By Georgiana Kotsou Large international scientific conferences of the early and mid-20th century often had extensive and luxurious social programs. Ceremonies, banquets, excursions, and touristic visits were some of the main activities, in many cases of significant financial cost. They spread across longer periods…
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Conferencing in space
By Jenny Beckman In the opening chapter of Poul Anderson’s science fiction novel Tau zero, published in 1970, space explorers meet at Lidingö in Stockholm as they prepare to leave Earth…
The commercial dimension of international conferences
By Robin Michalon, project associate researcher International scientific conferences are expensive affairs. Over the decades strategies have been deployed to make them economically viable. The most common item sold by…
Lorentz Centre: Ghosts of conferences past, present and future
By Vanessa Moss Vanessa Moss is an astronomer based at CSIRO Space and Astronomy and chair of The Future of Meetings project. She attended our project conference at the Lorentz…
HSS Roundtable: On ‘rules of procedure’
By Jessica Reinisch Some contributors to this roundtable have been asking questions about the unspoken purposes of conferences. I want to bring a related but different set of questions to…
HSS Roundtable: Technological Substrata of Conferencing
By Charlotte Bigg The move online of most scientific meetings in the wake of the pandemic has thown into sharp relief the taken-for-granted centrality of conferences within scientific cultures, including…
HSS Roundtable: “‘With scant time for discussion’: A short history of paper session frustration”
By Thomas Mougey If there is one thing that seems to unite all conference attendees is the frustration provoked by attending paper sessions. It appears that this frustration and the…
My Time as a Project Intern
By Joséphine Colic In May this year I began a three month internship on ‘The Scientific Conference’ project. I was in the middle of my Masters on the History of…
Contribution to HSS Roundtable: How international is International?
By Geert Somsen On August 5, 1922, Henri Bergson, the celebrated French philosopher, closed the first conference of the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, the showcase Republic of Letters of…
HSS Roundtable: Past, Present, and Future of the Scientific Conference
By Geert Somsen International conferences are under heavy scrutiny these days. Not only has the covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent move online of many meetings raised questions about the future…