It’s been over a week since Hastac 2011, which was an invigorating and eye-opening experience. First, some highlights, and then my reflections.
Highlights
The day before the conference officially started, there was a workshop on alternative academic careers (or alt-ac, as it is popularly called). This workshop was quite informative and well-attended, given the tight job market and increasing number of people interested in working in the academy in a position other than full-time tenure-track position.1Some people expressed concern that alt-ac meant failure, while others stated that they simply prefer an alt-ac position. Brian Croxall showed some cover letters and resumes for these types of positions and pointed in directions to find listings.
Beginning of the first day brought Cathy Davidson, who talked about attention blindness and the need to collaborate to compensate for each others’ blindness. I highly recommend watching the video of this lecture, as well as those of the other keynotes. Although many feared that the entertaining introduction by Daniel Herwitz might overshadow the actual talk, Cathy Davidson presented an engaging and thoughtful talk that really set the tone for the rest of the conference. For a more detailed description of this and the other keynotes, go to the blog roundup page for the conference and look at Karen Petruska’s incredible liveblogs. I don’t know how she did it.
Daniel Atkins’s talk, just after Davidson’s, on cyberinfrastructure, was also quite informative and tightly packed with info.
After this came concurrent lightning talks at 1o minutes apiece, and ronudtables where people presented work and invited discussion. Later in the day was a discussion of academic publishing with Dan Cohen, Tara McPherson and Richard Nash. This was quite provocative, as all three of the speakers have a strong history of promoting alternative publishing practices. The video of this is well worth watching, especially for Richard Nash, who I trust will be as captivating on video as he was in person.
Day 2 began with keynotes by Siva Vaidhyanathan and Josh Greenberg, followed in the afternoon by a trip to North Campus and the Duderstadt Center for poster sessions and a tour of the 3D Lab, which has an incredible audio studio, a 3D video facility, 3D printing, electronic music studio, and, the most amazing thing I have ever seen, the Virtual Reality Cave. They had a representation of Yost Ice Arena that you could virtually walk through with special glasses and a controller. It was very lifelike. The best thing is that all of the technology there is open to all students, facutly and staff.
Reflections
I am glad I attended the pre-conference alt-ac workshop. I am on the job market now, looking both for tenure track and alternative positions. I have had trouble articulating this position, because I feel that if I let it be known I am looking for alt-ac, potential TT employers might see me as not serious, or as about to give up. Conversely, I fear that alt-ac employers will view my actively seeking a TT job as treating them as a second choice. Neither of these is true. I am truly looking for both, and will take the position that seems best for me, whether ac or alt. It was nice to see that others had the same attitude, and some of the advice on how to advertise my skills was invaluable. I have long felt that my graduate education has trained me for once specific job, and that I don’t know how to move into any other position, but I have since come to realize that I have a fairly unique set of skills that are transferable to any number of jobs, and that I need to figure out how best to explain them to those who can use them.
For me, the biggest draw to the conference was Cathy Davidson. I have been working on the concept of “attention” in various ways in past several years, and her latest book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn touches on many of the concepts I’ve been trying to explore (I will post a reaction to the book at some point in the near future). Her talk, as I said before, really set the tone for the conference, and became a challenge in some ways to introduce a greater degree of collaboration in the humanities.
The conference was unlike traditional conferences. It had the feeling of a mixture of show-and-tell and real discussion of pressing issues in digital humanities. After attending two Great Lakes THATCamps and now this, I almost dread going to a traditional conference where people read about very specific topics for twenty minutes, three times per panel, 10 panels per day. I leave these (un)conferences thinking about how we might revamp conferences like MLA or SCMS to be more dynamic and user-friendly. I’ll let you know what I come up with.
- It is important to note that alt-ac refers to jobs that are still affiliated with the academy in some way, and not a job that is entirely not academic. Examples include university libraries and academic publishing. [↩]
