Sphinx

Never mind the hover board, what I was really expecting by 2018 was that we’d all be projecting ourselves into overseas conferences as holograms. Sorry, Belfast, but while I did find some quite nice beer, I still would have preferred to experience the round table discussion of Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler and other delights of this year’s European Social Science History Conference without all the rain…

For the research workshop on Capital in Classical Antiquity that I co-organised in Berlin the following week, we did at least try to take a step or two into the frictionless world of the future with a live feed, making the event available to everyone with an Internet connection, a great deal of patience for all the times when the sound went down or the PowerPoint slides weren’t legible, and, in the case of those logging in from China or Australia, raging insomnia. Was it worth it? My fear is that it may have exacerbated the sense of exclusion, as the discussions after each paper weren’t audible at all (and we gave up trying to record them) while the feed kept running during coffee breaks, showing an empty room when, one might imagine, the real business was going on next door or outside in the sunshine.

It’s not impossible to do a virtual conference – I’ve logged in before now to some things that I’ve heard about via the technologically adept Shawn Graham. But those were organised from the start as virtual web-based events; it’s the idea of a genuine hybrid, or even just making a physical conference properly accessible, that seems to be difficult to do properly without some seriously expensive equipment and substantial technical support. I suspect that the main benefit of what we tried to do will turn out to be the recording of the lectures, to be posted on the website of the TOPOI Excellenz-Initiative (who generously funded the enterprise) in due course – with, I hope, copies of the illegible slides…

That a properly internet-accessible conference isn’t a complete pipe dream, or at least may not be a too distant possibility, is something I deduced from my visit to the University of Toronto at Mississauga last month (which I am still meaning to blog about in more detail. Consider the picture above of part of a new hi-tech teaching room; pods for 6-7 people, each with its own screen (and, I think, microphones, recording equipment, ability to choose what to view or project including what other tables are up to…). The central control console can determine what every table seeings, switching everything to a single view of their own screen or of any individual feed, or leave tables to their own devices. Imagine this being linked up to similar set-ups around the world…

But note that this isn’t even the ‘real’ teaching room; it’s one of two temporary set-ups, so that teaching staff get to try out the equipment, experiment with pedagogical techniques and decide on the best configurations while the real building is being constructed, so the final versions will suit their needs perfectly. Consultation and proper planning? That’s truly a futuristic utopia…