The experience of the conference seems to evolve as one’s career grows—from the overwhelming experience of the graduate student newbie to the new challenges of working the publishing tables as a tenure-track faculty member developing a book. I seem to be in the joiner stage. A member of two special interest groups (SIGs), one caucus, and a committee, I devoted a good part of my conference to meetings rather than panels. This was somewhat disheartening, as I missed a lot of good work, but it has also made me think about value of working to improve SCMS from within.

I’ve been a core team member of the Media Industries SIG since its inception in 2012. In only three years, this SIG, which pulls from film, television, game, and new media studies, has grown to become one of the largest SIGs at over four hundred members. This year, we received an incredibly diverse range of proposals for SIG sponsorship, many more than the eight we are invited to submit. Among the topics reflected were media metrics, historical queer film, independent media, and advertising. The SIG’s growth is at once a testament to the vitality of this expanding area of research and a responsibility to continue articulating what is the role of the SIG within SCMS. For example, we’ve been working to create an “experts page,” detailing the particular subject areas of interest for our members, with the idea that this could become a resource for journalists needing quotes and talking heads. While we haven’t cracked the code of how to publicize this sort of resource, the desire to promote our members remains a priority for the SIG. I should note that this topic—identifying the continuing purpose and mission of a special interest group—came up at the Television Studies SIG meeting as well. For new and older SIGs, then, members seem eager to continue to push the possibilities of what an organization as large as SCMS can help us achieve.

My view of the possible scope of an organization like SCMS has been enlarged by serving on the public policy committee. The work of this committee tends to take place behind the scenes, so you may not know it exists even as it works to suggest policy updates and innovations to the SCMS Board that help you do your jobs better. In the past two years that I’ve been a member, the committee has provided advice for the board and drafted documents to advance the organization’s efforts to advocate for Fair Use protections (in publishing and teaching), Open Access, DMCA exemptions for teachers, and Network Neutrality (more on SCMS policies can be found here). There’s a whole world of activity at SCMS beyond the conference, and volunteering can be one path towards uncovering those efforts.

In the past few years, we’ve seen a wide range of new activities created solely through the support of the Board and the willingness of SCMS members to volunteer their time. Cinema Journal has expanded its reach online in a variety of (open access) ways to serve member interests. First, there is the “Teaching Dossier,” which features blog posts from members discussing their teaching strategies in line with particular themes for each issue. Second, the always entertaining “Aca-Media” podcast co-hosted by Christine Becker and Michael Kackman delivers a monthly program that features scholar interviews and discussions of current issues within media studies. The Media Industries SIG sponsored an affiliate event (one of three) at this year’s SCMS about the Sony Hack. Super topical, this event, too, helps us envision additional ways that SCMS can address current events and the place of scholars analyzing and commentating upon them. All of this activity confirms that SCMS members have the potential to inspire the organization to become more visible to scholars and the broader public across a range of platforms, transforming the conference into only one more opportunity to enhance the value of SCMS for all who work to give it meaning.

The magnitude of our annual meeting resembles a force of nature. Every March, as the tide of SCMS rises, we scurry to finish our papers and pack our bags. We arrive to the airport in droves and board buses to the conference hotel, mounting a peaceful but impressive take-over of the conference city. This year, one customs official looked over my shoulder at the line behind me with some wonderment, asking, “How many of there are you?” My favorite tweet of the conference came from Daniel Grinberg, who posted this exchange at the airport: “Customs guard: How much money are you carrying on you? Me: $10 to $15? Customs guard: Oh, are you here for the film conference?”

At the conference hotel, we squeeze into elevators, dash from panel to panel, converse in hallways, and, later, drain the liquor supply, a sea of name badges dotting the hotel bar in bursts of red and black. Anticipating our whirlwind conference schedule, we plan dinners and drinks with publishers, colleagues, and fellow panelists weeks in advance, and still somehow miss seeing some of our friends, hence texts sent like, “Hope you’re having a good SCMS. I’m here, too. Miss you.” Finally, we return home, exhausted but exhilarated, already contemplating what panel we may propose for next year’s conference.

Ultimately, SCMS’s large conference size marks an advantage for all its members, offering a diverse and stimulating meeting and increasing our odds of getting papers accepted, a factor we all deeply appreciate. The spring gathering provides a central, one-time-a-year gathering point for film and media scholars in all of our various interests, which allows us to more accurately trace shifts in our fields, as well as to engage in truly interdisciplinary scholarship.

Yet, for those conference attendees who seek a stronger network in their field or who feel lost in the crowd, allow me to pass along some good advice that I took this year: join a Scholarly Interest Group. While this is especially important for those film and media scholars who are still in the process of making professional connections, such as graduate students and junior faculty, it holds true for any SCMS members who wish to make meaningful, professional contacts.

There are now 27 Scholarly Interest Groups in SCMS, ranging from Animated Media to Radio Studies to Scandinavian Studies.

These groups provide a meeting point and a forum to share ideas for scholars who share particular interests in sub-fields within film and media studies. However, SIGs can also provide the much-needed service of reducing the enormous scope of SCMS to a manageable and productive size. Thus, SIGs function like a home base, a site where fellowship, mentorship, and scholarship can ignite and flourish under the umbrella of a shared concern/passion.

This year, I joined the War and Media Studies SIG, a newly-formed organization devoted to studying war and militarism in film, television, radio, and an array of new media formats. Exploring the history and culture of warfare, the War and Media Studies group will be highly interdisciplinary, intersecting such varied fields as rhetoric, history, political science, sociology, trauma studies, gender/race/sexuality studies, surveillance studies, cultural studies and peace studies. At the inaugural meeting, the range of scholars (grad students to full profs) and approaches to studying war and its representations impressed all of us. This was also reflected in the conference program, which listed several sessions that spoke to the theme of war and militarism in some form or fashion. I found the “Teaching 9/11” workshop, for example, to be especially thought-provoking and relevant, not only in terms of how we can address the subject of 9/11, and war in general, in our classrooms, but also how we can face the challenges of teaching in post-secondary institutions that are increasingly under threat of severe cutbacks and censorship. In other words, SIGs and their related sessions—especially workshops—bridge scholarship and pedagogy and provide a forum for larger professional concerns to be discussed openly.

The War and Media Studies SIG, of course, is only one of many. The list of SIGs grows each year. Scholarly Interest Groups are poised to provide support, fellowship, and mentoring for their members. When they do, SIGs help balance the scale of SCMS, making it navigable, while also allowing us to mine the riches of the vast conference.

Wednesday’s panel on “Network Studies” (B19) situated the digital as itself an object of study, and offered a number of valuable insights into historical and contemporary digital practices. Steven Malčić offered a particularly valuable history of the early Internet, carefully contextualized in object-oriented ontology as well as the history of computer science as a discipline. According to Malčić, ARPANET engineers conceptualized network “entities” in an inverted way, positing the stability of “processes” (protocols and applications) and the ephemerality of “objects” (users, hosts, and servers). Sheila Murphy, in her presentation on fitness trackers and other wearable devices, showed some of the ways in which personal data collection on them has been framed as a game. She made an important distinction between two different models of data collection: that of all-powerful, active “surveillance,” and the more passive “capture model” of wearables. Malčić and Murphy’s papers were only two of the many that explored the important intersections between the digital-as-technology and the digital-as discourse/rhetoric/philosophy, demonstrating that our understanding of how digital technology is implemented is fundamentally linked to the ways in which it is conceptualized.

Thursday offered a pair of workshops on digital archives and their uses, and both testified to the ways that digital technologies are changing research, publishing, and pedagogy. The workshop on “Making the Past Visible” (F19) modeled a number of innovative practices. Michael Newman made a compelling case for the use of archival images as evidence instead of simple “illustration.” He showed how platforms like Pinterest and Tumblr might be used as a supplement to the traditional book publishing model, not only as a means of preserving color, sharing evidence productively, and making visual arguments, but also as a way to connect scholars and other users with common interests. Deborah Jaramillo made the interesting point that pedagogy should be considered an integral part of archival research; teaching students with documents can be a way to curate the often-intimidating volume of digital archival documents. Curation was a theme that returned throughout the workshop, with several participants arguing for a greater valuation in our field—particularly for the purposes of hiring and promotion—of data collection, processing, and sharing.

A pedagogically-focused workshop later in the day (G18) showcased several resources for and approaches to teaching film and broadcast history. Beth Corzo-Durchardt stressed the growing importance of teaching students how to evaluate online sources, as well as how to be collaborative in their primary document research. Catherine Clepper modeled a fascinating assignment using the Cinema Treasures website (cinematreasures.org) to engage students with the exhibition history of their own hometowns, while Eric Hoyt, citing Franco Moretti, argued that the humanities needs to do a better job of teaching students how to read data at scale. Toward that end, Hoyt gave first public demonstration of Arclight, an app that visualizes hits, by year, for search terms across the entire corpus of the Media History Digital Library.

In keeping with Hoyt’s hands-on demonstration of the turn toward digital archives, Martin Johnson made the crucial point that despite this turn, scholars often proceed as if they are still using physical collections. This echoed nicely with the valuation point made in the earlier workshop, hammering home the importance of crediting—and being critical of—digital collections.

Finally, Friday afternoon’s panel on Digital Film Historiography (L8) showcased a large-scale digital project underway at the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam. Christian Gosvig Olesen presented on the project, which uses the 900 early films, 2000 photos, and 120,000 business documents of the almost completely digitized Jean Desmet collection. As Olesen explained, the Desmet project combines a mapping of early film distribution in the Netherlands (based on the business documents) with ImagePlot visualizations of the collection’s color films, in an exploration of the ways in which New Cinema History and statistical style analysis might be combined. Work toward combining these two very different modes of analysis for the project’s ultimate question—Did films with certain patterns of color aesthetics correlate with particular distribution patterns?—remains in an experimental stage. However, the project’s mapping component offers an interesting model for laying bare the inherent uncertainty and often-invisible lacunae of digitized corpora. By using color, the Desmet project clearly distinguishes between all the films in the collection and those for which distribution data actually exists, modeling one solution to the problem of corpus transparency in digital scholarship.

My personal takeaway from Montreal is that scholars are increasingly using digital tools for every aspect of their work, be it analysis, archival research, publication, or pedagogy—and with a healthy critical understanding of their advantages and pitfalls. Truly exciting work is being done in all of those arenas. What remains, as I see it, is the problem of technical implementation. Aside from a breakout session in the pedagogy workshop, none of the panels I attended offered practical training in the use of software tools or coding. Even a broad discussion of the kinds of tools, platforms, or languages that might be useful for approaching particular problems or research questions would help to expand the base of scholars able to do digital work. Some kind of forum focusing on the use of specific digital tools would almost certainly be well-attended if it were to be offered at next year’s conference, whether as a workshop, practicum, or even a poster-style “drop-in” exhibition. Such a forum would be invaluable, even if it were only a starting point; getting hands-on has a wonderful way of reducing the intimidating character of some more advanced digital tools, for students and advanced scholars alike. If the last few years have seen a digital turn in media studies, then solving the problem of technical implementation may very well usher in a digital acceleration.

Radio scholars–and I include myself–tend to have a love-hate relationship with their marginalization within cinema and media studies, but that identity is fortunately becoming harder to sustain. This year, instead, I felt a palpable confidence among radio scholars that hasn’t been there in years past. That might be because of the Serial-driven “year of podcasting,” which helped aural media appear more relevant to a wider range of scholars; the continuing strength of the broader field of sound studies doesn’t hurt either.

But most of the credit should go to the hard work of field-building: the conferences and list-servs; the Radio Studies scholarly interest group and the Radio Preservation Task Force; the soon-to-be resurgent Radio Journal; folks like Andrew Bottomley here at Antenna and Brian Fauteux and Jennifer Waits over at Radio Survivor working tirelessly to keep the voices of radio scholars included in the broader media studies conversation; even the growing cohort of young (and decreasingly young) radio scholars finding professional success (however defined for them).

I wasn’t able to attend all the radio-themed papers and panels this year, but that’s part of the point: a few years ago I could; this year, no one could. (Before anyone reads that as a veiled critique of the conference program, in which a couple of radio-heavy panels were scheduled concurrently, please listen to my interview with SCMS scheduler extraordinaire Bruce Brassell and know that I have only respect and admiration for the folks who put the conference together.) Nonetheless, based on my subjective sampling, it appears that many of the goals that we have for radio studies are clearly being met:

• Quantitatively, the number of radio-themed panels (and the audiences for those panels) continues to grow
• Papers that consider radio are increasingly found on mixed-media panels
• The “donut hole” of scholarship on 1960s-1990s-era radio, which seemed so self-evident in years past, is slowly closing
• Radio scholars are increasingly engaging the kinds of broader disciplinary conversations that help move the field beyond justification to exploration

Of course, some goals remain on the horizon for us to continue working toward. For example, I had hoped that the Montreal location might bring more international scholars to the conference, but clearly we still have a lot of work to do if we want expand the conversation significantly beyond North America. There are logistic, linguistic, and disciplinary challenges to overcome, but that must remain a top priority.

The necessity of such work notwithstanding, the 2015 conference was clearly a moment of consolidation and advancement. As I write this on a plane out of Montreal, it is hard not to feel optimistic about the state of radio studies, within both SCMS and the broader field of film and media studies.

A conference like SCMS reminds me in some ways of the high holidays of my childhood, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which I experienced as crowded shul (synagogue) services of long duration when everyday life stopped and the days had a higher purpose and their own rhythm and temporality. While SCMS is missing the participatory chanting and call-and-response liturgical song, we do have what feels like the special gathering of a whole community and a cyclical sense of another year’s passage. It’s a break from our ordinary surroundings and duties, and we feel (or wish to feel) that we are among fellow adherents. We often leave feeling at once energized by new ideas and exhausted by the intensity of the experience.

Just as Katz’s media events were first real-world events, even if they become substantially shaped through mediation, the academic conference existed before we began to treat it as a media event, or should I say, a social media event. It’s obviously not a mass media event like the Olympics. To the extent that the mass media give any attention at all to our conferences, it’s as dismissive mockery. But through Twitter and other social media we do represent the conference as it is unfolding and attend to it as a live audience. The conference is also shaping itself to suit this representation.

One reason why old people seem to never stop telling young people about life before the internet is that things really were quite a bit different! At the first conferences I attended there were VHS decks with TV sets on metal carts, and occasionally someone projected photographic slides. It was not uncommon for a paper to be read to the audience without any pauses for illustration and without visual aids. Word of an impressive (or terrible) paper might trickle out and spread by word of mouth. Perhaps a few months after the event a conference report would be published in a journal.

Now the temporality of the conference includes mediated liveness through the twitterstream, along with some video livestreams. As I write this from the airport departure lounge on Sunday morning at 9:30 a.m., I am also following a number of panels via Twitter as the conference still rolls on. Someone is analyzing Jon Jost’s films, while in another room someone is discussing the cable network Bravo. There’s a paper on computers in education, and another on Minecraft, all simultaneously in my feed this minute. Someone just tweeted a photo of a presenter’s PowerPoint slide. It has a quote from Jonathan Sterne’s book MP3 alongside a cat, naturally, holding a tin can to his ear as if to listen. And meanwhile 20 other panels are underway, from which no one seems to be tweeting.

At some panels I attended last weekend I tweeted from my phone, trying to capture key insights and hot phrases. Typing by thumb is slow for me, and I frequently stop to correct errors. I see only the tweet I am composing on the screen while I’m typing. But using your phone all day drains the battery, so for a couple of panels I switched to using a laptop with a big display and a full keyboard. In the Chrome Tweetdeck app, you can track multiple constantly refreshing columns at once. I kept open the usual “home” column of my regular timeline of tweets from the accounts I follow, as well as a #SCMS15 column of all tweets posted with that hashtag next to it on the right. I also kept open columns of my mentions and notifications, so that I could see if others were engaging with my tweets and could participate in backchannel conversations. During one paper I heard about US imports on UK TV, this conversation included at least one person joining in from the UK.

During the panels I was tweeting from, the #SCMS15 column was a perpetually cascading torrent of updates from multiple other panels. It can feel like perpetual information overload. I was usually accompanied by only one or two others tweeting from my panels, but some concurrent sessions were being tweeted by several participants, and some people tweet practically every point a speaker makes. Every time I picked up my eyes to look at the scholar giving the paper in my panel, the movement on the screen of fresh tweets arriving brought my eyes back down to Tweetdeck. In the backchannel, I often noticed people who were not present in the room, or not even in Montreal, participating in the conference by replying or even just by retweeting or favoriting tweets.

I know from my own account’s Twitter analytics that someone with more than 1,000 followers may expect a tweet to be seen by 100-200 others, which is a bigger audience than at any panel I attended at SCMS. If retweeted a few times, that audience can increase to 1,000 or more. (I’m just a humble media scholar; celebrities and commercial media institutions like CNN of course command much greater attention.)

Clearly the social media coverage is bringing awareness and participation to SCMS and to our work that cannot be compared with the old-fashioned in-person attendance. I think we should see this as open-access publishing. It also provides for distant participation by Society members and scholars in cinema and media studies who for various reasons do not attend the conference. Twitter isn’t always a great substitute for being there, and the live-tweeting sometimes feels fragmentary and confusing. Sometimes tweets seems to amplify and even glorify the ideas expressed in a presentation, and sometimes they seem to simplify or trivialize them. But when done well, live-tweeting can bridge distances and expand the conference’s reach in very productive and satisfying ways. It’s not the conference itself, but a remediation of it, projecting SCMS to broader communities.* One tweet I saw in my feeds and retweeted during the conference said, “I’ve never heard of #SCMS15, but the tweets I’m seeing from it pop up are fascinating.”

The ritual functions of the social media event extend well beyond the content of the panels. For days and weeks and even months before the conference, some of my Twitter friends were premediating** #SCMS15 by sharing details of submissions, acceptances and rejections, travel plans, outfit plans, karaoke plans, poutine plans, etc. I saw tweets of people’s passports ready for travel. At the conference, on the main concourse level, a red carpet was set up with a backdrop suitable for photography, a poster nearby encouraging sharing photos online. I heard both positive and negative reactions to this and I wondered if anyone was using it as intended, but eventually the pics of conference participants posing as if to appear in the pages of US Weekly appeared in some friends’ Faceboook feeds.

Sometimes the tweeting felt overwhelming, and I think I prefer the phone over the laptop despite my clumsy thumbs. The heightened interactivity provides a buzz, but I can’t imagine sustaining it for a whole day or two or five. I also don’t like the distorted impression you get from keeping your eyes on the hashtag twitterstream as a conference news ticker. Each session of the conference has 24 concurrent panels. At any given time, most of the papers being presented were not being covered at all. The TV studies and fan studies contingents, who already have robust Twitter networks firing every day of the year, tweeted the hell out of panels on topics of interest to them. Some film historians I spoke with were intrigued and impressed by a video screen in the main conference concourse, near the red carpet, displaying recent tweets including the #SCMS15 hashtag. But they found the content a bit puzzling, not entirely certain what exactly the tweets were.

This may be a problem of Twitter, which is notoriously hard for many non-users to “get.” I told one accomplished scholar who doesn’t use Twitter about the many admiring tweets from his panel, one of which I sent to him via email. I thought he’d be excited to have made such a strong impression. Although grateful for the positive response to his paper, he is ambivalent about actually reading any more tweets broadcasting his work. He told me, “I wouldn’t even know how to get on Twitter.” So whether because of how communities of interest have formed online, or how unevenly Twitter has been adopted, SCMS as social media event is functioning to include and exclude.

While this may be just one person’s subjective impression, there seemed to be much less tweeting about film than other topics. (I hope that analysis of the conference Twitter data will help us understand more.) I often think the name “cinema and media studies” is illogical in its implication that cinema isn’t media, or that media studies and film studies are necessarily separate — if related — fields. But in this instance, I think it’s fair to say that the social media event is really a media event more than a cinema event. One thing distinguishing this social media event from a mass media event is how fragmentary and narrow its community can be. It has the mass media event’s qualities of liveness and drama and communal ritual. The dimension of common experience is much more fractured and tribal, though. At least for now, it doesn’t appear to bring us together as one scholarly Society. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but it is a thing worth thinking about.

*Thanks to Christopher Cwynar for suggesting this point.
**Remediation is from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin; premediation is Grusin’s concept.

Michael Z. Newman is on Twitter.

Live-tweeting academic conferences is a relatively new phenomenon; as a result, conference participants and coordinators are still working out the kinks, so to speak. For example, at this year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference (SCMS), the absence of WiFi frustrated presenters and attendees who intended to live-tweet:

@loganpoppy #SCMS10 feels backwards w/o sufficient WIFI access. Back channel communication is effectively retarded. Needs to be addressed.

@loganpoppy @kfitz @j_l_r the value of backchannel comm is invaluable to me. We need to make this clearer to the organizing committee

On the other hand, participants at this year’s Console-ing Passions conference were able to tweet furiously because of the availability of wireless Internet access. In fact, a couple of followers from afar noted that the CP tweets had far exceeded those from SCMS in only an hour’s time.

@jmittell In about an hour, #CPUO has surpassed #SCMS in terms of dynamic participation on Twitter. Thanks for sharing with those of us not in Eugene!

@fymaxwell It’s 9:23 am, & #CPUO attendees have already surpassed the # of tweets sent over 5 days of #SCMS. Free WiFi=vibrant back channel. Who knew!

This is not to say that live-tweeting from Console-ing Passions was without problems. On the contrary, some tweets were inadvertently taken out of context while others were overly simplified. This means that some Twitter followers, particularly those who weren’t at CP, justifiably misread and misunderstood the presentations. (For more see Jason Mittell’s “Don’t Tell Me What I Can’t Do,” the comments section in particular.) Other live-tweeting concerns are as follows: several panels go un-tweeted, some live-tweeters take a negative approach toward almost every presentation, and other participants think tweeting during panels is just plain rude.

Still, many would argue that the benefits of live-tweeting academic conferences far outweigh the problems. For example, live-tweeting allows those who cannot attend to participate virtually; it encourages questions/conversations before, during, and after presentations; it helps graduate students to become more visible; and it produces a digital archive (archives: SCMS/SCMS10 and CP).

I am currently putting together some information for those who’d like to live-tweet the 2011 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference (PCA/ACA). Based on Twitter and blog conversations with those who have effectively (and not as effectively) live-tweeted as well as my own live-tweeting experience at this year’s SW/TX PCA/ACA, I’ve created some “Twittiquette” for PCA/ACA coordinators and participants (here’s a sample flyer). Of course, this could serve as a template for any academic conference.

For conference coordinators:

• Set up a hashtag stream on the conference website.
• Include the hashtag and WiFi code on badges and/or in the conference program.
• Inform speakers that they may be live-tweeted.
• Encourage speakers who do not wish to be tweeted to notify the audience accordingly.

And for those who wish to live-tweet during the conference:

• Strive for context. Sound-bites don’t help those following the conference from afar.
• For the purpose of archiving, please include the conference hashtag in your tweets.
• Respect those who do not wish to have their presentation tweeted.
• Cite the source of your tweets; give the speaker credit.
• Avoid negative comments; be critical, not unconstructive.
• Retweet relevant or useful posts.
• But also avoid flooding your followers with tweets; hit the high points.
• Make use of the Twitter feed for post-presentation Q&As.
• To the extent possible, respond to those who live-tweet your presentation.
• To separate the conference feed from your personal Twitter feed, set up a hashtag search in your Twitter client (e.g., Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Twitterific).
• Tweet a summary/teaser of your paper before your panel; publicize your area!
• Think about posting your presentation online. This way, others may further engage with your work and potential live-tweeting (mis)understandings might be minimized.
• Sit near the back of the room so others aren’t distracted by your typing/texting.
• Set up a time and place to meet your Twitter colleagues face to face.
• Finally, if you’ve never tweeted, try it! Its rewards are greater than you might think.

Based on your experience or hearsay, what would you add or remove from the list?