LINGUIST List 7.1704

Mon Dec 2 1996

All: Report on LINGUIST on-line conference

Editor for this issue: T. Daniel Seely <dseelyemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

Message 1: On-line Conference Report

Date: Mon, 02 Dec 1996 08:43:10 EST
From: Daniel Seely <dseelyemunix.emich.edu>
Subject: On-line Conference Report

A REPORT ON THE FIRST LINGUIST ON-LINE CONFERENCE

INTRODUCTION---------------------------------------------------------

The LINGUIST Network held its first on-line conference, Geometric and Thematic Structure in Binding, from October 14 through November 6, 1996. Since this was a "first" in linguistics (as far as we know), we thought some subscribers might appreciate a report on the progress of the conference. Also, we believe a report may help us plan for the future. We are committed to making on-line conferences a regular feature of LINGUIST and will soon be soliciting proposals for the next meeting. The first conference taught us a number of lessons that may be of some value in the planning and implementation of future electronic gatherings.

WHY ON-LINE CONFERENCES----------------------------------------------

One of the goals of the conference was to take advantage of the potential of the Internet to encourage scholarly interchange. Electronic conferences have at least 3 potential advantages. One of these was obvious from the first, but the other two were discovered in the course of the conference.

First , the potential audience of linguists who can "attend" an electronic conference is much larger than that for a traditional conference. The medium allows linguists to be actively involved wherever they may be, regardless of financial, geographical or political constraints. As a result, nearly fifty countries were represented at this conference. They are listed in the Basic Statistics section below.

Second, the medium offers ways to overcome or minimize some disciplinary constraints. Many of the "attendees" subscribed in order to access up-to-the-minute research in a subdiscipline outside their own, research that they would not normally read. The hypertext format allowed us to provide ancillary information about the presenters and the theoretical context of the papers. The conference organizer established hyperlinks to relevant home-pages, to bibliographic information about cited works, and to definitions of key terminology. Such information, we hope, enriched the conference for everyone, but it seems to have been especially useful to non-specialists.

Third, on-line conferences allow the immediate and permanent archiving of the papers presented, and of the commentary as well. As one of the participants mentioned, this makes the conference proceedings a useful teaching tool: he pointed out that teachers can ask students to read and comment on the papers, then later compare their own comments to the archived discussion. The papers and discussion are, of course, also available to scholars who want to consider the papers more carefully than a traditional conference allows.

BASIC STRUCTURE OF THE CONFERENCE-------------------------------------

The organization of the conference was quite similar to a regular one in some respects. A call for abstracts was made, and these abstracts were read by a review board before being accepted. One salient difference was that all correspondence--including submission of abstracts and papers--was electronic. In fact, this meeting did not require a single sheet of paper. Unlike most linguistic conferences, however, the authors of the successful abstracts were asked to provide a finished version of their papers some time before the conference took place. These papers were put on the Web, as well as sent out via email to the "attendees," all of whom were put on a special email list called linconf. Discussion was carried out by e-mail, but all comments were archived and immediately translated into hypertext format so that they could also be made available on the Web.

To allow thoughtful consideration of the work presented, the conference was divided into three sessions each with three papers, roughly one session per week; a keynote address by Prof. Howard Lasnik brought the total number of presentations to ten. The original idea was to make all of the three papers of a session available at the beginning of the week, have a two day reading period, and then open up the floor for open discussion, with the guidance of a moderator, for the rest of the week. At the end of the conference, there would then be discussion of all conference papers. As we will see below, however, in actual practice, more time was needed for both reading and discussion.

The linguistic theme of the conference was narrowly focused in order that the meeting be of manageable size and scope; and, furthermore, the primary conference organizer has some expertise in binding theory and it seemed useful to select a topic that we knew fairly well--indeed, this was important for everything from establishing the review board to editing papers for final presentation.

In the interest of space, the specifics of the linguistic theme won't be reviewed here, but all details are available at LINGUIST sites, e.g.:

http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/linconf/ http://linguistlist.org/linconf/ http://engserve.tamu.edu/files/linguistics/linguist/linconf http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/linguist/linconf

PREPARATION TIME-FRAME----------------------------------------------

The idea to have a conference with binding theory as its theme arose in February, 1996. The primary organizer, Daniel Seely, attended the Atomism and Binding workshop in the Netherlands during the month as more or less a fact-finding excursion--to gauge interest in an on-line conference of this sort and to solicit papers and review board members. With a positive initial response to the project, work began in earnest in March. The general chronology thereafter was as follows:

March.....Conference theme and organization completed Establishment of Review Board and Keynote speaker

April 1...Call for papers

May 15....Abstracts collected and prepared for review distribution

June 25- July 15...Reviews tabulated and final program established

August....Technical preparation

Sept. 25...Final versions of papers received and prepared for presentation

Oct. 14....Conference begins

This time-line proved quite tenable, but there are some things we would change. We believe there should be a bit more time for preparation of abstracts (the first call-for-papers might go out three months before abstract deadline) and for preparation of papers. Final versions of papers given at on-line conferences need to be submitted to the organizers well in advance of the conference, so that they can be readied for email distribution and translated into HTML for presentation on the Web. And the papers need to be prepared with considerable care, both by the authors and by the organizers: whatever errors they contain will be visible on the Web for a very long time. Thus, there should be a solid block of time not only between the establishment of the final program (based on abstract review) and the deadline for receipt of papers for presentation, but also between the receipt of the papers and the conference-beginning.

BASIC STATISTICS FOR CONFERENCE---------------------------------------

We present here a few basic statistics about the conference.

Number of Subscribers: 525 Countries: 46 Country makeup: Argentina 7, Australia 11, Austria 1, Belgium 2, Brazil 2, Bulgaria 1, Canada 27, China 2, Czech Republic 2, Denmark 2, Egypt 1, Estonia 1, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 1, Finland 2, France 3, Germany 40, Great Britain 34, Greece 5, Hongkong 4, Hungary 6, Iceland 1, India 1, Indonesia 1, Ireland 2, Israel 7, Italy 4, Japan 56, Korea 16, Mexico 7, Netherlands 10, New Zealand 7, Norway 4, Poland 1, Portugal 4, Russia 1, Singapore 1, South Africa 2, Spain 10, Sweden 2, Switzerland 2, Taiwan 4, Turkey 1, Ukraine 1, United Arab Emirates 1, Uruguay 1, USA 222

Number of Discussion Messages: 55 Number of abstracts received: 15 Number of abstracts accepted: 9

SUBSCRIBER COMMENTS-----------------------------------------------------

At the end of the meeting, we encouraged comments from subscribers in order to better determine which components of the conference worked and which didn't. Some thirty subscribers wrote in and their comments and suggestions proved valuable. A summary follows.

On the positive side, comments can be divided up into those that apply to on-line conferences in general, and those relevant to this meeting in particular. Common general themes were:

On-line conferencing is a good idea and should be continued.

Such conferences do save money and time.

Because there is more time to read and digest complex material, questions/comments and responses can be more thoughtful than at a regular conference.

Comments specific to this first meeting include:

That it was well-organized.

Papers and comments were of good quality.

It was a good opportunity for non-specialists to get exposure to some of the latest developments in generative syntax; exposure that might not be practical otherwise.

As for the negative side, the central generalization was this:

A regular conference is more focused in the sense that attendees do not have classes and the other normal responsibilities of the profession for the duration (usually 2 or 3 days) of the meeting. This means that conferees can concentrate entirely on the conference. Because an on-line meeting must take place over a substantially longer period of time, however, such focus is not possible. This makes reading all the papers and comments potentially difficult.

Representative comments on this point include:

"I would have participated more if I had time to read everything. The disadvantage of an on-line conference is that life does not stop during the conference, as it does for a real conference that you travel to."

There were a number of interesting suggestions for future meetings. One was to have more information available about subscribers so that everyone could keep better track of who was commenting. Another is that meetings be kept open such that people could make comments on papers for a longer period of time.

CONCLUSIONS-----------------------------------------------------------

Overall, we think it clear that this first meeting was a success and we continue to be committed to making on-line conferencing a regular feature of LINGUIST.

LINGUIST Moderators Daniel Seely, Conference Organizer Anthony Aristar Helen Aristar-Dry