And the crowds came to the 2012 Australian Historical Association Conference. Photo by Dave Earl

This week I’m in Adelaide for the feast of history that is the annual Australian Historical Association Conference.  Each day I’ll share with you my experience of the conference on this blog.

My first experience of a historical conference was earlier this year at the American Historical Association annual conference in Chicago.  Well…  I didn’t travel outside Sydney.  My experience of this conference was entirely online.  The attendees at this conference generated a prolific twitter stream and many blog posts.  I was very grateful to the participants for sharing the news of the conference in this way.

In my blog post written at the conclusion of the American conference I enthused about the reporting of the tweeps and bloggers, but recognised it just wasn’t quite the same as being there.  It was then that I decided I’d try to attend the Australian Historical Association conference in order to gain the full experience and be one of those who report it online.

With so many concurrent sessions, each person’s experience of the conference will be very different.  If you can, follow the conference twitter stream under the #OzHA2012 tag to read the comments of other conference attendees.  If you don’t want to follow it live, you can refer to the conference twitter archive that Sharon Howard has established.   The beauty of this internetworked era is that you don’t have to be in Australia or an Australian to enjoy this conference.  Sharon Howard is following it from soggy England, wishing she was experiencing this conference in an Australian winter (but she can console herself that the English are winning the cricket)! Continue reading →