[SIGCIS-Members] CFP: SHOT 2012 Conference, 4-7 Oct in Copenhagen. Deadline 31 March.

[Thomas Haigh]

Well, actually my longer string of highfaluting ten dollar words do mean
something different from "people without conference management experience."

It's not that computer scientists, for example, don't have conferences or
that their conferences are somehow more primitive than ours. The problem is
that the more experience somone has with CS conferences the more
"mystified" they'll be by the SHOT process. Consider: computer science
conferences provide written reviews and detailed scores. Reviewing and
scoring is done by anonymous experts rather than the program committee.
Reviews are double blind. Full text papers are submitted, reviewed, and
published in conference proceedings. Rejection rates are prominently
published. Leading conferences hold more prestige than journal publication.

None of these things are true for SHOT, or for history conferences in
general. So I sometimes get asked questions from SIGCIS members interested
in SHOT participation like "Where are the reviewers' comments," or "when do
I send the full paper," or "what's a commentator" or "when do the
proceedings come out." This year I decided to address those questions up
front to share the mysteries of history conference mechanics with our
interdisciplinary audience.

The mystification is, of course, mutual. Being used to history I find some
of the practices at ASIS&T, the leading information science conference,
quite odd but they seem perfectly normal to the "natives." For example, at
ASIS&T one can submit either a panel proposal of informal roundtable
discussion, reviewed on an abstract, or the full text of a formal academic
paper. Whereas for SHOT a panel is just a collection of three related
papers, ASIS&T has no way to propose a group of several scholarly papers.
Panels aren't even allowed to list titles for the contributions by the
individual contributors in case that distracts from the informality.

Tom


On 16 February 2012 21:00, Evan Koblentz <evan at snarc.net> wrote:

> >> I’ve become aware that there’s a lot of tacit knowledge about how a
> history conference works that is mystifying to (say) computer scientists,
> amateur historians or economists but is not included in a typical history
> CFP because it is “too obvious” to bother stating.
>
> ... "mystifying to people without conference management experience" would
> have sufficed.
>
> One need not possess a Ph.D. to appreciate the complexities of conference
> organization (says the "amateur" historian, while asserting this his
> Vintage Computer Festival has a lot more complexity than a SIG day.)
>
> Some irony: two of this year's VCF East lecturers are Ph.D.s -- Dr. Thomas
> Kurtz, of Dartmouth, and Dr. Kent Lundford, of MIT.
>
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