Here we share conference memories, both positive and negative, from our fellow #DARIAHVX attendees.
Names have been withheld.
“My first scholary meeting in the DH community was the Hannover Herrenhausen conference 2013 where I met Julia Flanders, Lev Manovich and other pioneers, but also critical main voices from my own field of research like Horst Bredekamp – and I started collaboration with dear colleagues.
What did I take home? Mostly inspiration – not pure knowledge (rather curiosity and motivation to gain that knowledge)… it changed my life 🙂
Sorry to say: this is not replaceable in virtual meetings”
“My strongest memory of a scholarly meeting was giving a presentation in French as a PhD-Student. (French is not my strongest language…). I was invited to a small conference to give a talk on my research and all the other speakers and the audience was mainly French-speaking and among them were the main experts in this (very) specific subject. It was extremely scary, but everything went well. Until now, the contacts I made at that meeting are important to me, my research, and my academic network.”
“During a coffee break in an Archaeology conference in Oxford, I mistook a well-known Professor for an usher and asked for more coffee. He brought me some, and twenty minutes later I saw him delivering the keynote talk.”
One of my strongest memories was finally getting to meet in-person a co-presenter that I had collaborated with to create the panel we were presenting on. I had read her book and reached out to see if she might have an interest in presenting with me and was delighted to hear back positively. It was a great moment to meet in person and solidify further the connection we had created.
Attending my first academic conference really made me feel part of the community, despite (then) being a library professional rather than a researcher. This was through my conversations with other participants outside of the presentation sessions – something that would be difficult to replicate digitally for people who do not already know each other.
“…walking tour in a new city exploring research themes – conversations were muddled, sometimes sung, with poetry and carried on through the evening.
These conversations that were started cast warm shadows onto the rest of the event and became imprinted onto each place, each session and each person.
We connected to research, our passion for research and found friendships that last along with the shadows.”
“Attending a lecture of Ilya Prigogine in the 1980s and seeing him holding the attention of the whole audience in his hands, plus feeling immersed in his explanations myself.”
“We had a conference with a very broad set of questions in the CfP (on digital cultural heritage), resolving in a meeting of people from different contexts asking the same questions and were very happy to see that others have similar questions and problems. The field of research was by then very new and unstructured and all of us were searching for context – some of these connections are still very vivid after more than five years.”
“Co-hosting a multilingual event where presenters spoke in many different languages, without any plan about which should be spoken. There was something liberating about the departure from the English ‘norm’, and while all the languages spoken were European (which meant that there was always a sizeable number who understood the discussion at any particular point), the changes between languages highlighted the contextual nature of knowledge, and surfaced cultural differences in discourse, theory and practical approaches in the field.”
“At an annual conference that I and many colleagues attend regularly, the opening keynote was presented the first evening. After, I joined the buffet and started discussing the keynote with a group of people. When the buffet closed, we moved on to a bar. We discussed the keynote over wine until the middle of the night and eventually, I slept through almost the entire next conference day. Today, I don’t remember the topic of the keynote, but I still work closely together with the people that I spent that night with.”
“A session during a one week research methodology workshop had asked the participants to talk about their research areas. Each of the participants had very unique ideas such as Leisure and IPl.
In another seminar on Contemporary British fiction, a participant presented a paper on types of witches in literature. This was something which changed my attitude towards perceiving Literature.”
“The first time I attended to a SBL-AAR meeting (Atlanta, 2003): discovering what it means to share a conference with thousands of other scholars in my field”
“I have not attended a scholarly meeting before and would love the chance to be involved in one.”
“Best one DH2014 Lausanne, for the environment, the venues, the woods”
“Meetings to organize scientific editions with colleagues already acquainted with. Very good and productive”
“The first time I attended to an ADHO meeting (Hamburg 2012): discovering Humanities going digital beyond the fields”
