Dear Terri, I was Reviewer 3 for your roundtable proposal who asked about sampling procedure. Thanks for your feedback to my review, and I appreciate having this chance to engage in a discussion of exploring the interdisciplinarity of the AOIR. Maybe you don’t remember, I met you and Nicole in the CSCW workshop on digital identity in Chicago in 2004, and I enjoyed chatting with you about your book project of camgirls at that time. In this message, I'd like to clarify about some misunderstanding about my review and share my thoughts. Hopefully this side of reviewer’s story will help improve the quality of future AOIR conferences, :). A disclaimer first: I saw most of the current discussion about the AOIR review system started from this year’s paper template; however, I didn’t use that template to review your proposal, and I reread the CFP part concerning the roundtable session to make sure I understood the expectation of the conference organizers for this format before reviewing your piece (since I didn’t get particular review guidelines for roundtable proposals). And I do support work-in-progress submissions: I regularly submit this type of work for feedback myself and I organized a review of this type of submissions for a conference last year. Let’s go back to the review. A review is just a review, one person’s opinion about certain research, and I’m upset to see such a review is misinterpreted in this context of a discussion on how to make an interdisciplinary conference better. So far I only attended AOIR once (as many interdisciplinary researchers with small travel budgets on this list, I have to be highly selective on the conferences I go). While I enjoyed the fresh ideas at AOIR, I was disappointed to see some presentations only had the depth of news reporting, which I regarded as an issue of description vs. interpretation in research. Of course your proposal is much more than that, but I don’t want to deny that my past experience influenced my review. I wanted to see more of the details, as I wrote in the comment. I guess one could understand my feelings if s/he serves on a job search committee: There are always those moments of disappointment when you see a stellar job applicant looks glorious on paper articulates his/her research framework poorly in a phone interview. By all the means, I’m sorry about the misunderstanding and frustration that came from my unsophisticated use of “sample” in review comments. I’m a qualitative researcher, and I don’t do experimental social science research at all. When I asked about “sampling procedures” in review, I simply wanted to know how you chose your cases for cross-cultural comparison because I reviewed many cross-cultural studies that picked up their sites randomly without justification. The lesson I learned from this case is that I would be much more careful about my wording in review in the future, particularly for this type of interdisciplinary conferences. Even though I didn’t intend to, people could misinterpret the connotation that go with certain words. I apologize about this misuse. On the other end, I was wondering whether the sampling question lacked legitimacy if it had been raised by an experimental social scientist. Isn’t one part of the joys of attending this kind of interdisciplinary conferences is to have our ideas collided in different perspectives? Yes, we are looking for camaraderie in professional communities, but we also want to see our ideas inquired and challenged by people who share research interests in similar topics but employ different research methodologies. Or maybe are we just still so discipline-rooted? The conference review process is always an interesting and heated topic for discussion. I’d like to recommend Jonathan Grudin’s recent piece: “Varieties of Conference Experiences” (The Information Society, 29: 71–77, 2013). Citing Anderson’s research, he wrote: “A selective conference accepts perhaps 5 percent that most experts would agree are strong, dismisses about 50 percent that attract no positive reviews, and arguably conducts a lottery to select among the rest to fill the remaining slots” (p. 75). For an interdisciplinary conference like AOIR, it is not a surprise that we have arguments about those selected papers. Yes, my submission was selected this year, but the one before this was rejected. As a writing scholar, I saw the problem of the paper template, and I discussed it in length with my colleague Jim Porter as we both tried hard to fit our own papers into that template before the deadline. I hope we are able to find a better system to review papers, and this is why I wrote to share another side of the story. Terri, I feel your pain about center and marginality, as my work was considered marginal. I still remembered how I was stunned to find that I was the only one who had a different skin color from dozens of attendees in a big meeting room as I was respectfully nodding my head and earnestly taking notes of the feedback for my dissertation proposal at a graduate research network years ago. In retrospect, I’m grateful for the critical (and sometimes brutal) feedback. It has taught me how to negotiate in a milieu of diverse perspectives, learn to be open-minded, and not to be offended by the face value of the words; of course it helped me improve my project eventually. I always use that experience to remind myself to be supportive to new work. I hope this note clarifies some confusions and misunderstanding about my review. I’m looking forward to reading more exciting work from you! Best, Huatong ------------------------------------------------------------------ Huatong Sun, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Digital Media Studies Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences University of Washington Tacoma http://faculty.washington.edu/htsun/ Book: Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users http://global.oup.com/academic/product/cross-cultural-technology-design-9780...