In February 2020, the British Society for the History of Science hosted its first entirely digital conference via Twitter, with the dual goals of improving outreach and engagement with international historians of science, and exploring methods of reducing the carbon footprint of academic activities. In this article we discuss how we planned and organized this conference, and provide a summary of our experience of the conference itself. We also describe in greater detail the motivations behind its organization, and explore the good and bad dimensions of this relatively new kind of conferencing. As the climate crisis becomes more acute and, in turn, the pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of academic activities increases, we argue that digital conferences of this style will necessarily become more central to how academia operates. By sharing our own experiences of running such a conference, we seek to contribute to a rapidly growing body of knowledge on the subject that might be drawn on to improve our practices going forward. We also share some of our own ideas about how best to approach digital conference organization which helped us to make the most of this particular event.
It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions.
Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) occur when pathogens unpredictably spread into new contexts. EID surveillance systems seek to rapidly identify EID outbreaks to contain spread and improve public health outcomes. Sequencing data has historically not been integrated into real‐time responses, but portable DNA sequencing technology has prompted optimism among epidemiologists. Specifically, attention has focused on the goal of a “sequencing singularity”: the integration of portable sequencers in a worldwide event‐based surveillance network with other digital data (Gardy & Loman, Nature Reviews Genetics, 19, 2018, p. 9). The sequencing singularity vision is a powerful socio‐technical imaginary, shaping the discourse around the future of portable sequencing. Ethical and practical issues are bound by the vision in two ways: they are framed only as obstacles, and they are formulated only at the scales made visible by its implicit geography. This geography privileges two extremes of scale – the genomic and the global – and leaves intermediate scales comparatively unmapped. We explore how widespread portable sequencing could challenge this geography. Portable sequencers put the ability to produce genomic data in the hands of the individual. The explicit assertion of rights over data may therefore become a matter disputed more at an interpersonal scale than an international one. Portable sequencers also promise ubiquitous, indiscriminate sequencing of the total metagenomic content of samples, raising the question of what (or who) is under surveillance and inviting consideration of the human microbiome and more‐than‐human geographies. We call into question a conception of a globally integrated stream of sequencing data as composed mostly of “noise,” within which signals of pathogen “emergence” are “hidden,” considering it instead from the perspective of recent work into more‐than‐human geographies. Our work highlights a practical need for researchers to consider both the alternative possibilities they foreclose as well as the exciting opportunities they move towards when they deploy their visions of the future.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.