After some internal debate, I eventually went on ahead and submitted a manuscript to CIKM 2020. Although it’s a short paper and therefore more or less by definition not supposed to be anything groundbreaking, I still had some fairly serious doubts about it and might well have abandoned it if the submission deadline had not been extended. The extra thinking time was very welcome, since it allowed me to make a submission I believe in and also to think about what the scope of my journal paper should be – the alternative would have been to include the subject matter of the conference paper in the journal paper, but I think the latter will benefit from a tighter focus. 

The conference was originally supposed to be in Galway, Ireland, and the plan was that our paper, if accepted, would be presented by my co-author Alan, who was the supervisor of my MSCA fellowship in Dublin – not that I would mind another visit to Ireland, but obviously travelling there would be a good deal more convenient (not to mention cheaper) for him that for me. Besides, since I no longer have my own funding to spend, I can’t even be sure if the university would cover my expenses. Alan, on the other hand, figured he’ll probably go to the conference in any case, paper or no paper. 

The question of who will travel to Galway and on whose money was rendered moot when it was announced that the conference is going to be a virtual one this year, with pre-recorded video presentations and online discussions. It’s not uncommon for conferences to have the occasional video presentation, but that’s still very much the exception rather than the rule – fully online conferences are a rare thing. CIKM would be the first one for me, and while I certainly understand and support the organisers’ decision, I do feel ambivalent about the idea of virtual conferences in general. 

Clearly when there’s a pandemic to be brought under control, hosting an international conference is not the greatest idea: you’ll have people coming in from around the world, shaking each other’s hands and generally spending a lot of time together for a few days, then going back to their respective countries to pass on whatever bugs they picked up from each other. However, even if we ignore the matter of contagious disease, there’s a lot to be said in favour of meeting your fellow researchers virtually rather than physically. As much as I enjoyed my trip to New Zealand last year, I can’t in all honesty claim that it was the most efficient use of my budget, and it certainly wasn’t very ecological. 

A lot of people are saying that COVID-19 has changed some things permanently, that we won’t be going back to all of our old ways even if and when the pandemic is stopped. With regard to remote work in particular, numerous organisations have had it thrust upon them wholesale and have discovered that it’s actually a viable and sometimes preferable alternative to making everyone haul themselves to the office every day. Since we’re all now routinely doing online meetings, and since a conference session is really just a special sort of meeting, it’s natural to ask if there’s really any need for all the hassle traditionally involved in organising a conference. Will such gatherings soon be a thing of the past, now that we’ve been forced by exceptional circumstances to make the transition? 

Personally, I wouldn’t bet on the imminent demise of the non-virtual conference just yet, at least not until we have more experience of how virtual conferences actually work. Online presentations may not be a problem, but there’s more to a conference than presentations, and much of it is bound to be lost when the delegates are not all gathered in the same place. The social aspect will suffer, obviously, which means there’s probably a lot of networking potential lost as well – and I’m saying this as someone who’s definitely not the most sociable and networking-oriented person in the academic world. At a traditional conference the starting of informal conversations and making of new acquaintances happen organically in a way that’s hard to recreate using tools designed for more formal meetings. 

Something that may be even more difficult to recreate in a virtual conference is the level of commitment that comes from travelling to the conference location and staying there for the duration of the conference: being there physically translates quite naturally into being there mentally as well. Sure, you’ll continue to do your emails, and you’ll skip some sessions that are not so interesting and use the time to do a bit of sightseeing, but still, at least I find that it’s easy to make the conference my number one priority when I’ve travelled to another country to attend it. I very much suspect that in a virtual conference it would be much harder to get into that mental state and that I would only attend my own session plus one or two carefully selected others, which I think would be kind of sad and antithetical to the spirit of the event. 

Speaking of sightseeing, I can’t deny that I enjoy travelling to new places and that I would miss the lost opportunities to do so if conference travel were to end altogether. I’m certainly not too old to remember that when you’re a junior (or perhaps even not so junior) member of academia, the prospect of a trip can be a pretty good incentive to get that manuscript finished in time for the conference deadline. How are we going to motivate future generations of researchers if not with tales of exotic conference locations and lavish banquets?