If you want to know what history excites historians living in Australia and the latest historical research, you should follow the annual Australian Historical Association conference held each July. This year’s record conference Twitter stream together with the conference program and abstracts gives us a peek into the vibrant conference held recently at the University of Newcastle.

Today I will just focus on the keynotes and the plenary sessions at the conference.

The keynote and plenary presentations are a good indicator of some of the issues and topics which are of great interest to historians. As all the people at the conference attend these sessions there are more people tweeting these presentations. Following a conference from afar via social media is not as good as being there, but we can gain a glimmer of what has been discussed by reading the conference abstracts and tweets.

The record number of tweets about the conference was great but it generated a problem. It takes a lot of time to wade through more four thousand tweets. I puzzled about how I could share with you some of the valuable commentary in the conference’s #OzHA2017 Twitter stream in a way that you would find readable and relevant without requiring you to invest too much time.

Storify is often used to archive tweets but I find the dump of hundreds of tweets in a regular Storify story tedious and not very useful. Even with good curation of tweets (ie only including useful original tweets) storifying the entire conference in one story would produce a complex and time-consuming resource for anyone to use.

So I decided to curate each keynote and plenary of the conference in separate Storify stories. Each story starts with the biographies of the presenters, the abstracts for the session and then the tweets of that session. The focus is on the text of the tweets and photos of presentation slides if they were tweeted. The end of each story has additional photos of the room and speaker(s) that were tweeted in case you want to use one for your own blog posts etc.

You can start your weekend by reading brief accounts of the keynotes and plenaries that interest you:

• ‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism: Mobility, Cross-Cultural Networks, and the Struggle for Postcolonial Sovereignty’, keynote presented by Professor Dane Kennedy (George Washington University)
• ‘Imperial Entanglements of Faith, Emotion and Affect’, plenary with Associate Professor Jane Haggis, Emeritus Professor Margaret Allen and Professor Fiona Paisley
• ‘When the War is Over: Australian Entanglement with Asia’, keynote presented by Professor Christine Twomey
• ‘Wild Jill’: Jill Roe and the Reshaping of Australian Women’s Histories’, plenary with Professor Angela Woollacott, Professor Melanie Oppenheimer, Ms Niro Kandasamy and Professor Mary Spongberg
• ‘Re-Entangling Capitalism, Settler Colonialism and the Environment’, plenary with Professor Grace Karskens, Dr Hannah Forsyth and Dr Julie McIntyre
• ‘The State of the Discipline’, plenary presented by Professor Martin Crotty, Dr Paul Sendziuk, Professor Stuart Macintyre and Mr Tyson Retz

There is more to the conference than the keynotes and plenaries. In my next post about the conference I will look at the topics which dominated the papers and panels delivered in the concurrent sessions as well as those topics and issues which interested the historians who were tweeting.

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Further Reading and Resources

This is the second in a series of posts about the 2017 Australian Historical Association Conference. Read the others:

• Post 1: ‘Australian History Conference Generates Record Twitter Stream‘
• Post 3: ‘Topics that Interest Historians in Australia‘ about the top topics from the concurrent sessions.
• Post 4: ‘Papers and Great History Websites Shared at #OzHA2017‘

You can still access some resources about the 2017 Australian Historical Association conference:

• Download the conference program, abstracts and author biographies from the conference website.
• Access the archived tweets from the conference.
• Check out the network diagram of the conference tweets.
• Find out more about the Australian Historical Association.
• If you want to keep up with the latest discussions and news about history, subscribe to my #OzHA2017 Tweeps list.

I have been blogging about conferences since 2012:

• How did the #OzHA Twitter hashtag start? Read about the history of the #OzHA hashtag in one of my conference posts from 2015.
• Read about Jill Roe’s cameo appearance amongst a group of #OzHA tweeps at the 2012 conference in my review of her Miles Franklin biography (hint: just search the page for ‘Aside’ which is towards the end of the review).
• Browse through my posts about the Australian Historical Association Conferences since 2012.
• The first conference I blogged about was the American Historical Association conference of 2012. Read ‘Nearly There: Experiencing a Conference Online‘ and read the comment by journalist, Jennifer Howard, about why journalists value people who tweet and blog conferences.