Reflecting on the 'Romantic Futurities' conference.

We were supposed to have been at Keats House, London, listening to the papers of 46 researchers from around the world while sat in rooms in which John Keats (1795-1821) wrote ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Perhaps we would have gone for a ramble across Hampstead Heath in the glowing summer sun of an evening (or is that too idealistic?).

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees

        In some melodious plot

         Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

               Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

We actually found ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, sat in home offices, at kitchen tables, at desks in bedrooms, staring at laptop or desktop screens.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

But it wasn’t all bad! Far from it! This article is going to be about how I, as part of a team of three, decided not to cancel our conference but to move it online and embrace the advantages a digital conference have to offer. I’m going to think about how we changed our ‘best-laid’ plans and reflect on some of the questions about conferencing that have been prompted by hosting a conference in a new and non-traditional online format.

Every two years the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) organises and hosts a conference for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers. I should first quickly clarify that I do not mean ‘Romantic’ in terms of love, but in terms of time period: the Romantic period is defined as the years 1780-1830 (although these dates are always the subject of great debate). I am one of the Postgraduate Representatives on the BARS Committee and it was my responsibility, along with the other Postgraduate Representative and the Early Career Representative, to plan and then convene this conference. We chose to theme our conference, ‘Romantic Futurities’, as we wanted to encourage people, among other things, to consider how the future was anticipated and imagined by writers and artists in the Romantic era, along with considering posterity, legacies, and the future of the field of Romantic studies. Little did we know how much our conference theme would resonate with current times!

Before:

We had an incredible response to our original call for papers. Over 50 researchers applied and we have to slim this down to 46 papers as this was the maximum capacity the site could have managed. We accepted the papers, formed the panels, invited two keynote speakers, arranged the catering, and planned workshops designed to upskill our delegates in terms of publishing, interviewing, and employability. We worked hard throughout January and February to make our conference a success. It was therefore a huge disappointment when we had to announce that the cancellation of ‘Romantic Futurities’ due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

        Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

        Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

               Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

                       And leaden-eyed despairs,

Transforming it to an online conference:

We did not remain in despair for long. We decided to see if it would be viable to host this conference online. We already had a WordPress site where we had posted the call for papers, biographies about our keynote speakers, and descriptions of the workshops. We could turn this into the website for our conference and host presentations there. We needed to see if our workshop leaders, keynote speakers, and our delegates would be willing to deliver their content in an online format.

This meant sending out Google Forms, and lots of them. We wanted to know if they would be willing to participate in a conference online? Did they want the conference to be synchronous or asynchronous? What platform would be best for any live elements? In what format would they record their presentation: audio, video, both, neither? Did they want their presentations to be wholly public or for individuals who deliberately registered for the conference?

We estimated that we would need 9 presenters to agree to deliver their paper online to make this conference viable. We hoped for about 20 people to register to attend the online version of this conference.

37 Postgraduate and Early Career researchers presented papers at this conference and over 250 people registered to attend.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

        No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

        In ancient days by emperor and clown:

The Conference

A lot of our original delegates said that they did not mind if the conference was run live or asynchronous. Due to the time scale we had to move this online (about 5-6 weeks), we decided to ask the paper presentations to be asynchronous, allowing people to access them around the world at any time, and the workshops and keynote lectures would be live. This would create a sense of interaction, community and engagement which might be harder to generate just from asynchronous presentations.

Each presenter recorded a video or audio presentation of their paper. Considering that none of them had access to libraries or to archives, the quality of their research was incredible. Furthermore, many had never recorded presentations and so learnt how to use new software while dealing with a pandemic and research barriers. We uploaded these onto our website - https://romanticfuturities.com/ - and password protected their papers, in order to protect intellectual copyright.

The live elements of our conference consisted of three careers workshops (‘The Non-Academic Job Market’, ‘Working in Heritage’, and ‘Academic Interviews’), two keynote lectures, and a poetry reading by former Keats House poet, Deanna Rodger. We used Zoom for these sessions.

We had between 50 and 90 people attend these live sessions from all around the world. Even the smallest audience, 50, was larger than the number of people we could have welcomed to Keats House. Our analytics of the website on Saturday 12 June alone showed that we had over 250 visitors to our site and over 2800 site visits. These numbers blew our minds. So many more people had engaged with this conference than we anticipated.

What Next?

Hosting this online conference has made me consider the following questions:

·      What is the value of an academic conference?

·      What are the disadvantages of a physical conference?

·      How does an online conference overcome some of the difficulties of a physical conference?

The point of a conference, particularly a Postgraduate and Early Career one, is to share our new research with our colleagues and fellow researchers in a friendly and welcoming forum. New ideas are suggested, insight is given, and you leave with ways in which to develop and enhance your research. Furthermore, they give people the opportunity to meet others in their field and to forge connections (network).

Can this happen online?

Of course it can. Each paper was part of a thematic panel and had a forum discussion underneath it where people commented on each other’s work and asked questions about their research. Delegates responded to this and even appreciated the fact that staging this part of the conference asynchronously gave them time to consider their response at greater length. We had more detailed discussions, and therefore perhaps more valuable discussions, because we could take time to consider our responses.

People met through these online forums and promised to contact each other via email after the conference. It was convivial and collegial, except that these exchanges were through a computer screen instead of in person.  

A disadvantage of physical conferences is that you have to run parallel panels, meaning that delegates have to choose between papers. Panels compete for the same audience. This was not so with our asynchronous conference. Everyone could attend every panel if they so wished. They could pause and rewind a speaker if something wasn’t clear. This immediately makes the subject material discussed at an online conference more accessible than at a physical one.

Discussing accessibility leads me onto considering the financial costs and environmental impact of running a conference. In our original list of delegates we had people from America, Australia, the Philippines, as well as countries in Europe such as Romania, Italy, and Germany. Now, no one had to fly over seas or travel by train to attend the conference. No one had to pay for accommodation in a London hotel or hostel. No one had to budget for eating out instead of at home. This may sound boring (and part of the fun of conferences is in the travel) but sadly conferences are usually not very inclusive events as you have to be able to afford the registration fees, the accommodation, and the travel – or be lucky enough to win a grant or a bursary to attend. By hosting the conference online, we levelled the playing field so to speak.

Yet this leads me onto one final reflection. We would never have moved this conference online if we weren’t forced to by circumstances beyond our control. We like the conviviality of meeting people and chatting in person, we like heading to the bar after a day of panels and discussing them with a drink, we enjoy exploring a new city as we travel to these conferences. All of this is natural human behaviour but it makes us complicit in sustaining a practice that is exclusive and also not environmentally friendly. I think I was struck by the number of registrants we had who would never have been able to make it if this conference had been held at Keats House. What opportunities to network, share research, think of potential new collaborations, would have been missed? From this experience, I am taking away a reinvigorated desire to increase and expand the accessibility of academia and of attending conferences. There were things we didn’t think of in time (such as gaining licences to provide recordings of workshops) but it is undeniable how many more people benefited from the conviviality and connected created online by this conference. We hoped 20 people would sign up to this conference, and our audience ended up being over ten times as big. Over 250 people signed up and contributed to the live and asynchronous elements, showing that more than ever before people want and need to feel connected and involved in academia and in research. 

Thank you for a fantastic few days. The conference has been an amazing experience and I’m really grateful I had the opportunity to share my work via this online format.