On 23 May 2017, at 1:14, Nabeel Siddiqui wrote:
Conference talks are places to showcase ideas, get feedback on works in progress, and form community.
I am late to this discussion, but it seems to me that Nabeel has identified what is most troublesome about this incident. For historians, conference talks are *not* publications, and should not be treated as such. The time to criticize publicly the work of another historian is after publication, not based on one’s personal recollection of a conference talk that was never meant to be treated as a finished and fully-cited article. I would be appalled if one of my conference talks were subjected to this degree of public criticism — much less dismissed as the product of “misunderstandings, historical errors, omissions, and confirmation bias”— and would regard such criticism as a deeply hostile and unprofessional act. I certainly would never attend that conference again. I hope that Joy does not feel that way. Not only do I value her and her work, but I found her talk to be thoughtful, thought-provoking, and not at all deserving of this kind of response. -Nathan --- Nathan Ensmenger Associate Professor of Informatics School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University, Bloomington homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/