bad cop and cut you off.
- make it clear when you finish answering a question (this is a combination of content, voice tone and body language), so that the next questioner can be asked to go ahead.

On Chairing:

- Get there well before the session begins.
- Check that there is water for the speakers.
- Check what the audio-visual requirements of the presenters are, check that the equipment is there and working, check that the presenters are confident in handling the equipment. If you are not confident yourself with the technology, check in advance about what audio-visual/technical support is provided by the conference.
- Decide on format - and talk to speakers about this - before beginning of session (eg questions individually or all at end). Some considerations in making this decision are how well the papers tie together and how people likely are to be session hopping.
- Have some kind of introduction prepared for each of the presenters. This should be at least their name and the title of their paper, but it is nice to expand beyond that. Keep it professional though - it really isn't relevant if the presenter likes long walks on the beach at sunset! This may also involve acknowledging funding sources that have enabled the presenter to be at the conference, or for the session to run.
- Signal time limits if needed. Enforce time limits if needed.
- Run the question list - make sure look around the entire room. It can be worth doing progressive speaking list (move up people that haven't asked questions already). Hopefully, it won't be neccessary to intervene if questioning descends into personal attack or pointless repetition - or if comments become far too rambling and irrelevant - but in the worst case, this might be part of the job.
- Have at least one question ready for each paper in case of the dreaded silence.
- End questions at the time limit
- Thank speakers (applause after each paper, and after questions.)

And around then, I arrived at my station.

Writing Technique: Addressing an Audience

Karen.Hall — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 05:45:00 GMT

Writing conference papers is different to writing thesis chapters, or even to writing articles.

I do write my conference papers in full: I read from them when I am presenting. In the ideal world, I've written the paper far enough in advance that I have edited it a few times, practiced more than a few times, and so can spend a fair amount of time doing more than heads-down reading off the page. In the world as it usually is, I have part of the paper blocked in with [talk about x for 1 minute] that I improvise off, which can break up the reading as well. It also helps that I did speech and drama at high school, so I have reasonable habits such as reading aloud at a decent pace, pausing according to punctuation, and looking up from the page and around the audience to start with. New Kid on the Hallway has an interesting discussion of the pros and cons of reading papers here that may be of interest.

Nonetheless, I find that having the whole thing written out is important. Mostly because I dont 'know what I'm going to say till I've written it, but there are other factors. Having a written version allows me to check that I can fit the paper into the time alloted to it (nothing worse that those people that get to 15 minutes, realise they have only got through the introduction to their argument but look at the time and jump to the conclusion). Also, in my field (or in the version of it I carry in my head), there is a valorisation of elegant structure and eloquent expression which I know I can't do without writing first.

But one of my key writing techniques for constructing conference papers is to talk it through to an audience. This audience might be my dog, the bottle of water on my desk, or anyone wandering by my office and silly enough to ask about the conference paper. Having that audience there as I test out the flow of ideas, the selection of relevant information, the rhetorical devices that hopefully make the paper interesting to listen to forces me to think about how the paper will work an a form of oral communication. What will grab the audience? How can I make the argument followable and interesting? Where do I need to slow down and explain a term, an idea, a contextual reference? Talking things through (literally) is one of my touchstones in writing conference papers.

I'll start of just playing with ideas out loud, and then jotting them down (a verbal version of brainstorming or mindmapping). Later in the process, I'll talk through sections of the paper. Once the whole thing is drafted I try to round up test audiences (I've been very lucky in belonging to two post-graduate/staff groups - the Nineteenth Century Group and the Round Table - that often organise trial run-throughs for their members ahead of conferences). I then take the feedback from the test audience and make changes.

At the moment I'm at the brainstorming-out-loud stage for my AVSA paper, but this weekend I'll try to move beyond that.

AVSA Conference Abstract

Karen.Hall — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 04:32:00 GMT

There is a definite art to writing conference abstracts: fitting the conference theme and its audience, making something sound exciting - and more importantly, plausible - when you might not have really started researching the topic yet, leaving yourself a clear sense of direction as well as space for alteration and improvisation when you do come back to write the paper.

Today I'm reading out my abstract for the Australasian Victorian Studies Conference to the Nineteenth Century Discussion Group, and I thought I would share it here as well. The conference theme is 'Victorian Beginnings', and it is being held here at UWA in early February.

Cameras on Camelot: Medievalism and (Victorian) New Media

Victorian photography, Jonathon Crary argues, formed part of a ‘vast systemic rupture’ generated by a ‘new cultural economy of value and exchange’. Yet while photography may have represented – literally – the new, the ephemeral, and the beginnings of a culture based around simulacra and spectacle, it also allowed the imaginative reconstruction and evocation of the past. An examination of the medievalist photographs created by Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron, among others, suggests the dual approaches to beginnings manifested in these images: they capture both the beginnings of Victorian new media and a revisitation of the beginnings of British national identity. As both ‘certificates of presence’ and obvious fictions, Victorian medievalist photographs engage with the paradoxical process of representing the past, a paradox made more obvious through the medium in which the representations are created. These photographs bear obvious signs of artifice and are tied to the present by the novelty of the medium, yet they attempt to offer visual access to the past in a way not previously possible. As a record of a moment of reality, they present a vision of the past that carries a weight of presence despite the temporal gap between the production of the image and its constructed content. As part of a circulation of medievalist images across media – primarily painting, writing, and photography – medievalist photographs provide one venue in which to examine the continuities and changes generated by new forms of media, exemplifying the contradictions of modernity in their appeal to new and to old beginnings.

I'm not really happy with the title, but I am looking forward to giving the paper (it has already been accepted). The pictures themselves are fascinating and they open up productive avenues of investigation and interdisciplinary scholarship. I'm looking forward to feedback from the discussion group - and any comments any reader might have!