by Katharina Rebay-Salisbury (Katharina.Rebay-Salisbury@oeaw.ac.at)
With more and more conference presentations and workshops taking place online or in hybrid form, we need to debate what an oral conference presentation is – and what it is not. Many of the recent events I have attended reported of unpublished finds and findings and asked the audience not to tweet or publicise the findings via other social media outlets.
This always leaves me somewhat puzzled – so you are telling me stuff in secret? For what purpose? My feeling has always been that a conference presentations is akin to a publication. If there is no other way to cite the source, citing a conference paper is, in my opinion, the next best to citing a publication, and slightly preferred to citing a ‘personal communication’.
This is different to – and should be clearly differentiated from - closed workshops, in which we debate issues freely, exchange opinions and develop ideas with participating colleagues we know and trust. EAA can provide such a setting, and this year’s virtual conference format was closed to all but registered EAA members. Participants saw the number of people following a talk or session, but not necessarily their names unless they participated in the chat.
In the framework of a workshop with known participants, rules can be set and agreed upon. The ‘Chatham House Rule’, for instance, is sometimes useful: When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.
With platforms such as Zoom, talks broadcast via YouTube or Facebook livestream, it becomes less clear who the audience is. Increasingly, contributions are filmed, and even if consent is mandatory for upload, once a talk is broadcast, its distribution is not controllable. (On the plus side – our research may become viral! Even if it is unlikely – how cool would that be!)
This may be problematic when sensitive issues are discussed. Gender, ancient DNA and cultural heritage are just a few of the themes that link archaeology to identity and other politics.
Copyright issues, in particular the use of images without proper referencing of the source, may again come to haunt us. Who has not browsed the internet for images to illustrate a talk without investing hours in hunting down the copy-right holder? In the future, with more and more contributions remaining on the web, it will be necessary to pay more attention to careful citing and crediting the sources. But which country’s law exactly applies? There may be some room for interpretation if it is the registration of the speaker’s affiliation, the organizer’s registration, or the video platform that counts.
In my opinion, there needs to be more clarity about the rules of the formats in which we are presenting our research. Every scholar needs to ask themselves what they are presenting, for which purpose, to whom, and in which format. If we are presenting preliminary work via a conference or virtual setting, it is out in the open. Please do not bother with ‘do not tweet’ signs.
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