{"id":24,"date":"2019-01-29T13:30:35","date_gmt":"2019-01-29T18:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/?p=24"},"modified":"2021-10-15T10:59:16","modified_gmt":"2021-10-15T14:59:16","slug":"tech-industry-events-vs-academic-conferences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/2019\/01\/29\/tech-industry-events-vs-academic-conferences\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Industry Events vs. Academic Conferences: Some Takeaways"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is the third part in a series on the intersections of technical communication in the tech industry and the academy. Read the series introduction <\/span><\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/2018\/11\/05\/tech-comm-intro\/\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">here<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One of the great privileges of working at RedMonk is that I get to go to the amazing conferences that we host. While I spoke at <a href=\"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/rstephens\/2018\/10\/24\/monktoberfest-2018\/\">Monktoberfest 2018<\/a>, I am also headed to <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/monkigras.com\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Monki Gras<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> this week, this time primarily as part of the audience and as a big fan of this year\u2019s conference theme of <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/2019\/01\/10\/trying-to-make-tech-more-accessible-and-inclusive-monki-gras-2019\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Accessible Craft<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Monki Gras, the tech conference about Software, Craft, and Tech Culture, returns January 31 and Feb 1st 2019.<\/p>\n<p>The theme this year is Accessible Craft: Creating great experiences for everyone.<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/8VeadDAmYo\">https:\/\/t.co\/8VeadDAmYo<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Monki Gras (@monkigras) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/monkigras\/status\/1056909177048702976?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">October 29, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">However, as I also have a <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/2018\/10\/12\/salve-munde\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">background in academia<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, I began 2019 with a flight to Chicago to attend the 2019 <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mla.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Modern Language Association<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (MLA) Convention. The MLA is a professional organization for teachers and scholars of (modern) languages and literatures. While the MLA is a separate entity from the more writing focused <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/cccc.ncte.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Conference on College Composition and Communication<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and the tech comm focused <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/attw.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Association for Teachers of Technical Writing<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, academics in literary, composition, and communication fields might find themselves at events sponsored by one or all of these organizations in a given year depending on overlapping interests and professional specializations. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For me, alternating between tech industry events and academic conferences has really emphasized the differences between the conventions and formats associated with each type of event. It has also shed light on some of the problems that transcend disciplinary and industry divides; I share some highlights below.<\/span><\/p>\n<h1><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Talks are more fun than papers <\/span><\/h1>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My experience with academic conferences have been primarily with those related to the humanities (the typical format for academic conferences in other disciplines may differ from what I have seen). I have attended large multi-track events like the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/mla19.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">yearly convention sponsored by MLA<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, multidisciplinary conferences like the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/wmich.edu\/medievalcongress\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">International Congress on Medieval Studies<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and smaller single-track symposia and colloquia organized around specific themes. Regardless of the size of the event, the conference sessions themselves follow prescriptive formats that include workshops and roundtables. By far the most predominant session format involves the presentation of a panel of three or four 15-20-minute papers that all ostensibly address a specified topic. This type of session often has a moderator (who runs the session) and may also have a respondent (who prepares a brief response to all of the papers presented in the session); time is usually set aside at the end for audience members to ask questions. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To clarify: the protocol for these types of panels is that the panelists will spent 15-20 minutes <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">reading a paper out loud<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. They may or may not also present slides. Hard-copy handouts involving key images or quotations may also be distributed, and sometimes\u2014in what I choose to read as a rather elitist and exclusionary practice\u2014quotations of material in languages other than the established common language of the session are <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">provided without translation<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In contrast, I have yet to attend a single session at a tech industry event where a presenter read a paper, including sessions that follow a multi-speaker panel format. Speakers may be aided by slides and notes, yet the predominant action is to \u201cgive a talk\u201d rather than \u201cread a paper.\u201d While this difference may seem semantic, in practice what works as effective written communication does not always translate to effective oral communication due to differences in organization, diction, tone, and pitch. Even when papers are tailored for aural consumption, the act of reading necessitates changes in eye contact, posture, and other cues that help engage an audience. The result is often the perception that such papers\u2014and by extension the academic conferences where they are presented\u2014are (at best) boring or (much worse) incomprehensible. Furthermore, presentations that exclude slides or handouts often omit visual and written components that may help supplement the spoken components of a presentation.<\/span><\/p>\n<h1><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Talks and papers present different accessibility challenges<\/span><\/h1>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With the 2019 Monki Gras theme of Accessible Craft in mind, there are, notably, some advantages to the practice of paper reading. First, because most academics are expected to publish their work as part of the \u201cresearch\u201d component of their jobs, academic conference talks are imagined as early drafts of larger projects that will then be published as articles or book chapters, both of which count much more favorably than conference presentations on an academic CV for purposes of hiring and tenure. Second, the option of reading a paper provides presenters who are unable to give a talk (or who are new to or uncomfortable with public speaking) with an alternative method of presentation. Third, having a completed copy of their paper allows presenters to distribute copies to audience members with disabilities (although larger conferences often have resources for sign language and live captioning) and, indeed, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mla.org\/Convention\/MLA-2019\/Information-for-Attendees\/On-Site-Resources\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the MLA asks presenters to come prepared with printed copies of their papers<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> for this reason. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The academic conference model, however, may create more accessibility issues than it solves. Due to concerns with intellectual property and the viability of their work as a publication, many academics are reluctant to distribute work that has yet to be published in print. Accordingly, many refrain from distributing copies of their papers (for accessibility reasons or otherwise). Most academic conferences forbid taking pictures or recording video of sessions, and often practices such as live-tweeting are allowed only with the permission of the presenters. This is in stark contrast to practices I have seen at tech conferences, where attendees are often encouraged to share pictures and thoughts through social media, speakers often publish their slides online, and video recordings of sessions are often made available after the event (e.g., you can find videos of the talks from Monktoberfest 2018 <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qhmRanugltc&amp;list=PLvsKqlNNP3R-fR8z-vAN6dziR6Ris63Y_\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">here<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">). Because the tech industry also embraces the practice of delivering similar talks at different events (a practice that is widely frowned upon in academic circles), speakers also have the opportunity to incorporate audience feedback into revised versions of their presentations. A good talk may have become a good talk through practice, peer insight, and the benefit of having been delivered in different contexts; ideas in a good recorded talk can be shared without the lag involved in the production of a peer-reviewed academic publication.<\/span><\/p>\n<h1><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Harassment and bias are not just tech problems<\/span><\/h1>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The tech industry is often chided to <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2018\/oct\/12\/tech-humanities-misinformation-philosophy-psychology-graduates-mozilla-head-mitchell-baker\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">hire more workers with backgrounds in the humanities<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. The rationale is that the humanities takes, as objects of study, concepts such as ethics, race, gender, class, and power; therefore, the argument goes, the humanities has practical insights into how to solve issues involving these concepts. While I agree that the study of these issues is vitally important, one thing that academic conferences (even in the humanities) make painfully obvious is that theory does not always translate into practice. As social media platforms like Twitter have helped make visible, academic conference spaces are often the site of incidents ranging from microaggressions to outright harassment and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/lottelydia\/status\/1080493175570075650\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">predation<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This tweet, for instance captures two high-profile incidents that occurred at two different conferences taking place at the same time that I was at the MLA Convention in Chicago: <\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">In case you didn&#39;t see both, today in things said *by professional colleagues* to panelists at meetings of learned societies. In 2019. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/FS9pNHEKtL\">pic.twitter.com\/FS9pNHEKtL<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Ian Petrie (@icpetrie) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/icpetrie\/status\/1081753470221385734?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 6, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The first incident occurred at the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.archaeological.org\/annualmeeting\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">joint annual meeting<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.archaeological.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Archeological Institute of America<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/classicalstudies.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Society for Classical Studies<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and involved <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2019\/01\/07\/racist-comments-directed-classics-scholar-disciplinary-meeting-floor-classicists\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">an audience member making racist comments<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> about <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@danelpadillaperalta\/some-thoughts-on-aia-scs-2019-d6a480a1812a\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dr. Dan-el Padilla Peralta<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a tenure-track Classics professor who had just presented on a panel. The second happened at the annual meeting of the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">American Historical Association<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and involved an audience member referring to <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jackiantonovich\/status\/1081691367674392578\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dr. Jacqueline D. Antonovich,<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> a tenure-track History professor who had just presented on a panel, as \u201cthe little redhead girl.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While the second incident is cited in a blog post by <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ladyscience.com\/about-us\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Lady Science<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> editor-in-chief Anna Reser as catalyst for <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ladyscience.com\/blog\/why-were-giving-up-conferences-in-2019\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">giving up conferences in 2019<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, Reser\u2019s post further captures some of the ways that academia can be exclusive towards scholars who speak as public intellectuals instead of institutionally affiliated ones. This can be particularly limiting because in many fields, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.chronicle.com\/article\/What-We-Hire-in-Now-English\/245255\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">such as English<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, the availability of institutionally affiliated tenure-track jobs is shrinking. <\/span><\/p>\n<h1><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Why I still go to conferences (even when I don\u2019t have to) <\/span><\/h1>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One thing that academic conferences and tech industry events both can (but do not always) do well is create configurations of people and perspectives that might otherwise never exist. Sometimes this happens on the conference program, as it did in two excellent sessions that I recently attended. The first, the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=HCCkVz25UU4\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Container Power Hour<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> session from AWS re:Invent brought together technologists from different companies to say very insightful things about emergent tech. The second, a session on <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.historians.org\/publications-and-directories\/perspectives-on-history\/january-2019\/after-charlottesville-historians-tackle-white-supremacist-nostalgia-for-an-imagined-past\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nostalgia and Narrative after Charlottesville: Comparing Myths of Origins in the Middle Ages and the American Civil War<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> was jointly presented at MLA and AHA and brought together medievalists and Americanists with varied disciplinary affiliations to address an increasingly visible topic.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">A parallel <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/AHA19?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#AHA19<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/MLA19?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#MLA19<\/a> session explores how the Middle Ages and the American Civil War have becomes sources of nostalgia for white supremacists on both sides of the Atlantic:  <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/cr2OjjRWwg\">https:\/\/t.co\/cr2OjjRWwg<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; American Historical Association (@AHAhistorians) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AHAhistorians\/status\/1080509284700573701?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 2, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For academics, many of whom work in departments where they are the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/lonemedievalist.hcommons.org\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">lone specialist<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in their field, conferences also present an opportunity to meet up with other folks interested in their area of specialization. I made the trip to MLA, for instance, in part to moderate a session, in part to <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/morrissociety.blogspot.com\/2018\/12\/the-william-morris-society-at-mla_22.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">meet up with my fellow William Morris Society<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> members, and in part to catch up with colleagues who have relocated halfway across a continent for their jobs. I have been delighted to see that these social connections also play out at tech industry events, as I really enjoy meeting up with clients (new and prospective) and even other analysts to talk about smart tech.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That is not to say, however, that there are no down sides to the almost mandatory networking and socializing that goes with such events, both on the academic and tech industry sides. As some of my <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/techstyle.lmc.gatech.edu\/the-office-hour-fixing-the-academic-conference\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Georgia Tech colleagues have discussed in a recent podcast<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, navigating conference social scenes can be awkward, especially when one is new to the hierarchies, histories, and protocols that everyone else seems to just know about (and for some attendees, such events can be even more stressful due to\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.chronicle.com\/article\/A-Minefield-How\/245441\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the near-ubiquity of alcohol<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At present, for me the advantages of such events still outweigh the disadvantages, and I anticipate many conference social hours in my future (and a few in the very near future). On that note, for those of you headed out to see the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/monkigras.com\/schedule\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">excellent talks at Monki Gras<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, feel free to find me and say \u201chi\u201d. I am always up for chatting (about academia or tech) over some coffee (I hear ours will be amazing), cheese (there will be <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/monkchips\/status\/1088575931713835008\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">raclette<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">!), or, in what may be a Monki Gras first, full afternoon tea.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Note: a version of this article has also been published on <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/techstyle.lmc.gatech.edu\/on-conferences-in-academia-and-the-tech-industry\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">TECHStyle.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is the third part in a series on the intersections of technical communication in the tech industry and the academy. Read the series introduction here. One of the great privileges of working at RedMonk is that I get to go to the amazing conferences that we host. While I spoke at Monktoberfest 2018, I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":26,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14,91],"tags":[15,17,16],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conferences","category-tech-comm-classroom-and-industry-series","tag-academia","tag-conferences","tag-tech-industry"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/files\/2019\/01\/Dr-Erin-Gilbert-Ghostbusters.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/kfitzpatrick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}