These are notes on organizing and running sessions for the Association for Computers and the Humanities at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America. They are intended to guide ACH members in working on this activity; some of the notes on running sessions may be of more general use.
The ACH gets to organize two sessions at the convention that the MLA holds from December 27 to 30 every year. We have this privilege because we are an “allied organization”. We can do whatever we want in these sessions: there are a lot of administrative restrictions but no intellectual ones. The sessions we devise are not subject to review by the convention's program committee.
For the individuals who organize and participate in these sessions, the advantages are: you are certain from the start that the session will be part of the convention (as compared to special sessions, which get reviewed by the program committee and often aren't accepted); many people in literary studies in North America need to attend this convention for job interviews anyway, so it's good to do something intellectual too; the sessions are also social events for people with ACHish interests.
The disadvantages are: it's expensive to attend the convention and there isn't much funding available; it's an enormous event and doesn't usually work very well as an intellectual forum; the timing is awful; so much is going on that interested parties are often unable to attend our sessions even if they're at the convention.
The ACH sees these sessions as an opportunity to publicize our kind of work to the larger literary-studies community. We normally try to organize sessions that have some interest outside the humanities-computing world; papers that are very specific to that community are better presented at the ACH's own conference. A number of ACH members have gotten involved in our organization because they heard about it from these sessions: it's important that we make it possible for people to see this kind of work being presented and talk with people doing it.
Our usual approach to organizing the sessions is to ask one person to take responsibility for each and then go off and line up the speakers. As the ACH's MLA liaison I take care of filing all the forms, and will usually ask you what sort of subject you have in mind for your session, but you get to make your own decisions about speakers.
The biggest problems that organizers face are usually administrative. The convention is huge and the MLA is huge, and so there are a lot of requirements and deadlines to meet. You should read the MLA's documents on this (on their web site under “Convention”, and in the September issue of PMLA). The main thing to remember is that while the convention is in December, all the work has to be done before the end of the preceding March. You can't do much of anything later than that.
This is the general timetable for the year of the convention:
(As of December 2007, the plan is to have no convention in 2010 and to hold the 2011 convention from 6–9 January, with further conventions following the same schedule.)
We normally begin work on the sessions twelve to eighteen months before the convention, between August and December of the year before it happens. This gives us the fall and winter to develop the topics and line up speakers. The MLA has a very strict deadline at the start of April for the session details: you need to have the list of speakers and their paper titles at that point, and the speakers need to be members of the MLA by that time. There's a later deadline for updates—but those updates don't go into the printed program, only into a supplement, so in practice most people don't see them. So you can add or change things later than April but in practice those changes are invisible.
A lot of organizations start later: it's common to issue a call for papers in the Spring MLA Newsletter for the same year's convention. If you want to do this, the deadline is usually at the start of January. These calls are limited to thirty-five words. But when you do it this way, the prospective speakers only wind up with a month or so to put their papers together, because the newsletter doesn't come out till late February. We've found it works better to give people more time; we also have publicized our calls for papers much more on mailing lists than in the newsletter. (The MLA does now publish the calls for papers on their web site, too, but they still limit you to thirty-five words.)
A session consists of three twenty-minute talks. Make sure that your speakers know they only get twenty minutes and will be dragged off stage with a hook when the time is up: nobody wants them to go on longer. Some people arrange sessions with four talks, but that means each speaker only gets fifteen minutes; if you don't really know the speakers, though, it can be worth considering, because the rate of no-shows at sessions has gotten rather high and four often turns into three. You can't have more than two speakers in a session from one institution, and no individual can appear in more than two sessions at the convention. A session may be focused on a single scholarly project, but only if the project has people scattered around at a number of universities, because of the two-speaker limit.
The speakers don't have to be ACH members, but they do have to be MLA members unless they really don't do literary studies. (A lawyer speaking about intellectual-property law could probably get an exemption; a George Eliot expert who hates PMLA couldn't.) They have to be MLA members by April: if they wait until the convention comes around to join, they won't be listed in the program. The MLA web site has a membership directory that you can use to check on speakers. (We don't require them to be ACH members; you should politely suggest it to anyone who isn't a member but you don't have to give them the hard sell.)
The MLA will provide a data projector and/or overhead projector for those who want to use them, but you have to specify what you want at the time the panel is submitted, in March. You have to bring your own laptop if you need a computer for the presentation. Internet access is still often a problem, and although wireless connections are increasingly common it will usually be impossible to know whether they'll be available at the session. But a twenty-minute talk is typically better without any sort of live demo anyway, because they really eat up the time. In today's world it's better to give a talk that advertises what you do and then send people off to explore the web site on their own.
In the past the ACH has sometimes organized demonstrations, tutorials, open discussions, TEI presentations, and other substitutes for groups of talks. These other things have never worked well; they tend to require audiences with more commitment to the topic than is usually the case at the MLA, and the audiences rarely expect anything to happen other than a conventional group of talks. Tutorials and demos in particular take a lot more time than we've got available. The majority of people who come to our sessions are not ACH members and it's a better use of the time to introduce them to the kinds of things we do, in the way that is customary at this convention, than to seek to engage them more deeply.
The session organizers can solicit papers by any means they like. We are not required to issue a public call for papers: if you've got three people in mind who fit the bill then you can just approach them privately. Or instead you can do it entirely by advertising on mailing lists. Nor are there any guidelines about how you choose papers if you issue a public call, though it's only polite to give everyone who submits something some sort of response. You can ask people to submit full papers, abstracts, or just titles; in the MLA world the one-page proposal is the most common thing.
If you issue a call for papers, you should make it clear that it's for a session to be held at the MLA sponsored by the ACH. The key distinction is that it's not a special session: those get culled by the program committee, whereas whatever we arrange is certain to get into the program and so is more attractive to prospective speakers. Otherwise the wording is up to you.
As session organizer you can choose to preside over the session and also give one of the papers (as long as you don't appear in the convention program more than twice). Or, on the other hand, you can get other people to give the papers and preside too—but this means you won't wind up in the convention program and won't really have any obvious role in the whole thing. Most organizers choose to give a paper as well.
The information we have to submit to the MLA is, for the most part, just what you see in the program: session and talk titles, name and affiliation of the person presiding and of the speakers. (Beware of the speaker who agrees to speak but promises to send the title along later. Extract something from them and tell them they can change it later.) We also need phone numbers and e-mail addresses for everyone. You should send all of this to me before the end of March so that I can get it to the MLA; it can't be late.
The ACH has no funding for speakers or organizers, and there isn't generally a lot available. The advantage of the ACH connection is that you are guaranteed to be on the program, so the long lead times that conference-attendance grants often involve are less of a problem; it is also feasible to line up plane flights far in advance and perhaps get a good deal. Hotel booking has to wait until the MLA sends you the convention announcement, as their rates are probably lower than what you'll get otherwise.
You'll get a chance in midsummer to review the program copy; this is just proofreading, though. At that point you'll also find out exactly what the date and time of your session will be. One of the sessions will always get scheduled on the very first or very last day of the convention, so warn your speakers.
The ACH always posts details of our sessions on our web site, and includes a pointer to the web site in the program. As organizer, you may if you wish develop your own web site for the session with extra material, or you can ask the ACH to publish it.
Get your speakers to provide a description in a sentence or two of what they do, so that you can introduce them properly. It's nice if you can say at least a little bit about their areas of work, refer to recent publications, etc. Don't just introduce the whole panel as a group at the start of the session; if you do that many people will be in the dark about just who the second or third speakers are when their turn to speak comes. They deserve to get properly introduced. It helps the speakers if you tell the audience the titles of the talks in your introductions; not everybody's got the program with them and it's awkward for the speakers to state their own titles.
Generally a lot of session leaders at the MLA seem to want to minimize their presence, on occasion just giving a brief introduction at the very start of the session and then saying nothing more. This may seem modest but is actually lazy. We ought to try at least a little bit to make it an occasion; the example of people in the creative-writing world, where introductions for speakers are taken quite seriously, is worth following.
Of course, speakers for their part are often astonishingly rude: they've had months to put a presentation together but frequently fail to fit it into the time they've got. It's very important to tell speakers that they only have the time allotted, and to cut them off when it's up. (And time spent setting up equipment and fiddling with it counts, if they didn't bother to take care of this before the start of the session.) If someone is running over, their presentation is not usually improved by letting them finish. If the audience really wants to know what they were going to say they can ask during the question session.
Please also read the MLA's Access Guidelines for the convention (available on their web site in the Convention section).
On running panels: Linda K. Kerber, “Conference Rules”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 and 21 March 2008, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Phil Agre's pieces on academic life are good on practical matters, and also good on sociological description of how the academic world works and how to create a place for yourself in it. His “Hosting a Speaker” is about inviting people to your campus, not about events like the MLA, but much of the discussion is still relevant. “Networking on the Network” is a book-length guide to academic careers.
John Lavagnino
May 2008