/2016/11/25/the-good-and-the-bad-of-aaa2016-or-the-aaa-must-never-use-that-scheduling-app-again/ Notes and Queries in Anthropology Fri, 08 Dec 2017 18:00:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1 /2016/11/25/the-good-and-the-bad-of-aaa2016-or-the-aaa-must-never-use-that-scheduling-app-again/comment-page-1/#comment-839721 Wed, 30 Nov 2016 16:46:35 +0000 /?p=20794#comment-839721 I was at MESA this year and they made the platform for their program on the Guidebook app, which was really great. Highly recommended for those planning D.C. next year.

]]> /2016/11/25/the-good-and-the-bad-of-aaa2016-or-the-aaa-must-never-use-that-scheduling-app-again/comment-page-1/#comment-839718 Mon, 28 Nov 2016 10:32:12 +0000 /?p=20794#comment-839718 Amy: The AAA has always had too many sessions/presentations, and only a handful of hot topics or well-known anthropologists draw more than a few people in the audience. (I attended the department chair’s breakfast on Saturday, at which the institutional research guy from the AAA mentioned, humorously, that the wisdom in the association world is that, while practitioners go to conferences to hear papers, anthropologists go to conference to present papers.) I’ve always assumed that this is partly because most of us don’t get any travel support unless we deliver a paper, so the AAA accommodates this by accepting a lot of papers and sessions, but one of the interesting shifts that I’ve seen in my professional lifetime is that graduate students are now organizing a lot of sessions — that was extremely rare when I first started many years ago, but is routine today, and since there are a lot more graduate students than faculty or professionals I suspect that part of the proliferation of sessions comes from this large resource of students.

]]> /2016/11/25/the-good-and-the-bad-of-aaa2016-or-the-aaa-must-never-use-that-scheduling-app-again/comment-page-1/#comment-839717 Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:52:59 +0000 /?p=20794#comment-839717 Who specifically was the app provider? This was the first year for a meeting app at the American Folklore Society meetings, which were held this year together with the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (thus a somewhat bigger meeting). Everyone who used it seemed to really love it. The provider was atanto.com, whose website says that the product can be used for a flat rate of $1500 per meeting. It handled a program that often had about sixteen concurrent sessions and did lots of useful things without being buggy. It even provided a easy way for non Twitter users could follow the Twitter stream.

]]> /2016/11/25/the-good-and-the-bad-of-aaa2016-or-the-aaa-must-never-use-that-scheduling-app-again/comment-page-1/#comment-839716 Sun, 27 Nov 2016 12:15:51 +0000 /?p=20794#comment-839716 I can’t agree more with you about the app. It was simply awful! People were buying programs onsite because it was so bad.

]]> /2016/11/25/the-good-and-the-bad-of-aaa2016-or-the-aaa-must-never-use-that-scheduling-app-again/comment-page-1/#comment-839715 Sat, 26 Nov 2016 19:36:40 +0000 /?p=20794#comment-839715 Great round-up, thanks! Any thoughts on the overwhelming number of sessions at the conference? I’m fairly new to attending AAAs so perhaps this is standard. I feel torn about it – I understand the impulse to offer a platform for as many scholars as possible, but is it worthwhile when they’re presenting 2-3 people? Maybe I was picking unpopular sessions, but there were so many things happening at all times that despite being very well-attended the event felt sparse…I wonder this is a part of why the event felt fragmented and isolated?

]]>