Social Science History Association, annual meeting

I am posting from Toronto, where I am attending the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association.  I've been a member of the SSHA for a few years; when I resigned from the American Anthropological Association in protest of their anti-science stance, I joined SSHA. I actually attended my first meeting in the 1980s, and published a paper in their journal, Social Science History, in 1987. But this is the first meeting I've attended since then. This has been an interesting weekend.

Professionally, there are some things the SSHA does well at their meeting, much better than the Society for American Archaeology meeting. Their sessions are all two hours in length. Most contain four papers of 20 minutes, plus time for a discussant, as well as time for discussion with the audience. Some of these discussions are run formally, with questions and answers, and some are more of a free-form discussion between presenters and audience. This format produces sessions much more intellectually satisfying experience than those at the SAA meeting, which has rushed papers, often ten or fifteen in a session, and no time for discussion.  All sessions fit into a single schedule grid, with 15 minutes between 2-hour time slots. This give time for continued discussion after a session, time to talk to people between sessions, and time to get to the next session. Sessions run on time.

The SSHA also has various alternative formats. They have a bunch of "author meets critics" sessions, with review of recent books, discussions with the author, and with the audience, and they have some roundtable events without formal papers.

Intellectually, many sessions have good coherence. The SSHA is organized into a series of 15 or 20 "networks." These are topic-based groups of members; I am in the urban and macro-historical change networks. There are also networks on gender, historical geography, cultural history, politics, and a bunch of others. Panels are reviewed by the networks, and the network coordinators assemble sessions from loose papers. My talk was submitted to the urban network, but they put me in a session organized by the historical geography network because of the GIS theme. The papers were diverse but very interesting and coherent in terms of analyses of movement using historical GIS data.

Each annual conference has an overall theme. Although all sessions do not have to relate to the theme, many do. This year the topic is "inequality," and I managed to hear a talk on inequality by Andrew Abbott, a sociologist I admire. Very interesting. They also evidently have a session about Charles Tilly every year, always overflowing. Tilly was an important part of the SSHA, and many of his colleagues and students are active members. There were four very interesting talks on extending Tilly's work in new directions. The chair was Daniel Little, author of the best social science blog, Understanding Society (it is listed in the right-hand panel here). In the audience discussion I talked about the lack of interest in Tilly's work in the field of anthropology. I mentioned that a paper I wrote (with Frannie Berdan) applying Tilly's model of durable inequality (Tilly 1998) to the Aztecs was rejected by American Anthropologist. Its sitting in a (virtual) drawer right now. Then, after the session, the editor of Social Science History came up and said that she'd love to get our paper applying Tilly's ideas to the Aztecs for the journal!

Charles Tilly

I also met Richard Harris for the first time. So now we both have to stop telling the story of how we had co-authored a paper with someone we have never met (Harris and Smith 2011)! Our paper was a response to a clueless survey of the field of urban studies that left out history and comparison. Our reply: "History matters" for urban studies.

I also met a colleague from ASU, urban historian Philip Vandermeer, for the first time. Its strange when you have to go to Toronto to meet a colleague from across campus.

This meeting was a very different experience from the SAA in that I know very few people. I'm not sure I'd want to go every year (next year the theme is pluralism, not exactly a major theme of my research). There just aren't enough papers from before the 18th century, or focusing on nonwestern settings.  But it has been fun and interesting. I had to overcome my archaeological inferiority complex. What am I doing here with a bunch of heavy-duty social science historians? Why would they care about archaeology? But this is a thoroughly interdisciplinary crowd, and in their estimation archaeology is great if contributes to answering questions of interest.


The image of a cat next to a net is an in-joke from the Tilly session.


Harris, Richard and Michael E. Smith  (2011)  The History in Urban Studies: A Comment. Journal of Urban Affairs 33(1):99-105.

Smith, Michael E.  (1987)  Archaeology and the Aztec Economy: The Social Scientific Use of Archaeological Data. Social Science History 11:237-259.

Tilly, Charles  (1998)  Durable Inequality. University of California Press, Berkeley.

The SAA meeting, 2014

The annual meeting of the SAA (Society for American Archaeology) just concluded in Austin, Tx. It was a fun and exhausting meeting. I was able to talk to most of the people I wanted to see, I met some interesting people, heard some good talks (and some bad talks and lots of mediocre talks). Here are a few random points:

Texas Barbecue!

I had two (count em, 2) excellent barbecue meals while in Austin. My in-laws picked me up for lunch one day, and we went to the County Line Barbecue just outside Austin. Great food, funky atmosphere, great view. Then I went to a home barbecue at the house of Michael Love and Julia Guernsey. Wow, Michael makes a mean briskit! Add beer and a bunch of interesting people, and that party was a high point of the weekend.

Boring (um, yawn, well, umph, snort, I wasn't really snoring, was I?)

Yes, there were some boring talks. Well, actually there were MANY boring talks. See my post for advice on how you too can achieve a boring result in a conference presentation! A lot of people told me that my presentations were interesting and entertaining. I do have a good style (if I do say so myself), but could that mask a lack of content? I have been tempted to give a completely vacuous presentation sometime, but with flashy powerpoints, jokes, and a lively style. Sort of like the people who submit nonsense to journals to see if they will accept the paper.

The Congress Street Bridge Bats

I did walk across the Congress Street bridge just after dusk, and I think I saw a bat! Had a nice dinner with some Mayanists at the funky Margarita Cafe, and we walked back along Congress St.
We clearly missed the dramatic flight of hundreds of bats, but I think there was one straggler flying along, plus a few drunk graduate students looking for the Penn State party (no, it wasn't under the bridge).

Risky behavior (mine)

I did admit to some potentially illicit behavior during my presentation at the Presidential opening symposium Wednesday evening. Hopefully the relevant law enforcement types didn't attend and won't come after me. This reminds me of the public admission I made in an SAA session a number of years ago. It was a session in honor of George Cowgill, and I mentioned some risky behavior I had engaged in as an undergraduate. No, I won't repeat that here. I am far too stuffy and dignified for such admissions.

Is this blog too edgy?

This seems like a pretty tame blog to me. I only say outrageous things now and then, and those things are probably not considered outrageous to anyone but a few cranky archaeologists. But today a colleague suggested that some of my posts are too edgy or over the limit. Hmmmmm. Maybe I should say something really over the top. A couple of years ago, a departmental staffer offered to send tweets when I made a post. Ok, fine. But then when I posted my advice on "how to give a bad conference talk," she decided that was too outrageous for university approval. Was I encouraging bad behavior? That's not the right signal for a university program. I guess we are supposed to be boring. That ended my free tweets from my unit (now there are new staffers, and they are tweeting my posts again, if I remember to tell them).

Interaction among scholars and intellectual progress

When scholars working on closely related topics get together, it is possible to make real progress and greatly advance understanding of the phenomenon at hand. Diverse perspectives and data sets generate synergies, and the give-and-take direct communication of ideas within a small group can generate real intellectual or scientific progress.  Too bad this rarely happens. Much of the structure of contemporary academia works against such synergies and progress. We have events that ostensibly promote intellectual progress -- conferences, symposia at annual meetings, edited books -- but actually serve to inhibit the kind of intensive intellectual interaction that generates advances.

 Several events in the past couple of weeks have brought this point home to me.

(1) A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Anderson posted a nice discussion on Savage Minds titled "numbers." Most of his ten items had to do with the amount of time spent on research and the amount of money required and available for scholarship. But his first item totaled the costs for ten people attending an annual meeting to participate in a symposium (actually, he seriously underestimated the costs), and asked:

But I think there are times when it might make sense to take that collective $5000, round up 10 people who want to collaborate, find a cheap central place to meet—and then do something.  Like write a book.  Create and actually start implementing a project. ... Imagine what 10 people with a common goal could really do if given some serious time to really put their heads together.

My sentiments exactly. You participate in a symposium at an annual meeting, and are given 15 minutes to talk. There is no time for discussion or questions from the audience. Official "discussants" may or may not say something useful. Often the most useful part is the trip to the bar or restaurant after the session.

(2) I spent a week at the Santa Fe Institute last summer. That place is really set up to foster the kind of face-to-face interaction that generates real scientific progress. In just a few days of discussion with a few colleagues, my understanding of urbanism advanced more than it had in several years of normal scholarly activity. A working group was formed, and when I got home I started working on a new topic (urban scaling). I now have a new perspective on urbanism as a social process, and I have many new questions about the similarities and differences between ancient and contemporary cities.

(3) I received received two invitations to participate in events on ancient cities. One was for a session at a larger conference where a bunch of archaeologists working on diverse urban topics in diverse areas of the world all gave papers. While there are some interesting people, and probably some good papers, this is the kind of dead-end event I alluded to above. I declined that invitation. The other invitation was for a targeted conference on urbanism in a specific area, with clear goals of addressing how urban concepts and theories relate to new data. I accepted that one. Part of my reason was to give me a chance to learn about an ancient urban tradition I don't know very well, but part was the greater chances that real intellectual progress would be made. Why? Because of the more focused nature of the topic, and because of the potential for good interactions with colleagues.

(4) I am reviewing an edited volume for a journal. While it has a number of excellent papers, it really falls short of the level of transformational scholarship that can happen when people get together under the right conditions. Consider two models.

Model A.  A group of organizers decide on an intellectual goal and how it can be reached. They invite participants and insist that each does X, Y, or Z in order to reach the goal. The session includes intensive discussion among the participants, and then they go back and write the papers needed to reach the goal (whether or not these match the papers they initially presented).

Model B. A group of organizers invite a bunch of people working on a topic to give papers. They provide some guidelines, but don't enforce strict standards. The papers are presented, there is a bit of discussion with the audience, and then the participants go revise their papers slightly for the published volume.

Guess which model generates more scientific progress? Guess which one is more likely to produce a publication that really advances understanding of a field?

I have blogged about this before, focusing more on the products: edited volumes:

Why are so many edited volumes worthless?
Buried in an edited volume
Swords, chainsaws, and edited volumes.



So, what can be done? Here are a few off-the-cuff suggestions. The basic idea is that participants, organizers, and sponsors should acknowledge the importance of give-and-take discussion among small groups of scholars and work to include this in their events.

• Professional societies should promote more forums and workshops at their annual meetings. The SAA, to take one example, has started to do this, but their annual meeting model remains overwhelmingly focused on the 15-minute, non-interactive, symposium.
• Funders and session organizers should promote these events. The close intensive sessions can be combined with public presentations, since it is good to share ideas more widely and many sponsors and funders require such public presentations.
• Organizers should be creative and diligent in constructing situations of intensive interaction even within the confines of traditional academic structures. Have a pre-meeting, have a post-meeting, set up a listserv for email communications, etc.
• Organizers should not be so hasty to bring every session to print in a lousy edited volume. Of course everyone thinks their particular topic and edited volume is of the highest importance to the universe, but, guess what? That is not always the case. On the other hand, if you have managed to generate interaction and synergy, then publication will likely be a positive step that is valuable to someone other than your mother. 
• Participants can urge organizers in this direction, perhaps by offering to help set up the kind of event I am talking about.

How to give a bad conference talk!

I just found that I had never posted this entry, written over a year ago.

I just got back from the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis. I have always been amazed at the low quality of many presentations at these meetings, starting at the first one I attended as an undergraduate. I am not just picking on students here; some of the worst clunkers are from senior scholars. It seems that many archaeologists must WANT to be boring and even insulting at conferences.  If that is the case, then I can be helpful! Here are some tips on giving bad presentations:

1. Read your paper from a prepared text. This will almost always result in a worse presentation than if you talk from notes, or talk from your slides. This is an excellent way to give a boring talk. But it is not fool-proof; sometimes reading produces a good presentation.
2. Go over the time limit. This makes the session chair mad, it shows a lack of respect for the audience and other presenters, and it makes you look less professional. Maybe this is what you want. If so, read on…..
3. If you want to go over the time limit, here are some good ways to do it:
1. Read your paper from a prepared text. Then when you have misjudged the timing (this happens in most cases), and your allotted time runs out, you still aren’t done! The best material is in the conclusions, right?, and so you can’t just skip them. Go on and forge ahead to gain all the benefits of running overtime.
2. Stop to explain a slide. If you have planned your talk (whether to read or talk from notes), and in the process you take time out to explain a slide, I guarantee you will not finish within the time limit. Yes, this is a money-back guarantee. Try it sometime and let me know if I am right or wrong.
3. Don’t bother to look at the clock or your watch during your talk.
4. Don’t waste time practicing your talk ahead of time.
5. Use a pointer to show something on screen (please don’t use the simple tools of powerpoint to emphasize sites or places or points with arrows, circles, etc.). Much better to wave your pointer (with an unstable hand) in the general direction and hope the audience can find the thing you are talking about, while wasting time.
4. Well, perhaps you are young and nervous and insecure and feel that something will go seriously wrong if you don’t read your paper. That is probably not the case, but if you feel this way, here is a way to make sure your presentation is bad: Write the text using the style of discourse you would use in writing a journal article. That almost guarantees that your talk will be stiff and boring and difficult to follow. Don’t write it out in the style of verbal discourse, and whatever you do don't be informal or clear; that might produce a good presentation and that is not our goal here. Postmodern obfuscatory prose can help you underachieve.
5. Here are some tips for making sure your slides are bad:

1. Have long paragraphs of text in the slide.
2. Use small font (or odd color schemes) so people can’t read the text easily.
3. Use complicated charts and graphs that can’t be comprehended quickly and easily. A table that fills the screen with numbers is a great way to put the audience to sleep.
4. Use a pointer to show the audience something that is painfully obvious on the slide. Needless repetition is good here, both for making you look unprofessional and for putting time on the clock to help you run over the limit.

1. Insult your audience! (this should be #6, sorry) If you don't think the tips listed above will be sufficiently damaging to your talk and reputation, you can step it up a notch and insult the intelligence of your listeners. One of my favorite tricks is to put a bunch of text up on the screen, and then read it out loud, verbatim. That insults me every time.

If you follow some of these tips, you will be sure to give a low-quality presentation at your next professional conference.

Desperate to present a paper? We can help! Go to BogusConference.Com

Every time I get one of these email solicitations for a bogus conference I vow to blog about it. I just received this message:
 -------------------------------------------------------------

Call for Papers from ICSSS 2011

Considering your research in related areas, we cordially invite you to submit a paper to ICSSS 2011.

2011 International Conference on Social Sciences and Society (ICSSS 2011) will be held in October 14-15, 2011 in Shanghai, China.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: economics, management, sociology, education science, linguistics, art theory, political science and other humanities and social sciences.

Website: http://www.icsa-association.org/icsss/

The submission system is open.

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icsss2011

Paper format see: http://www.icsa-association.org/icsss/ps.htm

Paper Submission Due：August 10, 2011(Extended)

Contact Email: icsss2011reg@163.com

Tel: + (86) 186 2787 2331

 -------------------------------------------------------

Okay, what is wrong with this message? (This is like one of those kids games: can you spot five things wrong with this picture?)

1. The theme is way too braod to be of any intellectual value at all.
2. You've never heard of this conference or organization.
3. You've never heard of any of the people on the organizing committee.
4. The registration fee is $1,400. That's right, $1,400. Check the website.
5. The "Call for Papers" is a long list of disciplines (including archaeology!), many of which have nothing to do with one another.

Let's look a bit deeper. I googled one of the organizers, Gary Lee, of the "Information Engineering Institute." In about three minutes of searching, I found him listed as an organizer  for these conferences:

• 2011 International Conference on Social Sciences and Society (ICSSS 2011)
• 2012 International Conference on Electronics, Information and Communication Engineering (EIEC 2012) 
• 2011 2nd International Conference of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
• 2011 International Conference on Future Information Engineering (ICFIE 2011 - Bangkok, Thailand
• 2011 International Conference on Mechanical Engineering and Technology (ICMET 2011) 

If you haven't guessed yet, the goal of these conferences is to make money off students and professionals
who are desperate to present papers. A few years ago, some MIT students submitted some fake papers to one of these bogus conferences. The text was complete gibberish (computer generated blather), yet the papers were accepted. Shades of Alan Sokal.

I wonder what would happen if someone submitted an abstract for the SAA or AIA meetings that was gibberish. A good way to do this would involve the Postmodern Text Generator. Click on the link, and then refresh the site for a new text. I have served as Program Chair for the SAA meetings, and I can't honestly say whether we would have rejected a nonsense abstract or not. Hmmmmmmm...........

How to give a bad presentation at a conference

I just found that I had never posted this entry, written over a year ago.

I just got back from the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis. I have always been amazed at the low quality of many presentations at these meetings, starting at the first one I attended as an undergraduate. I am not just picking on students here; some of the worst clunkers are from senior scholars. It seems that many archaeologists must WANT to be boring and even insulting at conferences.  If that is the case, then I can be helpful! Here are some tips on giving bad presentations:

1. Read your paper from a prepared text. This will almost always result in a worse presentation than if you talk from notes, or talk from your slides. This is an excellent way to give a boring talk. But it is not fool-proof; sometimes reading produces a good presentation.
2. Go over the time limit. This makes the session chair mad, it shows a lack of respect for the audience and other presenters, and it makes you look less professional. Maybe this is what you want. If so, read on…..
3. If you want to go over the time limit, here are some good ways to do it:
1. Read your paper from a prepared text. Then when you have misjudged the timing (this happens in most cases), and your allotted time runs out, you still aren’t done! The best material is in the conclusions, right?, and so you can’t just skip them. Go on and forge ahead to gain all the benefits of running overtime.
2. Stop to explain a slide. If you have planned your talk (whether to read or talk from notes), and in the process you take time out to explain a slide, I guarantee you will not finish within the time limit. Yes, this is a money-back guarantee. Try it sometime and let me know if I am right or wrong.
3. Don’t bother to look at the clock or your watch during your talk.
4. Don’t waste time practicing your talk ahead of time.
5. Use a pointer to show something on screen (please don’t use the simple tools of powerpoint to emphasize sites or places or points with arrows, circles, etc.). Much better to wave your pointer (with an unstable hand) in the general direction and hope the audience can find the thing you are talking about, while wasting time.
4. Well, perhaps you are young and nervous and insecure and feel that something will go seriously wrong if you don’t read your paper. That is probably not the case, but if you feel this way, here is a way to make sure your presentation is bad: Write the text using the style of discourse you would use in writing a journal article. That almost guarantees that your talk will be stiff and boring and difficult to follow. Don’t write it out in the style of verbal discourse, and whatever you do don't be informal or clear; that might produce a good presentation and that is not our goal here. Postmodern obfuscatory prose can help you underachieve.
5. Here are some tips for making sure your slides are bad:

1. Have long paragraphs of text in the slide.
2. Use small font (or odd color schemes) so people can’t read the text easily.
3. Use complicated charts and graphs that can’t be comprehended quickly and easily. A table that fills the screen with numbers is a great way to put the audience to sleep.
4. Use a pointer to show the audience something that is painfully obvious on the slide. Needless repetition is good here, both for making you look unprofessional and for putting time on the clock to help you run over the limit.

1. Insult your audience! (this should be #6, sorry) If you don't think the tips listed above will be sufficiently damaging to your talk and reputation, you can step it up a notch and insult the intelligence of your listeners. One of my favorite tricks is to put a bunch of text up on the screen, and then read it out loud, verbatim. That insults me every time.

If you follow some of these tips, you will be sure to give a low-quality presentation at your next professional conference.