2023 IBHA Conference
Saturday 08 July 2023
On Wednesday 05 July I flew to Philadelphia. The flight from Portland to Philadelphia passed along the north edge of the Great Salt Lake. I don’t think I’ve seen the Great Salt Lake from the air previously, but it was remarkably beautiful in an almost otherworldly way. I arrived in Philadelphia at midnight, and got to my hotel about 1:00 am. This newsletter is a full day late as I have spent the past couple of days with the events of the IBHA (big history) conference. The event itself is hybrid in the sense of being conducted online, but there are also a few people gathered in various places. I am among a few individuals who have arrived at Villanova in person and who are making use of a room at the university. Lowell Gustafson of the IBHA is affiliated with Villanova University and obtained for us the use of the facilities.
The first day went rather well, with many presentations of a uniformly high quality, though it was marked by technical problems, both with the platform and with bandwidth issues. In a hybrid event in which technology plays a significant role, it is important to make sure that the technology actually works, and that it works smoothly and effectively, and not merely as a sequence of hiccups and false starts. The second day saw a continuation of technical problems, in some cases interfering with the presentations, and, unfortunately, my presentation went rather poorly. Another presenter repeatedly talked over the top of me, and of course it is difficult to maintain one’s concentration with that kind of distraction. One of the problems intrinsic to online platforms is being irrupted by ambient sound from microphones that are either left on, or have been accidentally turned on. Usually the host of a given session has the power to mute any participant, but they have to continually police the session; any lapse of attention can result in interruptions.
Worse, my slides wouldn’t advance in presentation mode, so of course the animations built into each slide wouldn’t work either. Most participants recorded their presentations beforehand. These recorded presentations were then played, and the presenters were available afterward to respond to comments and questions. Mostly this worked well. However, I did not record my presentation, as I thought that I could do it live. That was a mistake.
There were other options. I could have transferred my presentation to another computer and done it that way, but that involves problems as well. If you use a font in your presentation that is not loaded into the computer that you’re running it on, the formatting will be thrown off. If I had been thinking ahead more effectively, I could have made one presentation based on animations and another simplified presentation without any presentations that could be used with the more sophisticated version couldn’t be supported by the platform. I can keep that in mind for the future, but what is the point of giving a presentation if everyone just records their presentation and then it is played on a platform like Airmeet? Part of the interest in an in-person conferences is that the presentations are not canned. I took notes during the previous day’s presentations and cited these presentations in my remarks in order to be directly relevant to the proceedings. This is the point of a conference as I see it — to have a dialogue, an exchange of ideas, that takes place during a specific period of time. One might as well just watch a video on Youtube (at a time of one’s convenience) and cut out all of the intervening layers of unnecessary complexity.
My session was not the only one marred by technical difficulties. Airmeet is a disaster of a platform, and we have struggled to make it work over the past few days. For all that may be said against Zoom as a platform, I have never had as much problem with Zoom as I have had with Airmeet. There were also long delays (sometimes as much as a half minute) between live events and the online events, which creates real problems with an hybrid event. I would hesitate to be involved in any future meeting using Airmeet as a platform.
One can regard hybrid events such as this as an experiment in a new kind of conference. It was pointed out to me today that there were remote presentations (although relatively rare) prior to all the shutdowns that resulted in conferences going online for a couple of years. During the two years of the worst shutdowns, online conferences rapidly improved in their sophistication, and now that we are seeing a return to in-person conferences, we are seeing a much larger admixture of remote presentations, which effectively turns them into hybrid conferences. This changes these events. On a side note, the ISCSC conference upcoming in September explicitly asked me if I planned to show up in person, as they will only be allowing in-person presentations (a decision of which I approve). The Heroism conference upcoming in October will allow both in-person and remote presentations.
The failure of my presentation really put me off the day. I couldn’t enjoy the second day as much as I enjoyed the first. What is the proper response to this? Do better next time? Stop going to conferences? I have often said after attending conferences that I realize in retrospect that I learn a lot — and certainly I have learned a lot this time and have many references to follow up — but I may be getting burned out on the conference experience. Despite all that I learn, the negatives of attending may eventually come to swamp the positives, and I will cease to make any effort to engage in this way. This isn’t new. I have always come away from conferences with very mixed feelings. Usually a conference represents a significant gain of knowledge to me, but that gain in knowledge comes at the cost of the inconveniences and irritations of the whole business.
