Comments on: Culture clashes and conference etiquette

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:33:30 +0000

Dear Abby,
Until recently I had a laptop that sounded like a C 130 taking off. The fan was so strong that if I sat in the front row and the speaker was using loose leaf notes, there was a risk that they would blow away. One speaker’s toupee flew off.
Should I not be live blogging?
Signed, Limited by Laptop
But seriously (well, that was half serious … but now I have a silent laptop, so it’s OK) my interpretation is that this dust up is more about journalist vs. blogger, and in that context, it is mainly about what people are accustom to or what sorts of rules have emerged (in journalism … there are no rules in blogging per se). And this problem will go away, and the people who don’t want you to look at them or hear them when they are giving a talk at a conference anyone can pay to go to will continue to be annoying.

By: zayıflama

zayıflama — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:29:20 +0000

I had read enough on issues with students being disciplined in educational settings with continual photo-snapping and uploading them, so I’d always go for the option of talking / emailing to the presenter after the talk to see if I could get their slides or if they could direct me to a summary.

By: Walt Crawford

Walt Crawford — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:31:10 +0000

Podblack: Fortunately, since I no longer use Twitter (for now) and rarely speak any more, I haven’t encountered the direct putdown. These days, in library conferences, I suspect I wouldn’t even suggest that people not liveblog or tweet–actually asking for full attention would be far too antediluvian.
Cell phones that aren’t on vibrate, though: That’s not only rude to the speaker, it’s rude to everyone in the room. But it still happens–although not all that often in library conferences.

By: Podblack

Podblack — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:22:39 +0000

Heh, my first experience of Twitter at a conference? Try watching someone openly Twitter on their phone an insult about your presentation and reading it later! :p Maybe they were just jealous, but it turned me off it for life! I’d already consolidated my ‘you know, just having your mobile phone on during a presentation is bad manners anyway’. Could a presenter request that it is NOT Tweeted and be respected? Could a blow-by-blow account hold off, or be used for sessions where the presenter is okay with it – or has an ‘official Tweeter’ on hand?
I had read enough on issues with students being disciplined in educational settings with continual photo-snapping and uploading them, so I’d always go for the option of talking / emailing to the presenter after the talk to see if I could get their slides or if they could direct me to a summary.
But what of using a camera that takes video? I’d taken short less-than-one-minute films of single lectures at a conference last year and turned them into a sequence of ‘what the conference was like’. I had one person completely rip out a sequence my footage without crediting or asking me – who then stubbornly argued that they’d ‘embedded it’. No, embedding is taking my link and acknowledging me as film-maker. _Not_ cutting out the bit you like and not telling me and then lying about what you did!
In response to that, I’m now coordinating with the conference organiser to take similar short-YouTube-ready videos in future and make the footage their property. However, I should also be sure via them if presenters are okay with an amateur video added to the mix, as there is already an ‘official video’ being done during presentations anyway.
Keeping a laptop open? I have had a well-known author next to me get told to move (when we were seated in the back row!) when they were typing, although it didn’t bother me. Apparently there were people seated nearby who found it distracting, not the presenter? So, that’s another factor to consider.
So, in light of all of these experiences, I’m going to take the approach in future to be more sensitive and take a notepad and jot down ideas – and just use my laptop to lean on. I can always take a moment after the lecture to type down what I heard. Ask the conference track organiser about what is suitable so presenters (or attendees) aren’t distracted by my fondness for technology. Oh – and mobile phones? Turned off!

By: Walt Crawford

Walt Crawford — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:35:49 +0000

Angel: Maybe at one point, certainly not recently–or at least I’m not in the “too many speaking invitations to think about, hot journal invitations…” group. I was more on the receiving end.
Christina: I have no problem with people liveblogging for their future self–it’s a form of note-taking. Once I decided that I shouldn’t try to use it as a useful source, for various reasons, it hasn’t been a problem–and I can skip the 6-8 different versions of some conference programs very rapidly.
It’s only tough when I read a program overview (usually not liveblogging) that’s really intriguing–and realize that I can’t reasonably rely on it as the basis for anything else. Such is life.

By: Christina Pikas

Christina Pikas — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:56:24 +0000

I prefer to read someone’s reasoned summary of a session, but I’ve been grateful for live blogging for finding information – although typically twitter feeds are too fast and furious. I have done both: live blogged and written summaries later. For re-finding what happened when, I find my live-blogged sessions most useful (to me!) because they are enough to fill in my memories. I’ve always blogged with my current and future self as my primary audience. I tweeted some during the general sessions at sla – but mostly because I was too tired to carry my laptop! Even then, I tried to make observations instead of play by play.
BTW- I think this culture clash is even within science. If you’re required to do a 10 page paper that will be published in proceedings, you can hardly complain about blogging! But some conferences have no proceedings so that people are free to write journal articles later so I would think it depends on the conference.

By: Angel R. Rivera

Angel R. Rivera — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:51:39 +0000

So, are you part of the charmed circles, Walt? On a serious note, I may need to reread that link from C&I. I do remember for a while in the librarian blogs some fuss over the “he said this/no, he didn’t” from liveblogging, just not quite where I read it.
And yes, what you do is information science.
Best, and keep on blogging.

By: Mark Lindner

Mark Lindner — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:43:00 +0000

I did have an LIS PhD candidate tell me (quite forcefully) to remove the photos I had of 2 of her presentation slides because this was her dissertation work, blah blah blah. I went ahead and removed them with much grumbling under my breath. They were not by any stretch her key points but relevant to my interests. So while we are generally more open, not all of us are.
By the way, I no longer attend her many presentations or read her papers.