(First off, let me say thanks to the powers that be at McCarran airport for offering that electronic manna from above, free wifi access. Seriously, it’s a classy gesture – “Sorry we took all your money and left every permeable substance you own smelling of stale smoke, but here, check your e-mail before you get on the plane home. Just ’cause we care…”)
Anyhow, I’m heading home from the Society for the History of Technology annual meeting, this year held at the lovely (*cough*), luxurious (*cough* *cough*) Imperial Palace, which will likely be rubble within a year or two, at which point I will celebrate its demise by raising a glass in memory of its inscrutably tangled corridors, impossibly unrecognizable celebrity impersonators, and best of all, torrential post-rain river running through the parking lot. (Seriously. I couldn’t make this up.)
Aside from the surroundings, I had a very good time this year; the sessions we’d organized on mediation and technology were rejiggered a bit by the program committee, but all was well in the end, and my talk (*update:* view slides and notes) was well-received, even in light of the fact that more than half of my slides essentially involved stick figures and speech bubbles. (Again, not so much kidding).
Beyond my particular session, it was a really productive meeting; met a bunch of people I’d been wanting to meet (only one has a blog that I know of), and got to see the SHOT crew who I look forward to catching up to every year. A bunch of grad students joined the mix, with particular standouts being the gang from Hopkins (perennial SHOT stalwarts) and a new crew from Northwestern, which was at SHOT in serious force this year (go Jen Light!). Sharp people and good historians all around.
Finally, it was a few days of plotting and strategizing; had a great talk with Paul Israel about data mining collected historical papers, set up a lunch in DC with Jonathan Coopersmith to finally talk in depth about pornography and technology, managed to plug Zotero (now out in beta, if you haven’t found out already!) and other CHNM projects, and best of all got to spend the better part of a day with Julian Kilker planning all sorts of innovative stuff (more on that in a day or two, when I’ve actually had a chance to sleep and air myself out).
There are a few conferences that I’m getting in the habit of attending regularly; SHOT and 4S in the fall, and SxSWi in the spring – while the sessions can range from transcendent to interminable and the attendee pools overlap far less than I personally feel they ought, I *always* come away invigorated (even when, as now, I’m about to get on a red-eye flight to be followed by a day of meetings). That’s the real value of conferences; as much as I appreciate digital technologies, there’s truly nothing like sharing the same physical space with friends and colleagues for several days.
Even if it is the Imperial Palace.
