Smarthistory: The Blog

Steven and I blogged the post below on the official CAA blog for last week’s annual conference in LA. We raised what we thought was an important issue and a few people responded (one publicly) — but since the “comments” function was turned off on that blog, we thought we would re-post here, in case anyone had anything to say about it!

Couldn’t we rethink this a bit?

The CAA annual conference has been enormously successful for many years, and this year is no exception. It brings a vast number of artists and art historians together, and clearly there is enormous value to be derived from that — the networking and employment opportunities, and the serendipitous meeting with new and old colleagues.

However, for the most part, the core of the conference – the Program Sessions — follow a model that has remained virtually unchanged since the nineteenth century. Papers are prepared in advance, read, and if the session is well structured, there might be an active question and answer period afterward, perhaps with a discussant leading the way. It seems that for most sessions, the vast majority of time is taken up with the reading of carefully prepared papers with significantly less time allotted to either a discussant or active Q&A.

Maybe this needs some rethinking as a format? We were hoping we could begin to spark a discussion via this blog to solicit new models, perhaps some that might take advantage of new technologies? For example, what would happen if some papers were posted in advance in Commentpress – a format that allows for annotations on sections of text (this could be moderated, and open only to CAA members).Or, what about using Voicethread to extend conversations that began during a session? There may be numerous ways to employ technology to make our time together more valuable and to extend the session conversations beyond the sessions themselves.

The conversation about how best to do this might have taken place here on this blog, unfortunately at some point (and we just found this out), the comment function was intentionally disabled. This means that the format of this blog mirrors the principle format of the sessions themselves – something rather one-way, when it seems to us the point of us being is together is rather different…