On June 2, 2022 at 10:30 AM ET, Danielle Cooper and Dylan Ruediger will attend the SSP Annual Meeting titled, “Building a More Connected Scholarly Community”. Below is the abstract for their session. For more information, please visit this site. 

From Conference Presentation to Content Stream: Speculations about the Future of Academic Meetings and Scholarly Communication
Conference presentations are essential to the research process of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Researchers use them to test provisional hypotheses, stake out research agendas, and collect feedback on works in progress from live audiences in transient, relatively collegial, environments. These traditional uses of conference presentation play important roles in scholarly communication, nurturing ideas towards publication and formal peer review. Yet, scholarly conferences and presentations are transforming in response to environmental pressures and changes in the political economy of higher education, transformations that have been sharply accelerated by COVID-19. Perhaps the most drastic of these changes is what some observers have called the “contentification” of what had previously been an ephemeral form of scholarly communication. Could this trend provide new revenue models for societies, publishers, and perhaps even individual researchers? Would a shift towards on-demand streaming of conference presentations invigorate an often-critiqued form of scholarly communication? What might be lost if conferences transform from being a largely oral and ephemeral genre to one rooted in permanently archived video presentations? This roundtable brings together directors of scholarly societies, journal editors, vendors, and researchers to discuss the risks and opportunities of what could become a permanent shift in the medium and purpose of conference presentations as a genre of scholarly communication.