Just to contribute to the discussion as someone who didn't submit this year (I had surgery the day before deadline - all your awwws here plsthnx) but has been accepted and reviewed the past couple of years and who also reviewed this year: As others have noted about their experiences, I had one paper in particular I didn't feel was really in my comfort zone as a reviewer this year. I am not sure what the conftool system allows for but I think it'd be great if we were able to review according to discipline and not just topic. For example, one of my selected topics is something suitably vague like 'social networking' - which is great if someone's done a lovely qualitative analysis of discourse or user opinions etc - I am all over that. But if I was sent a really complicated stat-heavy analysis of social media algorithms or something (this hasn't happened thankfully) I would have no clue what to do with it! Interdisciplinarity is great when we get there but to ensure it is interdisciplinary, it probably would be good if familiarity with disciplinary approaches and framing was part of the review process... ...which also leads us back to the short paper format. I found it easier this year to work with than last year having gotten more used to it - but it's still difficult to assess the quality of scholarship and ideas based on something that is an uncomfortable halfway house between an abstract and a paper - I know some people like it, but maybe multiple submission formats would work - and reviewers could choose which format they reviewed? Possibly messy to administer, but maybe it would help the problem of trying to make one approach work for all disciplines? Ruth ________________________________________ From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] on behalf of Radhika G [gradhika2012@gmail.com] Sent: 04 May 2014 14:33 To: Jill Walker Rettberg Cc: list list Subject: Re: [Air-L] The review process for IR15 we do open review at ADA: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology which I co-edit with Carol Stabile. http://fembotcollective.org I can talk to you about how that's going sometime via google hangout if you like and put you in touch with Carol and the terrific ADA editorial team. r ___ Radhika Gajjala http://www.cyberdiva.org On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 6:32 PM, Jill Walker Rettberg < Jill.Walker.Rettberg@lle.uib.no> wrote:
Congratulations and condolences to everyone who's just received acceptances and rejections for their IR15 papers and panels. I got one of each (hooray for our pre-conference selfie workshop!) - and I was hoping to renew the (sorry, I know kind of exhausting) discussions about how an ideal review process would look.
First, thank you to the organisers for seeing through a very complicated process - and getting the notifications out on time, too! I genuinely appreciate that it is a HUGE job organising a conference, and that there probably is no perfect system - especially in a radically cross-disciplinary conference like this. I'm also program chair for another conference next year and obviously would like to make sure that the reviewing process for that goes as well as possible.
My main disappointment was that the two papers I was assigned to review weren't in my area of expertise. I think I made the mistake of checking "digital humanities" among the list of topics and methodologies I could review and I got two papers that had that in their keywords but had absolutely nothing to do with digital humanities at all. I thought that was pretty disappointing, especially since I know many people in the humanities didn't get humanities reviewers, and there I was, a humanist reviewing statistical and sociological methods. Not optimal at all.
I would prefer an open review process, though I realise traditional blind review might be easier (due to familiarity?) and for an open process you'd have to find ways to avoid people just voting for their friends or people they know of. There are systems for this though, aren't there? And you could even still have semi-blind review where authors were anonymised.
If that's not going to happen, at the least I think tracks (perhaps especially for the humanities) or, better, allowing reviewers to bid for papers they would like to review (based on the titles or perhaps title + abstract) would make sense. It's such a waste to use me to review statistics and have ethnographers reviewing literary/textual analysis, and that can be avoided with bidding. I think Easychair.org allows this. Also it's really fun as a reviewer to see the titles of ALL the proposed papers. You really get an idea of the field as a whole. I don't see any reason why that should be secret.
Anyway, in the interest of openness, and because rejection is part of being an academic and one we tend to pretend never happens, I posted my rejected proposal and the reviews it received here: http://jilltxt.net/?p=3963 along with some thoughts about the process both of being a reviewer and of receiving reviews. There are also some interesting comments from others in the Facebook thread I posted here (because nobody comments on blogs anymore) https://www.facebook.com/jill.rettberg/posts/510785413159
I'd really like to hear other peoples' experiences with the process and ideas for how to set up an ideal reviewing process for a cross-disciplinary conference.
Jill
Jill Walker Rettberg Professor of Digital Culture Dept of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies University of Bergen Postboks 7800 5020 Bergen
+ 47 55588431
Blog - http://jilltxt.net Twitter - http://twitter.com/jilltxt
My latest book, Blogging (2nd ed), is available from Polity: http://www.politybooks.com/book.asp?ref=0745663648
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