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

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Nathan Ensmenger
Associate Professor of Informatics
School of Informatics and Computing
Indiana University, Bloomington
homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/