Yet another conference I probably won't attend….

I came across something this morning called HASTAC, which stands for Humanaties, Arts, Science, Technology Advanced Collaboratory and which is pronounced (according to the site) “haystack.” Cute. Anyway, they have a conference in April– see info and the call for papers here— that looks pretty interesting. But I probably won’t be going.

For one thing, I have enough to do. I’m already going to the CCCCs and (it turns out) that I’m going to be one of the organizers of a small department conference we have here in early March. I’m also certainly going to go to Computers and Writing in May since it’s just down the road at Wayne State, though I haven’t decided if I’m going to get something together in terms of a presentation or if I’m just going to attend. I’m thinking about just attending since I’ve never actually done that for a conference.

For another, I’m at a place in my career where I don’t have to go to conferences like this, and I work at a place where I can’t get funding to go to more than one conference a year, maybe two if one of them is a 50 mile round-trip from my house. I suspect I am not alone in that. EMU does not have a proverbial pot to piss in, but when it comes to conference travel, a lot of my fellow academics have the same basic problem. It’s a natural place for cutbacks; cutting travel budgets doesn’t have direct or apparent impact on campuses, and the folks who need to go to conferences (e.g., folks seeking tenure) will just pay for them out of pocket. It’s a bad state of affairs because, essentially, it’s a tax that new faculty have to pay.

But I digress.

This still looks like an interesting conference and organization.

Slight update:

Here’s still another conference I won’t be attending, “SHARP 2007: Open the Book, Open the Mind,” in July at the U of Minnesota.

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