{"id":5595,"date":"2015-08-14T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2015-08-14T02:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.wordpress.com\/?p=5595"},"modified":"2022-08-04T00:25:55","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:25:55","slug":"the-loud-sounds-of-many-fingers-typing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2015\/08\/14\/the-loud-sounds-of-many-fingers-typing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Loud Sounds of Many Fingers Typing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Lush<\/a>
My favourite, quiet courtyard at University of Sydney<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This series of posts has largely celebrated the tweeting of this year\u2019s Australian Historical Association Conference. Overall we did well at sharing the news of the conference online. But while we should celebrate our achievements, we should at the same time keep a sense of proportion on all this. Twitter is not everything and neither is social media. The vast majority of conference attendees did not send a tweet and are probably not on Twitter at all. However, as I wrote in my last post<\/a>, historians who are not on Twitter also benefit from tweeting.<\/p>\n

But for at least one attendee, the use of computers during conference sessions\u00a0detracted from their conference experience.\u00a0After the conference they\u00a0shared their less than ideal experience with me. They\u00a0noted that I had referred to \u201csoft tapping of numerous keyboards\u201d from people tweeting at the Global Digital Humanities Conference in an earlier post<\/a>. This historian said that in their view the sounds of people typing was not \u2018soft\u2019 but so loud that they found it quite distracting. They said that they didn\u2019t feel comfortable raising this during the comfortable as they didn\u2019t want to upset people or cause the issue to mushroom into a controversy.<\/p>\n

I sympathise with this person. My hearing is like that experienced by people who use hearing aids. I have an auditory processing problem which makes it very difficult for me to filter out extraneous noises. When I was in university lectures I had to sit at the front in those classes with people who typed during the lectures as the sound of the typing made it very difficult for me to hear the lecturer.<\/p>\n

It seems that I have improved my ability to filter out the sound of typing since then (possibly aided by quieter keyboards) but at the Australian Historical Association conference I made sure that I sat at the back or at the side of rooms so that I would not disturb\u00a0others. Aside from the sound, I find it distracting when I can see someone\u2019s screen.<\/p>\n

It is not only people who are tweeting that use a keyboard during a conference. People also use a keyboard to take personal notes.\u00a0Touch screens should result in quiet typing but I find that the clack of finger nails on touch screens very annoying.\u00a0Would it be practical to ask people who are typing to sit at the back of venues to minimise the distraction to other attendees?<\/p>\n

The related issue is the fact that the person with a legitimate problem did not feel that they had a means to discuss the issue with the conference organisers who may have been able to ask those typing\u00a0to move to the back of venues. The person who raised this issue did not want a big fuss made about this, but I am sure that conference organisers could make available a discrete channel of communication at a conference to deal with issues like this. Perhaps there could be an \u2018ideas\/comments\u2019 box at the registration table which attendees could be encouraged to use to communicate congratulations, suggestions and problems?<\/p>\n

What do you think about this issue and these ideas? Please share your comments below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This series of posts has largely celebrated the tweeting of this year\u2019s Australian Historical Association Conference. Overall we did well at sharing the news of the conference online. But while we should celebrate our achievements, we should at the same time keep a sense of proportion on all this. Twitter is not everything and neither […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30,7],"tags":[43,106,187],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Yvonne Perkins","author_link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/author\/yvonne\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7036,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595\/revisions\/7036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}