{"id":4301,"date":"2013-08-01T00:46:35","date_gmt":"2013-07-31T14:46:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stumblingpast.wordpress.com\/?p=4301"},"modified":"2022-08-04T00:23:42","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:23:42","slug":"2013-australian-historical-association-conference-on-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2013\/08\/01\/2013-australian-historical-association-conference-on-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"2013 Australian Historical Association Conference – on social media"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Green<\/a>
The conference was held at the University of Wollongong. What a beautiful environment!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Social media has revolutionised reporting.\u00a0 Citizen reporters flood social media with immediate observations of revolutionary events, disasters, sports matches as well as more mundane everyday moments.\u00a0 This form of reporting is also changing the experience of academic conferences for many.\u00a0 People who cannot attend can listen in on the conference backchannels through Twitter.\u00a0 They can discuss it on Facebook and read about it on blogs during the conference and in the immediate aftermath.<\/p>\n

Tweeps and bloggers attending the annual conference of the Australian Historical Association in Wollongong broadcast the news as it happened \u2013 or did they?<\/p>\n

Blogging the Conference<\/h2>\n

In the first part of this overview of the conference<\/a> I gave an overview of the conference program.\u00a0 In that post I mentioned a lot of sessions.\u00a0 Where they had been mentioned in a blog post elsewhere I hyperlinked them.\u00a0 If you have a look at the hyperlinks in my post, 2013 Australian Historical Association Conference – The Program<\/a> you will see that only a small proportion of sessions had been blogged.<\/p>\n

Having a good internet connection available at the place where the blogger is staying during the conference is critical if a blogger wants to post daily.\u00a0 Being well rested before the conference starts is essential. It takes a lot of time and energy to provide a timely reporting service about a conference on a blog.\u00a0\u00a0 The papers presented at a conference are intellectually invigorating as are the conversations with fellow conference attendees during breaks and over meals.\u00a0 Then the blogger heads back to their accommodation to write up the day\u2019s proceedings.\u00a0 We do this in good faith and take a lot of care to report fairly.\u00a0 Yet this can be difficult when you don\u2019t have a copy of the papers in front of you.\u00a0 Do the excerpts and summaries of the papers included in the post represent the paper fairly?\u00a0 I had particular difficulty grappling with the plenary panel, \u2018Rethinking Indigenous Histories<\/a>\u2019.\u00a0 In the end I stated in the post that what I was writing was not a report but my reflections on a few extracts from the talks.<\/p>\n

I was writing until past midnight each night during the conference.\u00a0 Janine Rizzetti<\/a> who also wrote daily blog posts during the conference spent many hours during the conference blogging too.\u00a0 Why do we do it?\u00a0 Speaking for myself, I love sharing the history world with people who are not historians but who enjoy learning more about history (I also enjoy sharing with historians!).\u00a0 I am excited by what historians do and think that their work should be more widely shared.\u00a0 Blogging about the conference also helps me to reflect on what I have learned that day.<\/p>\n

Here is a list of all the blog posts that I am aware of which were written about the 2013 conference:<\/p>\n