Strange title. MelbourneDAC is serious about encouraging dialogue and conversation around key ideas. This is why all the conference papers have already been made available to presenters, and are about to be made to all delegates a week before the event starts.
The sessions are divided into two streams, long papers and short papers. Long papers run to around 10 pages in the proceedings, but authors will only get 20 - 25 minutes to present their work. Short papers run to 4 pages in the proceedings and presenters only get 15 minutes to present. The major difference between these sessions is not in duration, it is audience. Long paper sessions are single track which means the entire conference cohort will hear them. The short papers are in dual track sessions, so the conference community will divide in two for these. We are not running a 5 or whatever track conference where your audience consists of 12 people.
The nice thing about single sessions is that everyone hears the work and this makes a major difference to discussion. Instead of coffee being "which session did you go to?", then "how was it?", it runs something like "what did you think of X's paper? I reckon it rocked." While the short papers are being delivered in dual sessions, the larger single track presentations still give the conference focus and some cohesiveness (socially and intellectually).
All papers have been made available to all delegates prior to arriving here, so at a minimum it is hoped that people will skim the papers that they are strongly interested in so that when they go to the relevant session it will not be to hear the paper repeated but to hear it spoken to. There is a difference there, and it is a useful difference.
Everyone will also get a CDROM with all the papers included (as pdfs) which of course means you could skim them during the conference if you have a laptop (or used the computers provided). More usefully, I hope, it just makes it very easy for each person to leave with a complete record of all the academic content in a readily accessible format, so that the conference doesn't disappear into fine fond memories of discussion and chatter, but there is a decent durable record of parts of it. This is common for scientific conferences, but in my experience is rare for humanities conferences.
Posted by amiles at May 14, 2003 06:09 PM