Well, post MelbourneDAC and one of the several things I've been wondering is the role of this blog. Obviously it will shortly go into hibernation, well, be closed actually, as it was never intended to be the generic DAC blog (for future conferences for example), but was always a sort of 'sideways' appropriation of blogging to easily manage and update a website. Along the way I was also interested in the ways in which I could use a blog to provide some rudimentary project documentation, particularly with my interest in developing and exploring ways or methodologies of managing a conference that provided and encouraged something that was a bit more sophisticated than the more usual talk and walk events so common in the humanities.
Did it work? Yes and no, of course. There was some tension as the blog become a site of reportage, tensions between novice and experienced blog authors, but also tensions between what the object of the MelbourneDAC site might be and what the content of a semi-public space becomes. Frankly this is quite a positive thing, certainly productive, as the multiple voices and trajectories turned it into something closer to a forum than just a conference web site and promotes some sort of test scenario to simply see if indeed it worked, and is it worth (was it worth) doing.
On the other hand, the project documentation has not been fantastic because I only moved this to a blog quite late in the process. Organising the conference started over 15 months ago, and I do think if I'd run the blog from the start, and used it to document the organisational side of the conference more substantially, then it would have been much more effective as a documentation system.
What I've liked about using a blog for the conference is that is does tend towards documentary. Not in a distant 'voice of god' sort of manner, though that is pretty much my tone now I suppose, but in the thick of things a sort of observational direct cinema sort of textuality. So in that sort of way the blog works well to document the conference as an event rather than as some sort of solidified or stable thing. And using a blog has made adding new information very very easy, and I'd certainly encourage anyone thinking of maintaining a web site for a conference to seriously consider something as simple as an installation of movable type.
Posted by amiles at June 3, 2003 05:16 PM