lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

I wrote this just after attending CAIS at McGill University in Montreal in 2007. It was intended as advice for doctoral students from LIU, but I suppose it is good advice in general.

On Attending Conferences

After every conference I have this idea to write up some conference etiquette but I always forget. So this time, perhaps thanks to my relaxing train trip from Montreal to Toronto, I’ve compiled my thoughts.

Attend the Whole Thing

Unless you are very famous or the paid keynote speaker it is expected that you will attend the whole conference. This means

-Arrive the day before, and do not depart until after the closing session. People are noticing who is there when.

-You are allowed each day one of the following: a) sleep late and miss the first session; b) take too long at lunch and miss the first afternoon session; or c) leave a session early, say, before the final paper but after you’ve listened to the first two.

-I know, it’s an exotic locale, but you aren’t on vacation (at least not yet). So if you plan to do tourist things, plan them for before or after the conference.

-Significant others likely will be bored, unless they are also in the field. And also they likely will cling to you, which will prevent you from being fully engaged. People won’t come up to you to talk about your presentation if you appear to be with someone. Leave your s.o. at home, or suggest a museum tour, or arrange time to spend together enjoying the sights after the conference. In fact, there is usually a little bit of an emotional let-down at the end of a conference, so this is a terrific time to have someone you care for arrive and take you away from your work.

-Plan to make yourself available during the coffee breaks and receptions. People who are introverted, or people who were a little distracted at the time of your presentation but who were interested in your work will be looking for you to chat about your research. If you aren’t present in these downtimes they won’t be able to find you.

-Likewise, more is expected of you than just presenting your paper. You are expected to be part of the give and take of the conference. You should approach people and comment on their work or ask them questions about their research.

-In other words, you are expected to engage the community. This means reading the abstracts, or if possible the papers, before the conference, so the presenters are then enabled to move the discussion forward in the sessions. A good idea is to arrive enough prior to the conference to register and then sit down with the program and the proceedings (increasingly these are online so bring your laptop) and study before the conference begins. Yes, study.

-Ask questions in sessions, but do so intelligently. Do not take everybody’s time to make a speech, and do not ask irrelevant questions. But do ask questions that move the discussion forward or that synthesize a presenter’s results with work by another author or another presenter.

-The time limit is for real; you only have 15 or 20 minutes usually, so do not plan 30 minutes of material and then try to rush through it.

-The assumption is that attendees are prepared for your presentation (see under study above), so do not copy your paper in chunks into PowerPoint. Rather, plan to cover the main points. You do not need to spend much time on literature review or background. Give operational definitions and research questions, but remember, your paper has been or will be read.

-Remember you are in information studies now, or a part of it such as knowledge organization. So your focus should be on the content of interest to the growth of our science. If you’ve created a taxonomy of swimming pools, do no more than one slide about swimming pools. We all know they’re blue and have water. What we want to know is what your warrant was, how your categories were generated, what concept theoretic describes the categories, what is your epistemic stance, what future uses are there for this taxonomy, etc.

-Do focus on your methodology, especially anything interesting or new about it.

-Do give your results, and show how they lead to your conclusions.

-Do not fill up slides with text and read them to the audience; rather, put only one point on a slide as an illustration, and plan to explain it. People cannot pay attention to what you are saying and read your slides at the same time. And people won’t pay attention at all if you are just reading your slides to them.

-Consider illustrative material–pictures, graphs, music–anything lively that makes your point. But don’t be silly; this is science after all. We’re all here to learn together.

-When the timekeeper holds up the time card acknowledge it (a nod is sufficient) and react accordingly. If you have a 2 minute warning and you have ten slides left you do not have time to cover them all–skip to the last one, and use your two minutes to explain it fully. You can come back to the details during the questions.

-Be prepared for questions; except right after lunch there will always be questions. It is okay to say “I didn’t think of that, thanks” but it is better to say “Yes, I covered that in my paper for XYZ Conference and the abstract is on my website.”