The Covid-19 pandemic in year-1 had killed hundreds of thousands of people in the states and territories of the USA by November 2020. So the normally boisterous annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) was transposed into all-online video recordings and live-events streamed from the conference hosting website. But in November 2021 every effort was made to ensure a safe return partly to in-person presentations and round table discussions, awards ceremonies, business meetings, exhibit hall displays, and informal conversations and brainstorming in the hallways between events. However, vaccination rates around the country stalled at around 2/3 of eligible people. Children 5 to 12 years old had only just been given emergency use authorization to be vaccinated. So the 2021 get-together produced a hybrid experience with some parts exclusively in-person, other parts in-person but streamed live (and recorded for later playback via the conference website hosting service), and still other parts virtual (presenters geographically distributed; or else presenters all in-person at the conference venue but using the video conferencing system for distant observers to watch and interact). A separate library of presentations was uploaded before and during the on-site dates in middle November to form a collection of “on demand viewing.” Meanwhile, the recordings made of the online presentations (virtual sessions) during the conference week are designed for upload and replay within a week of the event so that up to six months later a person (presumably only with login/password obtained by original registration) can watch or review the discussions. This plethora of synchronous and asynchronous information, knowledge, and wisdom can quickly overwhelm a person who is presenter, staff member, or attendee who is browsing the entirety of the operation, whether that is from a location at the hosting site or someplace far from there.
The field for studying human life on the planet, past, present, and future is a wide and diverse terrain. Some people focus on archaeological methods to understand a place in relation to its surroundings. Others take a primary interest in people alive today in the many facets of their lives from beliefs to livelihoods to ways of organizing social life. Still others make the main focus about language structure and function as it is experienced and how it changes. And there are others who attend the annual meeting of the AAA with expertise in the physical basis of human life, bodies ancient and modern in variation and in lines of descent. More recent generations have also specialized in Applied Anthropology, putting into practice some of the working methods, tools, viewpoints, and research to investigate complicated human settings and come up with recommendations to resolve conflict, enhance organizational life, or gain insight into user experiences. With so many facets of human life of self and others, it is not surprising that the subjects featured in the conference presentations covered a wide range of materials and people.
In pre-Covid conferences the massive flow of information and knowledge in the organized sessions, sometimes scheduled concurrently, would result in creative work-arounds so attendees could cherrypick one presentation in one room, but then jog to another room to catch a different one with related discussion. Some might leave behind a voice recorder and request the chairperson to record the entirety for personal use (not for social media broadcast). Others might make note of authors to contact later in the hall, by on-site message boxes, or electronically after looking up the person’s contact information. That way it would sometimes be possible to get a copy of the speaker’s notes, slideset or draft document used in the session. In other words, during pre-Covid times there could sometimes be many gold nuggets for a diligent attendee to seek out during the 4- or 5-day conference: books newly published on display in the exhibitors’ hall, citations mentioned during presentations, introductions made by acquaintances having “loose ties” to others that could lead to newfound professional linkages, notes taken during keynote and individual presentations as one’s mind is sparked in new ways.
Overall, the pre-Covid experience of a big and long-lasting annual conference like this is to energize one’s own projects, to offer glimpses of imagined future projects, and to supply food for thought about the subject of anthropology in general. But unless some of the energy is captured in writing or conversations and proposals for new research, within a few days the lull after the frenetic few days tends to dull the mind and to bury the good intentions as the uphill climb of catching up with work left undone during the days of the conference comes into view.
This year, with the bifocal nature of the hybrid-version of the conference, the ocean of people and ideas at the hosting site grows both bigger and longer. Instead of “all you can eat” during the fixed conference dates, now the digital distribution of pre-recorded and conference-recorded materials allows a person to nibble at the rich feast, rather than to binge on it. Some may find themselves outfaced by “too much information,” feelings, though.
As for the selection of full-length as well as short ethnographic films that distributors before Covid would screen in parallel to the formal sessions by scholars now can be previewed during a 2 or 3 week window, rather than to compete with the academic panel discussions taking place live and in-person. In other words, the amount of rich information has grown much bigger, and the time during which a person can browse and sample and take notes and interact with authors and producers has expanded, too. So instead of a crazy few days of total commitment in the host city’s conference venue, now it is more like a month during which a person who is determined to extract ALL the relevant people, titles, topics, and developments is able to steadily work through the mountain of material.
What follows is one person’s learning curve, limited by the connectivity far from the site and limited by the mental appetite for video streaming sessions and all the other digital material housed within the conference website: lists of people and their profiles for private messaging, prerecorded and live video presentations, sessions conducted in-person but recorded for post-conference viewing, ethnographic films, publishers’ booths in the exhibitor hall with generous conference discounts for in-person or online purchases during a 3 week time frame.
Although the official dates for listed sessions ran from Wednesday to Sunday, November 17–21, 2021, many of the AAA’s topical membership Sections held business meetings online for members before the actual conference dates. And the Society for Visual Anthropology (one of the Sections and the SIGs — Special Interest Groups) held their own Visual Research Conference in the days prior to the AAA dates, as they have always done in the time when meetings were in-person only. So for some colleagues, the entire space of conferencing was longer than a whole week. Others can only afford the time and expense of a day or two within the conference block. Those at home save the travel time, meals and lodging, but unlike the people on site, those at home seldom have uninterrupted blocks of time since the normal routines of residential life are still in place. However, in my case most of the five-day block were uninterrupted at home, so what follows is an honest attempt to wrap my arms around the whole online experience.
The AAA staff organizing the event and the webhosting company helpfully sent out instructions to make the on-screen experience of exploring the conference as trouble-free as possible: updated Zoom software, using only one device to login at all times (restricted login credentials), and so on. But when it came to User Interface (UI) in the webpage menus and navigation around the content there, apart from an FAQ written for presenters and one more generally addressed to online attendees, it was a matter of hunt and click, trial and error. There are questions left unanswered by the UI: (1) how long will recorded content be kept online before the platform closes once and for all (follow-up email gave a reply of May 31, 2022), (2) will some or all of the digital records go into an archive (indeed, into Archive.org), (3) sessions conducted in-person but streamed live and also recorded — how long will it take before these recordings can be played back, (4) will the login credential and device used during the conference also be the only one able to login to see recorded content after the conference hotel closes on November 21, (5) is there a suggested form of citation for recorded conference sessions (e.g. recording URL and time mark), (6) what happens to Zoom session “chat” scroll of messages when a session ends and recording stops (not conserved in the screen recording, according to follow-up email)?
As I browsed and clicked, waited and reloaded stalled pages, slowly those various questions came to mind. For each day’s catalogue of scheduled events I built my wishlist of virtual, but also in-person sessions, including concurrent (conflicting times) sessions. Even though it was impossible to participate in the sessions held only in-person, by adding these to my agenda or wishlist of sessions, I ended up with a cumulative collection of session descriptions, presenters, and some of the attendees (big followings had five or more pages of registered people who had clicked “add” this session, although my PDF from the session page did not display more than one string of names). If time and bandwidth were unlimited, the next step would be to use the conference participant index to view the profiles for each presenter and attendee in search of keywords that seem to overlap my own. The website’s searchbox did not seem functional, since look-ups of people, sessions, or other search fields gave no replies to my own limited looking. But since time and bandwidth are not unlimited, documenting all those potential colleagues with shared interest will have to wait for another day. If only an automatically generated pool of people were to turn up when completing one’s own profile, sort of like the book title suggestions at Amazon, “people who bought this book also looked at…” (in this case it would be fellow anthropologists identified, rather than book titles).
By the second day, most of my five days of agenda were filled in. A PDF preliminary program had already been released 14 days ahead of time. That allowed scrutiny to sketch out one’s short-list to verify against the final program online. That way, it was mostly possible to seek out the sessions from the early PDF and add them to one’s final-schedule session agenda. As for making a reference PDF for each of session’s webpage displays (description and persons, sometimes with shared files uploaded there, too), since many attendees only joined the virtual or the in-person session at the last minute. So generally, I tried to make the page capture PDF close to the start time on the day of the scheduled session. As well by the second day, I had taken a first look at the virtual hall of about 20 publishers and other AAA-related sponsors and services. And I had bookmarked the ethnographic film distributors’ list of “preview-only” titles and passwords to revisit later or when tired from on-screen video presentations. The library of “on demand” sessions prerecorded will be available for many more weeks, so those I have printed out in list form to save for a rainy day or two.
Days three and four included a few time slots with concurrent sessions, one with 3 virtual streams (but Zoom only allows one tab or app running at a time, it seems); another time with 1 virtual and 1 in-person (but in-person was not live-streamed on Vimeo in the same way that an awards luncheon or a plenary session had done). Since my home Internet is sometimes unstable, I resorted to chat participation instead of spoken interchange. Most sessions filled the 1 hour 45-minute session open/close time windows with presentations and commenter, occasionally making room for interchange of the presenters with each other, but less often building in room for listener input of question, comment, or proffered reference suggestion. In order to capture all or parts of the Zoom chat, I used a text editor to paste the chat exchanges into a text file. As for “share your screen” slides used in the sessions, very occasionally I made a screenshot to use the image as a writing prompt or as a memory jogger when there was too little time to write down a reference long hand on some nearby paper, or by typing into the text file. At the end of the fourth day I had a few dozen screenshots or people, slides, and UI friction points. And I had a few dozen of the in-person and the virtual session webpages (recorded as PDF) with their presenter lists, paper titles, attendees, and synopsis of the session scope. The conference aftermath of sorting through these accumulated files, along with assorted scribbles in long hand will take some more time in the week that follows the last day of the AAA annual meeting.
Mindful of the host-city in-person conference drawing to a close on day five, I made an effort to revisit the publisher webpages keyed to the conference after having ordered a couple of books the day before, but with a few more publishers left to browse. Three sorts of books stood out in my wandering through covers, titles, and Table of Contents displayed. A few I decided to buy online. A few I did not want to buy and yet I wanted to look through at length. These I recorded as screenshot or PDF for later look-up at lending libraries. The third category is something unfamiliar to me, “Open Access” publications in which a third party foundation or sponsor somehow pays for ebook distribution, one download at a time. As it happened, three of my “to buy” list of the total 8 or 9 gave a link to the Open Access edition. While the print edition was also for sale, the Open Access digital edition for download required no payment or registration; some offered multiple formats from which to choose: Kindle (prc, mobi, azw), ePub, or PDF. Others presented only one format for download.
Among the two-dozen or more feature-length ethnographic films offered for preview during a 2 or 3 week window of time, there were 3 or 4 that I strongly was curious to see. Another two or three I wanted to skim or browse for a glimpse of the approach taken. The others were about topics with little direct intersection to my own interests or the purposes that I might have to put them to. Since the available viewing dates extended beyond the actual conference block, I determined to postpone the rest of my viewing until the week after the conference.
Three interesting person-to-person interchanges arose. During an awards luncheon one of the recipients put a request into the chat for a screenshot of her moment of fame to be emailed to the address given in the chat, since her phone or connectivity precluded doing so on her own. A few minutes after I (and others no doubt) responded, she acknowledged receipt with an expression of thanks. Elsewhere, a session presenter offered to share the draft document of her spoken ideas via email, so I sent my request. After she had passed the presenter baton to the next person she responded by email with a document attachment. The third example of interacting was not in the Zoom chat, but rather by the conference platform’s own internal messaging function: look up a person in the database and send a direct message. That is where I sent a few citations to a colleague new to disaster anthropology: the relevant Google Group, a weekly newsletter of disaster news, and a thoughtful blog by Dr. David Alexander, a long-time pillar in the field, .
Now that the conference block has ended and the digital traces linger on, there are several things to complete while a little of the energy and momentum still remains from the intense few days. One thing is the compile scribbled notes, copy/paste the pack of session webpages (PDF), and shuffle and sort of the screenshot images by purpose (people, books, UI, and so on) for print out leading to further action. For example, books to hunt down from libraries, people to search in the AAA online directory (to request presentation slides or document, perhaps), and the additional reflections and ideas pulled from session notes and PDF descriptions. There are also the remaining ethnographic films to watch and possibly react to (one distributor invited comments by email that would be forwarded to the filmmakers); there are the many wishlist presentations “on demand” to peruse; and there are the books purchased from the conference exhibitors that will be arriving in two weeks, not to forget the Open Access ones downloaded already.
Thinking about the ways that knowledge sources like seminars, books, movies, and one-on-one conversations are similar and different, the many forms of knowledge intersecting during the week on-site and online present a challenge to engaging with well, and a challenge to handling the torrent of wheat and chaff to winnow the valuable parts to keep, return to, and share with others. With a book it is possible to start and stop, add margin notes, consult the index or pause at an illustration. The sequence of pages is not necessarily fixed in a one-directional and linear way. So a person can jump around, repeat, or simply turn one page after another, either in chapter order or in some other order. Recorded presentations can be navigated to some extent in this same personal way: one’s own pace, sequence, and note-taking. By contrast, though, live sessions run at a fixed pace and unfold in real-time according to a linear sequence: person A, then B, then C. So while something interactive is lost from the live (online or in-person) experience, by working from a recorded session, the viewer can handle the bundle of ideas and interpretations and citations something like a published book: the person can set the terms of the engagement and actively sift through the source to discover or to reconfirm details. So in the interest of future conferences, perhaps this hybrid model is the more productive of building more knowledge because participants have more ways, more time, and more control to engage with the sources. By holding live but recorded sessions the best of both worlds is presented: interactive live dynamics of age-old conference habits can carry on, along with the possibilities that recorded source material allow to others who are absent from the live location and fixed time frame.
In summary, whereas pre-Covid the compressed conference experience produced lots of margin notes in one’s program booklet, along with some dog-eared pages for people, sessions, publishers’ lists, now in the hybrid configuration there is a lot more to see and hear before locating the bits most pertinent to building one’s knowledge, one’s network, and one’s imagination. And the time frame spreads out the consumption (and production) of scholarly communication so that what used to be a crazy smorgasbord of travel, engagement, reflection, and processing now is more like two or three or four weeks of rich food for thought.
This sincere and sustained effort to take all of it in has been eye-opening and enjoyable, in spite of some User Interface frustrations. Considering the purposes of conferences like this, perhaps the hybrid experience opens up possibilities to enhance the traditional face to face framework for expressing and consuming complex content. The social part of learning still is best in-person, although certain hesitancy and hierarchies of status may hinder some of the free-flow that chat-boxes and video conferencing allow in its “flat” social arena. The “draft-only” quality of oral presentation and dialog about the unfinished work is possible both in person and online, but online it is easier in some ways to capture a few traces of the presentation (screenshot, request for draft presentation material, session webpage containing presenters, audience, and topical synopsis in paperless, digital form). The intellectual detail of formal presentations is preserved when sessions move online, but now it is easier to copy/paste or interject questions, concerns, and comparisons by voice, by chat, or using the direct message system in the conference website.
This account gives one person’s learning curve and the strategies to record, reflect, and follow-up with as many of the relevant elements as possible in the age of bottomless digital content, virtual meetings, and extended time frames to digest this new scale of communications face to face or mediated by telecommunication online. Perhaps this hybrid experience will be one of the legacies of the pandemic for more and more thinkers to get acquainted with.
