February 2021 Research Update

Amici!  It is now March!

First, before I pile into the updates, I want to note that one of you lovely reader/patrons has very kindly made a narrated version of the "Practical Case for the Humanities" Collections essay (here).  Narrated posts is an accessibility option I've always wanted to offer, but never been able to put in the time or had the skill at narrating, so I am thrilled to see that.

February, as is its want, has blown by.  I spent the month working on a few projects.  For the blog, I have been trying to get all of my notes ready for the long-awaited series on textiles (to begin this week, I hope).  Mostly that meant I had to run down some discussions of ancient flax farming, an element of the production chain I realized I knew very little about.

As an aside, it is really striking the different structure of the literature on ancient textile production as compared to farming or iron-working.  While the major reference works for farming or iron-working often have publication dates in the 1950s and 1960s (supplemented by later works in the decades that followed) it seems no accident that the study of a kind of labor generally done by women only started to receive really sustained study in the 1990s, with E.W. Barbers two books on the topic (Women's Work (1994) and Prehistoric Textiles (1991)).

Subsequently, publication in the topic in the ancient Mediterranean has really been driven by the (generally very good) series of books published by Oxbow in their Ancient Textiles series starting around 2004.  Most of the scholars pushing the topic forward are archaeologists, because most of the evidence is archaeological.

Of course that archaeological evidence base may be part of the reason that textiles were slow to get the attention that other forms of ancient production did, but it is hard not to conclude that there is also a gender component such that it is really only as archaeology became a less male-dominated field that textiles got the serious studies they have long deserved (keep in mind for instance, at any given time in pre-modern history, far more humans were engaged in textile production than metalworking, probably at least one, if not two orders of magnitude more).

I have also been working on an essay for public-facing publication on the All-Volunteer Force (that is, the post-conscription US Military) and how the Roman experience with an All-Volunteer Force (that is, the post-Marian Roman army) ought to shape our understanding of the current challenges facing the US AVF.  I hoped to have that done in February, but it has been stubborn and time has been short.  I think I should be able to get it finished this month and of course I'll shout out on twitter and the blog should it appear in print.  I do have another essay on civil strife in ancient Greece and America still trapped in editing-hell, but it may climb out any day now to make its belated appearance.

Finally, it seems that it is conference panel submission season, which is a good excuse to talk for a minute about academic conferences.

Most academic disciplines (and even many subfields) have their own professional associations, which in turn tend to all have their own annual conferences.  Academic conferences are important for a number of reasons.  First off, they are important opportunities for scholars to get together and connect with colleagues.  Specialists in any given subfield are likely to be fairly spread out, geographically, after all.  Departments, especially in the humanities, tend to hire aiming for coverage rather than specialization, so if you work on, say, the Roman army, chances are you are the only person at your university who does so (and thus probably the only person for miles in every direction who does so).

More than that, academic conferences provide an opportunity for scholars (including quite junior scholars who don't yet have much in print) to present preliminary versions of their research and get feedback from a scholarly audience.  So the actual conference program tends to be organized as a series of 'papers' (lectures, really, you read the paper to the audience).  Those papers are grouped into panels by topic.  A small conference (like, for instance, the annual Haskins Society Conference focused on medieval history) may simply have a consecutive series of panels lasting a few days, along with perhaps one or two longer 'keynote' talks.

Larger conferences, like the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) or the Joint Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies and the Archaeological Institute of America (SCS/AIA) involve lots of paper-panels.  As a rule, SCS/AIA has 4 blocks of papers per day (over 3 days) with around 16 different panels running in parallel in each block.  Attendees tend to scan the program, identifying the panels that have topics of interest and bounce between them, sometimes catching the first half of one panel and the back half of another if they are in the same time-block.

So what are conference papers for?   There are a few reasons why giving conference papers as an academic is a good idea.  The main idea behind them is that conference papers let scholars update the field as to what they are working on currently at a faster pace the journal articles, book publishing and peer review.  This can give scholars, especially junior scholars (graduate students, early career academics) a chance to 'plant a flag' as to what they are working on and to effectively announce themselves as working in a given subfield to other members of that subfield who might not know it.

Moreover, there is typically a Q&A session at the end of either each paper or each panel, which creates a (relatively) low-stakes environment to get feedback on a project that is just getting underway.  If you have seen academics joke that "If you don't have anything nice to say, say it in the form of a question" and "I have a question...well, it is more of a comment, really" - these are jokes referring to very common conference Q&A behaviors.  There can be some sharp elbows in this (SCS/AIA in particular has a reputation for that; I think I have seen at least one person's paper demolished in the Q&A every year I've gone.  Other conferences are more cordial), but better to get that feedback at a conference than after months of peer review.

And of course conference papers are a good way to pad out of a CV, as they show engagement with the broader field and that your research is being (in theory) taken seriously.

Conference Paper Submission

Most of the conferences I've presented at work the same basic way.  There are typically two tracks to submit a paper for inclusion on the program: individual submission and panel submission.  The conference organizers (typically a committee in the professional organization) thus has two different piles of submissions.  In the first pile are individual papers which need to be brigaded together by topic (typically in groups of 4 and 5) to make panels (which then get assigned a panel facilitator).  Then there are groups of scholars who will submit a set of papers as a 'pre-made' panel.

Basically it is like in a team-based multiplayer video game: there is a solo-queue and a pre-made queue.  Unlike matchmaking systems, organizers generally will not fill out a pre-made with a solo-queue rando; you either need a complete team, or you submit individually.

Of course not every paper gets in.  Difference conferences are differently selective based on the ratio of submissions to available slots.  A more regional conference, like CAMWS tends to accept a high percentage of submissions (making it a more promising venue for graduate students and early career scholars) while my impression is that the reject rate for SCS/AIA is fairly high (my own record at CAMWS is 100%; at SCS/AIA 80%).  Acceptance and rejection isn't purely a matter of quality, but also a matter of getting enough papers together to form a panel.  It is difficult, for instance, to get a paper on an ancient military history topic through at the Society of Military History Annual Meeting (SMH) as an individual submission because there just aren't likely to be enough other individual papers on the topic to fit together; panel submissions have better success rate.

Paper submission is, in theory, double blind (at least for large conferences; smaller conferences sometimes work differently): the scholar submits an abstract (a short, formal summary of the paper laying out its aims and topics, typically 300-500 words but each conference has a different, arbitrary but strictly enforced word limit) that is anonymous (along with a submission form that isn't).  The abstract is thus assessed by someone who doesn't know your name, and whose name you don't know, in theory making things more impartial.  In practice, senior academics tend to have lots of contacts and so tend to submit papers as panels with lots of Big Names which tend to get through the selection process.

The actual papers themselves are generally short, with presentation times for a single conference paper usually running 15-25 minutes (strictly budgeted between each paper in a panel).  Unlike other sorts of lectures (like many invited talks, or class lectures) conference papers are typically read, not given from notes - that is, the presenter reads their paper, word for word, from a prepared script.  It is a bit of a running joke that only very senior scholars will present from notes at a conference (with the strong, I-don't-give-a-f*** energy that implies).

On account of my anti-social tendencies, I have tended to be in the individual submission queue in the past, though this year I am part of efforts to organize not one but two ancient warfare panels, one for SMH and one for SCS/AIA.  So February saw me writing abstracts for those papers; we shall see if the paper-selection gods smile upon them (but panels have much higher acceptance rates than individual submission, so here is hoping).

And that, for the most part, was February.  Article II is still in the review process (we might hear word in March, but May is probably more likely), though as I noted when I submitted it, the journal in question has a high rejection rate, so resubmitting the article to a different journal may end up being necessary.  On the upside, if the article is bounced, it would give me a chance to incorporate the very recent article D. Jones, "Experimental Tests of Arrows against Mail and Padding," Journal of Medieval Military History 18 (2020) which offers a tremendous improvement on the impact data from Williams, The Knight and the Blast Furnace (2003) but which came out after I had submitted my draft (Jones' conclusions would not meaningfully change my argument, but would provide more and better evidence for some of the things I am suggesting).

So onward to textile production!