“I can’t feel the panel.” This is how I summarised my first day at the EASST/4S conference taking place in “virPrague” to my partner. Put frankly, I felt a bit frustrated. I had been looking forward to the conference for quite a long time, excited that it would offer me multiple chances: the chance to share findings from my research in a panel on inequality I had set up together with my colleague Nelius Boshoff from Stellenbosch University, whom I was really looking forward to meet again in Prague; the chance to present myself to the STS community, which I am trying to connect with and make myself belong to. Being a post-doc whose affiliation provides a highly interesting space to carry out science studies, yet is not linked with STS institution-wise, I am tasked to build up my scholarly network somewhat on my own – and the EASST/4S conference promised to be a great opportunity to progress in this regard. As much as I was curious about the research presented at the conference, I was curious about getting to know people personally – and, admittedly, as an academic with care responsibilities, I was also curious about having some days abroad, just for myself, even if it was for work. 

These were my expectations, before COVID-19 changed life substantially. When the organisers announced the conference would not be cancelled but shift into virtual space, I was happy and relieved that the efforts of application had not been in vain, yet also wondering which of my initial expectations would materialise, as ‘face-to-face’ interaction would be mediated by technology. 

‘Locating and timing matters’, also for virtual conferencing   

Now the conference started like this for me: I was waiting for my mum to arrive to look after the children, so that I could eventually finalise my presentation scheduled for day two, while I had also selected ten panels (for day one only) which I deemed highly relevant and thought I shouldn’t miss. The first sessions, then, felt rather odd. I was sitting at my desk at home, with an unstable internet connection, trying to follow talks while hearing my children play outside. This was when I first realised how ‘locating and timing’ mattered – also with regard to participating in a virtual conference. My timing had been bad due to the delay in preparing my talk. And my location made it rather difficult to concentrate.

I found it somewhat hard to switch my mind into a conference mood, and suddenly realised how much it makes a difference to physically ‘be’ somewhere. The presentations I listened to were most interesting; however, I couldn’t ‘feel’ the panel. Over the course of the conference, the informal rule and habit emerged that listeners switched off videos and mics during the talks, and only turned them on for asking a question or making a comment afterwards. This was for good reasons, including to save privacy and bandwidth. However, I perceived a downside to this practice, namely that the reaction of the audience during the talks could hardly been grasped. One could not see facial expressions, hear murmurs or laughter in the room, see people taking notes or sending bodily signs that show their intention to engage in interaction. I realised that active listening is obviously only one of various bodily actions which usually take place when I am in a room with a speaker in front. What it also does at a subconscious level is absorbing the ambiance and the audience – and this is what I was missing.

Physical presence matters for discursive exchange 

How much such bodily perceptions matter for the scientific discourse, albeit in a different context, was broached by a panel organised by Mareike Smolka, Ricky Janssen and Cristian Ghergu from Maastricht University, which dealt with “Affects, emotions, and feelings in data, analysis, and narrative”. In the first of two sessions, Mareike Smolka presented insights from on-going research on the relation between affect and collaborative action in interdisciplinary collaborations carried out together with Erik Fisher (Arizona State University) and Alexandra Hausstein (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology).¹ They highlighted how tensions that emerge in interdisciplinary collaborations are as much cognitive as they are bodily felt by providing auto-ethnographic experiences such as the situation when Erik Fisher was challenged by a senior member of a research group he was meant to collaborate with in the context of Socio-Technical Integration Research. The text passage they used for illustration is captured by the screen shot below:

 

 

While I was listening to Mareike reading out this passage loudly, I thought: Yes, this is exactly what is lacking in the virtual conference space – the ability to “detect” and “process” the affective dimension of colleagues’ reactions (these are the terms used by Mareike, Erik, and Alexandra), to feel how their comments resonate with my own questions, assumptions, and interests. In a virtual space where you only see one or two faces on a screen surrounded by black squares with white letters, it is hard to feel the affective dimension of our research – “to move with and be moved by” (Mareike, Erik, and Alexandra citing Myers, 2012: 177) other bodies and their curiosities.²

The absence of physical presence complicates the conference situation not only for speakers, but also for listeners, particularly first-time participants who would benefit from experiencing how peers in a scientific community react to each other. This is difficult to grasp on a screen where people appear only to ask the speaker their question. And it also makes it more challenging for ‘newcomers’ to get into the conversation. Not being physically together in a room made it considerably more challenging to sense when the right moment has come to raise my hand (i.e., to click on the blue hand in Zoom), ask a question or make a comment (which in the realm of scientific conferences is also a performative act with image-building effects; see Hitzler and Hornbostel, 2014: 71). Some moments of awkward silence following the end of talks made me think I may not be the only person insecure in this regard. 

Feeling virtual vibes, finally 

What I described so far, however, is not the full picture of my conference experience. During the first two conference days, I somewhat struggled with the lack of immediacy sitting alone in my room while listening to scholars’ presentation. But then on Thursday something unexpected happened: I started to feel conference vibes. It happened while I participated in the panel on affects, emotions and feelings, and in hindsight, I think it happened not only due to the inspiring talks and lively debates starting off in the panel, but also as its topic made me reflect about my own affects as conference attendant. This reflection helped me to reconcile the fact that I was bodily at home, which also meant my kids would sometimes come for a cuddle or climb on my knees, but that I was somewhere else mentally at the same time. On Friday, when I attended the last sessions, the virtual vibes of the conference even made me write some enthusiastic and personal tweets (which I usually refrain from posting): 

 

 

All in all, and with a bit of time having passed, I see that the EASST/4S conference in its virtual format has actually met a lot of my initial expectations. Although I did not encounter scholars face-to-face, I was able to connect with colleagues and continue exchange via emails, which partly offered more substantial exchange than small talks at a coffee break. This is not to say that I would not have loved to have a coffee break in Prague. However, in hindsight, I see more and more the advantages this virtual format has offered – such as being able to bring my kids to bed after the conference days were over, and to watch recorded sessions I was unable to attend simultaneously. Eventually, the conference made me aware of the fact that I am able to feel virtual vibes, which was truly a new experience to me.  

 

 

1 Their conference paper was titled “From Affect to Action: Choices in Attending to Disconcertment in Interdisciplinary Collaborations”. 

2 I want to thank Mareike Smolka, Erik Fisher and Alexandra Hausstein for granting me permission to incorporate the screen shot including the vignette, as well as for clarifying concepts and making instructive comments on an earlier version of this text. 

 

 

Bibliography

Hitzler R and Hornbostel S (2014) Wissenschaftliche Tagungen – zwischen Disput und Event. In: Behnke C, Lengersdorf D and Scholz S (eds) Wissen – Methode – Geschlecht: Erfassen des fraglos Gegebenen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, pp. 67–78.

Myers N (2012) Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter. Durham: Duke University Press.​

 

Introduction

This paper is concerned with a reflexive account of the experience of both delivering and listening to presentations in an online environment and the changes that it has generated in terms of pedagogy. In particular, it considers the experience of the use of comics and associated videos as a means of delivering learning (whether this is framed within a conference environment or a more conventional on-campus teaching context). The starting point for this discussion is with the EASST/4S Conference as it was one of the first large-scale, on-line conferences attended by the author. The paper also reflects on some of the other conferences and workshops attended in a virtual format and with the subsequent early experience of on-line post-graduate teaching based on this early conference experience.

 

 

EASST was to be east but in reality it went everywhere

As the conference went virtual it, de facto, changed the rules of ‘engagement’ around the delivery of papers and how we communicate complex issues in, what could be seen as, a fractured environment. We rely on visual cues from those that we communicate with as a means of assessing understanding, but the flow of most conference presentations doesn’t allow for a fully interactive session due to time constraints. So, what if we could have the best of both worlds. Having a presentation but with the opportunity to answer questions in real time and within the various flows of the presentation.

There is an obvious challenge associated with a virtual conference. How do we ensure that there is sufficient engagement from those who attend the session? Is it enough to simply turn up and present a presentation over the appropriate conference platform? How do we get engagement from those in the audience and, perhaps more to the point, how do we gauge the effectiveness of that engagement when we are busy making a presentation? Finally, how do we design into conference presentations the potential for chance meetings in the virtual coffee breaks? These are things that we often take for granted when attending a conference as we are ‘in the room’ and have a range of visual cues that provide us with feedback. The key challenge of a virtual conference is, therefore, around the processes of engagement. It was as a means of trying to address that issue that we need to look to the work of Aristotle (Gallo 2017).   

 

 

If we take on Aristotle’s’ arguments to heart, then the development of pathos is likely to be a key component of delivering in an online environment as it will allow for a greater sense of engagement from the audience with the presenter. It was an attempt to explore the notion of pathos that drove the underpinning pedagogical approach that is discussed here.

One of the approaches that the author had trialed before the conference was through the use of visualisation – initially as a means of storyboarding the academic content of slides – along with that of storytelling. The next logical step in that process was to develop ‘stories’ that were bespoke to the course being taught. An obvious extension of the visual storytelling approach was though the use of comics as a medium for communication and so a series of avatars were created to provide an additional commentary on the slide deck – usually as a means of provoking and questioning the speaker! The avatars were also embedded in a series of bespoke academic comics that were designed as the spine of the teaching approach.  The purpose of attending the EASST/4S conference was to deliver an academic paper, but also to present a Making and Doing session on the use of those bespoke academic comics. The aim was to outline how comics theory could be used as a means of shaping the structure of a lecture, or presentation, and how the comics approach could be used to explain models and concepts in a concise manner. The approach was aimed at providing a more accessible means of delivering learning to those students who were studying in a second language. Then along came COVID-19 and the impetus changed considerably!

 

 

A comics-based approach to uncertainty

The theory of comics provides some insights into the ways that visual storytelling can be used as a means of communication (Potts 2013; Eisner 1996). The main elements of a comic-based approach are shown above and consists of images and words being used in a self-reinforcing way to enhance recall and understanding.  There is a strong psychological basis for using the ways in which we process information via our cognitive short-cuts (heuristics) and we can use these processes as a means of developing understanding (through the visualisation of the narrative) and developing recall (Cohn 2013; Eisner 1996). These images and words are framed into discrete elements that are designed to develop meaning within the narrative structure (McCloud 1993). Each of these frames are linked together by the flows of the argument within the overall narrative, thereby allowing for the progression of ideas and concepts. The final element of comics theory relates to the gutters – the spaces between the frames. These can be seen as spaces of emergence in which additional issues can be raised or developed as a function of the interactions between frames to create moments that matter or to offer the potential for alternative interpretations within the narrative structure (see, for example, Berlatsky 2009). Taken together the comics approach provides for a means of providing insights into academic issues and developing insight and understanding. The COVID-19 changed that dynamic and led to a shift from the ‘static’ form of the comic to a more dynamic approach which required the animation of the avatar as a means of addressing the pathos element highlighted by Aristotle.

 

 

Animating the avatar and the emergence of Avatar TV

Right at the outset it needs to be stated that I had not produced a video lecture before COVID-19.  This wasn’t a case of tapping into an existing skill set to turn conventional lecture material into video that could be delivered on-line. The need to pivot from a face-to-face form of delivery under the pandemic generated the impetus to use the software that produced the avatar to generate a talking avatar. That was then inserted into the slide deck and a script produced that allowed the avatar to take over as the presenter. 

The delivery of the presentations took place in two discrete sessions – a formal academic panel and a Making and Doing session. The experience of both sessions was quite different. The panel session was a formal 15-minute presentation which was timed when producing the video. Questions were asked both within the session via the chat function but also at the end in a more traditional way. The impression was that the panel session went well and there appeared to be considerable engagement from the audience. The Making and Doing (M&D) session was a different experience. First of all, the author had limited experience of such a session as it appears to be unique to EASST/4S. Secondly, the time allocated for the session was 60 minutes and this generated logistical challenges in terms of breaking the presentation down into 15/20-minute blocks. The timing is important as 20 minutes appears to be the optimal time period for an online presentation. With hindsight, this introduced uncertainty into the timing as the questions occurred after each block. The level of engagement was such that the presentation came close to overrunning the time slot due to the extent of the questions from the audience in the period between the block delivery. With hindsight, it might have made more sense to deal with the M&D session by utilising a blended approach where the videos were made available prior to the session and this would have allowed the delegates to use the time available for the discussion. This would have been more effective but presupposes that the delegates would watch the videos prior to the session. 

 

 

Concluding Comments

The move to an online format in which the avatar is given voice and put into a self-contained video lecture offers considerable benefits in terms of developing engagement (pathos) compared to a voice-over presentation and, possibly even an on-line, face-to-face lecture. Whilst the start-up cost of producing an avatar-led presentation are higher, if this is part of a wider approach to learning design then the material could be current for several years before it needs to be re-developed. In contrast, a ‘live’ on-line face-to-face session will incur the same time-related costs every time that it is delivered. In addition, the use of the avatar can generate the pathos that was highlighted earlier, especially if the avatar can be given a personality that is different to that of the lecturer. For those who are nervous about appearing ‘on-line’ in a video, the avatar-led approach offers some additional benefits. In terms of a conference presentation, the benefits are not as obvious and the main one is in terms of controlling the timing of the presentation to the timeslot that is allocated. It remains to be seen how this approach will develop in the future, but it could be argued that our institutions will change as a function of the COVID-19 pandemic and we will need to explore new, more student-centred approaches to learning and teaching as a consequence. This is a first step in a brave new (avatar-led) world. 

 

 

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Will Varner and Carl Potts of the New York School of Visual Arts and Alan Irwin from Copenhagen Business School for comments on the underpinning construction of the comics approach which is described in this paper. Needless to say, all errors of omission or commission remain those of the author, although a certain avatar may also bear some responsibility as well.

 

 

Bibliography

Berlatsky, Eric. 2009. ‘Lost in the Gutter: Within and Between Frames in Narrative and Narrative Theory’, Narrative, 17: 162-87.

Cohn, N. . 2013. The visual language of comics. Introduction to the structure and cognition of sequential images (Bloomsbury Academic: London).

Eisner, W. 1996. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.: New York, NY).

Gallo, C. . 2017. Talk like TED. The 9 public speaking secrrets of the world’s top minds. (Pan Books: London).

McCloud, S. 1993. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art (HarperCollins Publishers: New York, NY).

Potts, C. 2013. The DC Guide to Creating Comics. Inside the art of visual storytelling (Watson-Guptill Publications: New York, NY).

Introduction

Organizing a large international conference is a truly daunting task, so there is no other way to begin this commentary than by showering praise on the courageous team of organizers behind the Prague2020 conference. From my perspective as a remote participant located in Denmark, every aspect of the online conference appeared to function very smoothly. I can only begin to imagine the amount of invisible work carried out behind the scenes that enabled this mega-event to get off the ground.  

 

A social experiment in remote participation

I happen to know that a great number of other people also enjoyed the conference. Not only did I participate in sessions with lively debates, I also experienced the luxury of hanging out with a group of other Danish STS scholars during the conference. This social interaction was the outcome of an initiative by the Danish Association for Science and Technology Studies (of which I am a board member). A few months prior to the conference, we decided to encourage Danish remote participants to book a room in a particular hotel north of Copenhagen during the conference. Our hope was to create some sort of conference vibe and hold ad hoc meetings and joint activities alongside the conference. We had no idea how many people would buy into this idea, but as it happened more than 20 people booked a room and signed up to a shared Teams page, allowing us to do a bit of ad hoc coordination. We ended up having a very nice “conference dinner” together on the second night of the conference and a fair share of other mingling and serendipitous meetings. We enjoyed a particularly proud moment together when the Danish TANTlab received one of the EASST awards. 

 

 

Normal conferencing?

When thinking about my own experience of the virPrague conference in a Danish hotel, I try to remind myself that there is actually no such thing as a normal conference or a normal way to meet. This point became very clear to me when I recently read the Dutch historian Wilbert Van Vree’s marvelous account of how meeting rules and behavior have developed since medieval times (Van Vree, 1999). With Van Vree’s book in mind, I can begin to imagine what might happen if people from other centuries could time-travel to our last so-called normal 4S/EASST conference, the one in Barcelona 2016. They would surely be puzzled. Medieval warrior groups would be proud to see that the conference organizers continued a procedure they invented – a security guard posted at the entrance made sure that swords, battleaxes, and other weapons were not brought inside. But the same warriors would be absolutely shocked to see that the guards allowed women to enter. People from the medieval church councils would recognize the seating arrangement, with some presumably higher-ranking people sitting in front, lower-ranking people in the audience, and inferior others standing by the walls. But they would ask themselves why the inferior meeting participants by the walls only had to stand for 20 minutes, rather than for hour after hour. People from the debating societies of the late 19th century would applaud the authority of the chairpersons who self-confidently allocated speaking time and occasionally cut people off. But they would also wonder why the people in Barcelona completely overlooked the importance of calling a vote.

 

Some personal experiences

So how did I experience the virPrague conference – being of course not entirely able to shake off my preconceptions of what a normal conference should be like. During other conferences, I have found myself moving from an early phase of wild interest in too many different things to a final stage of severe conference fatigue. The experience of virPrague was similar, but not exactly the same. Before and during the Prague conference, I used the feature on the homepage that allowed me to add items to my personal calendar. This of course made it painfully clear that I wanted to see too much, but the pleasant surprise was that it also allowed me to quickly navigate between sessions in a way that was much easier than trying to move my physical body out of one room and into another without disturbing two presenters and their audiences. For better and for worse, the materialities of the meeting did force me to stick with presentations that I did not find immediately interesting. 

I also found the physical strain of listening for many hours easier to bear. The online format made it possible to move my body to more comfortable positions with my microphone muted and my camera shut off. This meant, of course, that the speaker’s sense of whether their talk had captured the audience and demanded their attention was diminished. I also experienced this with my own presentation. My sense of the audience consisted entirely of the people who responded directly. Luckily, there were a good number of active participants in the session and a good fit between the presentations. But I heard from others, who were unfortunate to be in a thematically scattered session, that it was quite an eerie experience to present to a passive audience. 

The experience of conference fatigue phase caught up with me a little later than I had expected, most likely because the physical and emotional labor was less demanding than that of sitting in a conference hall. When the fatigue hit me, I resorted to some of the old strategies: micro-tourism (in this case going for walk), coffee sessions with other participants, and catching up on other work. I regret that I did not use this phase of the conference to contact people whom I had briefly interacted with during the sessions. This is something I will have to do better in future. 

 

Thinking about the future

I have heard people say that they hope we will never have a strictly online conference again. I too hope that the coronavirus goes away, but I am not so sure about the conference format. Has the climate emergency, as well as the ever-growing size of our STS conferences, made the time ripe for a radical change? I realize that not everything is ideal with an online conference, but neither is the climatic situation in which we have put ourselves. Should we really, mindlessly, continue an academic ritual that causes ever more people to fly to international conferences? I think not. In fact, I will encourage the leadership of 4S and EASST to impose a 10-year ban on STS conferences that require air travel!

How would that work? The quick answer is that no-one knows. But the better answer is that once the decision is made, we will have forced ourselves to ramp up our sociological imagination. What kinds of “normal, inevitable, and necessary” meeting practices need to be challenged? What kinds of new socio-technical meeting formats might stimulate and sustain our STS community? Would it be possible to designate a number of regional locations accessible by train, where remote participants could create new types of conference experiences? What else might we do to engage all generations of STS researchers in different parts of the world? How can we stimulate a broad-ranging experimentation and reflection on new types of meetings? What might we collectively learn from being an STS community and doing STS under these new conditions? All of these questions and many more would immediately be raised by a ban on grand physically co-located STS conferences. The questions would be troubling and demanding, but I believe they would also spark an extremely interesting discussion and collective experimentation within our community for the next decade.

The environmental benefits are clear – far less CO2 would be emitted. But there are also other immediate benefits. For one, just think of the message a 10-year ban would send to other disciplines. The STS community would demonstrate that we are not afraid to throw ourselves into a radical collective experiment, and we could proudly say that we are not just talking the talk about responsibility. In this way, a self-imposed ban would be a great way to renew our claim to be a bold, avant-garde discipline.

With this comforting thought, I shall end this personal reflection on the virPrague conference. I warmly thank the organizers not only for creating a superb rescue plan in the era of the coronavirus pandemic, but also for setting us on a path that might lead to the more sustainable organization of STS in the future. 

 

 

Reference

Van Vree, W (1999) Meetings, manners, and civilization: the development of modern meeting behaviour. Leicester: Leicester University Press.