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Conference papers

The formal session is dead. Long live the formal session!

Timothy Burke is all for eliminating the "formal session" from the American Historical Association conference. He says:

The formal session is a kind of loathsome ritual of humanities and social science academia, a lacerating gesture of masochism. Three, sometimes four, panelists read dully through a pre-written paper. Every once in a great while, one of them has actually written a shorter version of the paper designed to be read aloud, that has some vague hint of a performative gloss to it. Mostly though presenters just put red lines through paragraphs they want to skip, rush through the end, make amendations on the fly, read prose intended for formal publication.

... and goes on to say this ...

I suppose someone could say that's not how it should be, that formal sessions could be run better, but why reform it? The formal session is an inevitable bore. The only time conference meetings on papers work is when papers are precirculated (and read by the audience), and there will be some of these at the next AHA meeting. (emphasis added)

Burke's thoughts must be shared, as the email I got about my Organization of American Historians session next April said

The OAH has made a commitment to provide a more dynamic, innovative, and interactive annual meeting. We strongly encourage participants to present or "talk" their papers from notes, speaking directly to the audience, rather than reading their work line-by-line ... To allow for more audience participation during paper sessions and the more colloquial presentation mentioned above, the OAH provides the option of posting papers on our gated website prior to the meeting. Posting your paper will allow attendees to read it before the Annual Meeting and be prepared with questions and comments.

Yet I know the frustration of which Burke speaks. I once attended a session at Social Science History Association—where most of the papers and presentations are quite good, in the British sense of quite—that represented the nadir of the "formal session." While the papers were on closely related topics, one presenter had pulled out. It was the first session of the conference, which traditionally at SSHA means low numbers, due to people not arriving until later on Thursday. The first speaker, a graduate student (on the job market, I could tell before he even alluded to this, because he was wearing a suit. At SSHA, yes, at SSHA, a very informal conference) read his paper in a monotone. As the only audience member for some time I felt that I could not leave, but I knew the speaker would not notice for he not once raised his eyes from his task of reading his paper verbatim. I had high expectations for the next speaker, a full professor at a Big Ten university whose books were models of lucid prose. But no, it was worse. She also read her paper. The nadir came when she described a cartoon. She did not interest her audience (now doubled) with an overhead or handout of this cartoon, she took several minutes to describe it.

Despite this experience I am here to praise the formal session, not to bury it. It's not hard to learn how to distil 30 pages into 7 (7 pages is about 15 minutes talking), and present it to an audience. It's not hard, even for historians, to learn how to operate an overhead projector, and display some pictures to their audience. Not hard at all, it really just takes a little practice.

Perhaps it is different at the large mega-conferences, I have tended to go to more specialist ones where the papers are often on cognate topics, and someone in the audience often knows some background, and can ask good questions.

It is, I think, a good discipline for presenters to have to assume that their audience has not read the paper, and may not know much about their topic. I worry that if people were just allowed to pre-circulate papers and discuss them, that people would begin treating major conferences like in-house workshops and seminars. The value of the formal session for the presenter should be that it provides some incentives to distil their research into a concise presentation for intelligent people who may be ignorant of the precise topic.

When you pre-circulate papers the readership rate is typically between 0 and 1. It's very rarely 1, and more often 0, I'd wager.

If everyone read the papers circulated, then this model would work fine. Questions would mostly be devoted to what is in the paper, and some discussion would ensue. And if the presenter knows that the readership rate is going to be 0, then they have every incentive to make a good presentation, and get some feedback from that.

But when it's between 0 and 1—some read the paper, some don't—not so great. Without being able to deny entry to people who haven't read the paper, what does the speaker do? Well, typically they discuss the paper assuming that people have read it, and rightly so, from the presenter's point of view. But then you get the inevitable questions from people who haven't read the paper, asking for clarification and explanation. "It's in the paper," is one response, and perhaps you could say "No questions without having read the paper," but you be the chair or discussant that tries to enforce that ... I'm not sure that would work so well.

My point is that the formal session is a good idea gone a little wrong. It's a good idea because it should help the presenters/authors think about what's truly important and interesting in their work. The solution is not to abolish the formal session, but for historians to improve their presentations. The costs of this training are remarkably low, it could very, very easily be incorporated into the structure of existing graduate seminars or courses.

If you think this difficult to achieve, I would just invite you to attend conferences outside North America. The dull, monotone reading of the paper is a North American problem -- it's much less of a problem in Europe and Australasia where the standard seems to be a snappier 15 minute presentation, not quite ad-libbing it, but speaking from notes.

Posted by robe0419 at September 23, 2005 05:05 PM | TrackBack