Conferencing from Home: ACH 2021 and !!Con

Quinn DombrowskiJuly 28, 2021
Conferencing from Home: ACH 2021 and !!Con

In 2019, I wrote a blog post about the experience of going to the DH conference in Utrecht, followed by the ACH conference in Pittsburgh. Two years later, it's time for another ACH write-up, with a very different point of comparison: !!Con, a tech conference celebrating "the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing". While I've attended and presented at other virtual events this year (including the CSDH-SCHN conference), as co-VP of ACH I was particularly committed to attending as much of that conference as I could, and volunteering as a chair, online respondent, and livetweeter. !!Con was a more serendipitous discovery thanks to a tweet from Scott Weingart. It was the first non-academic conference I've presented at, and while differences in both scale and nature make it hard to compare directly with ACH, there were some aspects of !!Con that may serve as useful provocations for how to run virtual or hybrid academic conferences.

ACH

ACH 2021 was the second modern instantiation of a conference run by the US-based DH professional organization. Originally slated to be in Houston (in a summer when the ADHO DH conference was slated to be in Tokyo -- both of these in-person events have now been rescheduled for next year), ACH 2021 pivoted to being entirely virtual prior to its CFP last December. Roopika Risam and Jen Guiliano took the lead on organizing this virtual event, and did a tremendous job. A major goal of the ACH conference is to serve as a more accessible venue for the kind of DH scholarship that takes place in the United States, and the program reflected those priorities through a very thoughtful balance of work focused on social justice, Black DH, pedagogy, the intersection of archives and identity, multimedia, multilingual DH, and computational text analysis.

!!Con

!!Con (pronounced "bang-bang-con") is a typically New York-based in-person event consisting of a series of ten-minute talks spread over two days. It's been running since 2014, and !!Con West ran in Santa Cruz in 2019 and 2020. The event is usually held in May, and thanks to COVID, !!Con 2020 was an "experimental remote conference". The "Exclamation Foundation" (the organization that exists solely for the purpose of running this once-a-year event) designed !!Con 2021 from the beginning as a virtual and international event. Much as the priorities of ACH were evident in the topics of the presentations, the structure and infrastructure of !!Con reflected its focus on supporting whimsy and serendipity for people spread (at a minimum) across the US and Europe.

Presentation modes

At ACH, there was a mix of presentation types, ranging from lighting talks and posters (ideal for work in progress) to long papers, roundtables, and "alternate formats" (like a session I ran with Liz Grumbach and Merve Tekgürler that was held in Animal Crossing and streamed to Twitch). The conference ran for three days, and it was no doubt challenging to fit in all the submissions that fared well in peer review. Presenting at a conference like ACH is an important professional milestone for people not only in grad school or faculty roles, but for librarians and staff as well. To mitigate the time crunch, a private Humanities Commons group was available for registered attendees, and session chairs encouraged participants to continue the conversation there. The poster session was carried out entirely on Humanities Commons, with presenters uploading their materials to a discussion "topic" specifically for that purpose.

!!Con talks are 10 minutes long, except for a couple 30-40 minute keynotes. There's no peer review process the way there is with ACH; the organizing committee just chooses which proposals to accept. At this point in my life, I can practically write a DH conference submission in my sleep (especially a 250-500 word one) -- I've even written a guide to how to do it. But !!Con was different: they wanted a specific and detailed description of how you would fill the 10 minutes. Since my proposal was about the Data-Sitters Club, I had plenty of material to draw from, but piecing together an exactly 10-minute talk (complete with breakdowns of how many minutes / seconds would be spent on each section of the talk) required a fair amount of effort.

Registration & schedule

!!Con was a pay-what-you-want conference; the recommended ticket price was $64, but if that was a lot, you could pay nothing. If you did pay something, a !!Con t-shirt or sweatshirt (you could pick your favorite size and color from a webstore) was part of the deal. Tickets were released in two batches, and both sold out promptly. Accustomed as I am to academic conferences, I was shocked that as a speaker, I would not only get free registration (and a shirt), but also an honorarium.

While ACH registration was comparable to !!Con's ($35-$90, depending on whether you were a student and/or member), the sponsors of ACH were academic institutions and programs. In contrast, the sponsors of !!Con were tech companies (which, I'll confess, I had never heard of with the exception of Mapbox). This, plus the smaller number of talks, presumably made it feasible for !!Con to not only offer the shirts and honoraria, but also AV professionals, live captioning, and streaming. To my surprise, all the talks were streamed live for anyone who wanted to watch from the !!Con website. What's more, the schedule was arranged in such a way that every talk was broadcast twice: first live (in the early evening / post-work hours on the east coast), and again the next day as part of a "syncwatch" during the early evening hours in Europe. (The talks were also edited and posted to YouTube shortly after the conference.) To make life easier for participants, the schedule on the !!Con website automatically displays using the correct time zone for wherever you are, based on the detected time for your computer. I'm so unaccustomed to schedules being in my own time zone that I initially subtracted three hours when putting events on my calendar.

I ran into the same problem of mis-calendaring my talks with ACH, but this time it was due to subtracting three hours instead of two. DH conferences worldwide seem to put a lot of symbolic value on the time zone where conferences are hosted, which has gotten me in trouble more than once with submission deadlines. I know a few east coast colleagues who, accustomed to having everything in their time zone, were caught off-guard by the ACH schedule being in Central time. A bit of Googling suggests that it’s possible to get ConfTool to show times and dates in your time zone, but it involves more than a little user configuration.

Because ACH sessions started at 8 AM Central, I resigned myself to simply missing the first two hours (with the exception of one day when I dragged myself onto Zoom at 6 AM for a discussion about software papers). It would have been really nice if there were a way to have an equivalent of the “syncwatch” for the sessions that worked out to be very early in my time zone. The late session ran until 7 Central, which made it possible for me to attend then go pick up kids, which was convenient. But it was strange, and a little exhausting, to spend the days immersed in Zooming and then … nothing. On one hand, I definitely needed a break from Zoom, but I missed having some kind of space for opt-in social engagement. Obviously, dinner and drinks isn’t going to happen with a virtual conference, but the way !!Con made up for the social gap left me with a lot to think about.

Social spaces

Since all the talks were streamed publicly, one might wonder what incentive there was to register for !!Con. The answer, again to my surprise, was the social aspect of the conference, particularly Discord. I'd used Discord as the voice-chat platform for the Animal Crossing: New DH talk series, but I'd never seen Discord used to cultivate community before !!Con. Every talk had its own channel, and the Q&A (as well as cheering, commentary, and general positive vibes) for each talk took place in that channel. The commentary and Q&A from the syncwatch rebroadcast the following day was just a continuation of that chat. Because people were already in those channels engaging with the talks, there was much less friction to continue the conversation, compared to having to log into Humanities Commons, look for the thread for a presentation, and re-initiate a synchronous conversation asynchronously at ACH.

But that wasn't all! There were also Discord channels for the sorts of things that one might talk about over coffee or drinks. There was an introductions channel, a pets channel, a job-seeker channel, a crafting channel, and others. People were active in those spaces (as well as the voice channels) throughout the day and night. I ended up hanging out in the crafting channel one evening and had a great conversation about sewing with someone else from the west coast. It worked far better as a drop-in, conference-like social space than I could have imagined.

In addition to Discord, there was also a more experimental virtual space / social interaction platform, Skittish, that was used for the official "hallway track" events and unconferencing sessions. I didn't feel like I had the mental bandwidth to try a new, experimental platform (even one with cute barnyard animal avatars) so I sat those out, but there seemed to be a lot of energy around it from what I could see on Discord.

Community norms

While a conference on "the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing" is going to select for a certain kind of attendee to begin with, I was impressed with the way the !!Con organizers went about setting expectations around community norms. They reached out to all the speakers and asked us to flag any difficult topics in our talks (e.g. racism and sexism) and offered to run through our talk with us to share pointers for covering those issues in a sensitive way. Again, size matters here -- it’s hard to imagine there being enough volunteer labor to support a similar initiative at ACH, but maybe something a little more scalable like a written guide or a set of people speakers could reach out to for support might fill some of this need.

There were codes of conduct for both ACH and !!Con which covered similar ground on the "do-not's", but !!Con's included a set of "do's" with a pointer to more detail from the Recurse Foundation's social rules that I bookmarked for future reference. Both !!Con and Recurse are explicitly tech-oriented spaces, and not all of these guidelines (like "assume that all your fellow conference-goers are technical") would work equally well if applied directly to DH contexts. But a lot of them might -- maybe academic conferences would be more welcoming spaces if they adopted guidelines like "no 'well-actually's" and "no feigning surprise" (e.g. "You don't know who Foucault is?!").

Imagining the best of all physical and virtual worlds

A survey went out to ACH attendees immediately after the conference, seeking input on people's preferences around conference modality for ACH 2022. Even when in-person conferences become a reliable option again (which may not be 2022 at this rate), I expect that hybrid conferences will continue, at least for organizations that prioritize access in the face of travel costs, care responsibilities, and other factors that can make in-person conferences challenging for some attendees. Organizing either a physical or a virtual conference well is a massive undertaking; attempting to organize an event that does both at the same time and in some integrated manner is even more daunting. But while there are differences in the audience, professional function, and scale of a disciplinary conference like ACH compared to a whimsical, niche tech conference like !!Con, I think there's still practices from !!Con that may be worth exploring, specifically for the networking / social aspects of the conference.

Twitter is an active social space for DH, but by being open to the world, it’s hard to enforce community norms. Grad students and people new to DH may be (understandably!) reluctant to just jump in. Having a closed space, covered by the code of conduct, that nonetheless supports casual conversation across time zones would be a helpful addition to virtual and hybrid academic conferences. Not everyone will participate (just as not everyone participated in conference-organized social activities in the before-times), but just as there were volunteers to lead the ACH “newcomer” dinner groups, I expect there would be volunteers willing to participate in virtual social spaces with the goal of fostering community.

There could also be something generative about rethinking the physical social spaces in a hybrid conference to reflect the setup of virtual social spaces. If there’s a “pets” Discord channel, would it be possible to project some of the pet pictures from Discord in one corner of the reception area, to encourage in-person participants to add their own pictures and engage with the online participants? Or imagine an “Animal Crossing” channel where people could arrange times to offer tours of their virtual island to both in-person and remote participants, using Discord for audio? I did a little of this in an unofficial way, wrapping up the conference with an Animal Crossing hangout session, in addition to our official Animal Crossing presentation, where Liz Grumbach, Merve Tekgürler and I interviewed conference attendees in-world, either through their character visiting or by finding them a virtual object to use as an avatar.

All of this depends on volunteer labor, which can already be a strain to find enough of when running a conference. But those of us who have established professional networks thanks to DH conferences owe it to the next cohorts to invest in creating spaces where they can do the same, whether or not it’s feasible for them to fly across the country.