Home Again
It turned out that I forgot the cashews I’d bought specially for my trip; also my umbrella, which has gone missing somewhere in the murky depths of my flat. It also turned out that the conference hotel apparently believed that the correct temperature for a meeting room is something only slightly above absolute zero, with a noticeable draft in every part of the room, so although it was mild enough weather when I managed to get outside, I’m surprised I managed to get out of there with all my toes intact. (Must investigate knitting insulated liners for my dress shoes.)
The conference itself was interesting, but not as exciting or as helpful as I’d hoped. That’s not to say that I got nothing out of it — but most of the good ideas will come in handy when we move to more online content. (I particularly liked the idea of integrating social bookmarking for online content; I’m not sure how well that would work with members-only pages, but there are a couple of ways around that, I think. Of course, if I ruled the world, I’d make a lot more of our content accessible without member login, as well as completely redoing the online bookstore, but that is another story entirely and I shall stop talking about it now lest I get carried away and start ranting.)
The stuff I’d really hoped to learn, about paperless workflow, was not particularly helpful: either we’ve been doing it for years (e.g., sending out PDFs to authors instead of paper proofs), it seems weird (getting PDF proofs from the printer, which seems pointless because we’re sending them PDFs in the first place, so . . . why?), or the people giving the presentations either farmed it out to subcontractors (copyediting) or admitted that they hadn’t moved to paperless work (proofreading). All the XML people I spoke to, who were mostly vendors, wanted to take over our entire process and send it to India — a strange thing to propose to me, I thought, as it would effectively put my colleagues and me out of jobs, would it not? — and weren’t particularly interested in talking about how we could do it ourselves, or what tools or books they might sell me to help that process. (Additional note to vendors: if someone identifies herself as an associate editor, please do not later refer to her as assistant editor. These things, albeit minor, tend to rankle.)
It also struck me that, in comparison, our winter and annual meetings are much better organized. Granted that there’s an economy of scale (the CSE meeting had something like 325 attendees, I think; I can never recall how many people show up at our meetings, but I want to say that it’s usually at least 10 times that), but honestly, how difficult is it to put up a little sign on your registration table saying “Registration”? They had a sign you could see in front of the escalators, but the table itself was behind the escalators, with no label at all. The gap between sessions was usually 30 minutes, which is way too long (and is probably why the last sessions of the day let out at 5:30, which I think is rather late); on the other hand, on Tuesday the plenary speaker was supposed to start at the exact same time as the first sessions of the day let out, with no gap at all. Thus, you either skipped out of the sessions early, or tried to squeeze into the back of the room at the last minute. Or, you could do what I did: read the title and summary of his speech, realize that anyone who made his living telling people about futurism and isn’t talking about art is likely to make me either throw up a little in my mouth or giggle uncontrollably, and skip out on that particular speech. (This turned out to be a wise decision: while waiting for the next sessions to begin, the people sitting around me spontaneously and energetically began telling me how truly and spectacularly horrible the speech had been. Apparently, the man used “vision” as a verb, which we all agreed should be a capital offense.)
Also, if one more speaker had assumed that everyone in science editing must obviously work for a journal, not a book, I was going to scream. Perhaps I should raise this issue with the organization, and volunteer some time on some committee to ensure that editors of scientific books also be represented? Or maybe I should gather some data on our own work, and try to get a presentation accepted at a future meeting? Hmm.
On the other hand, they gave us a free continental breakfast every day (vegan option = just fruit, which gets tiresome, but at least guarantees I won’t come down with scurvy), and the opening day’s keynote speaker, Ian Sterling, was truly excellent. His slides were perhaps a little, er, colorful — I had not realized quite how much blood was involved when a polar bear is successful when hunting — but he was engaging, eloquent, and extremely successful at conveying the import behind something like four decades of research. I wonder whether we could get him as a speaker at one of our conferences. . . ?
General impressions of Vancouver: not as exciting as I’d hoped. Architecturally fairly standard, at least in the downtown area where I was. Lots of hedges fencing in private homes, which was a bit weird but in a pleasant-ish way. Lots of hybrid taxis. Lots of homeless, including a large number of younger people sleeping rough. (One of the moderators, who was a local guy, actually mentioned that in his post-session comments: apparently the government has turned out patients from mental health care, regardless of whether they have any outside support system in place or anywhere to go. If that’s true, apparently our northern neighbors learned nothing from our stupid turfing-out of patients in the 1980s.) This last factor probably affected my impression of the city the most; as upsetting it is to see homeless people here and feel powerless to help them in any real way, somehow it’s even worse in a country that I expect to be more progressive when it comes to serving their citizens rather than the interests of big business. (I don’t remember seeing large numbers of homeless people in Quebec City two years ago, so either this is a fairly recent phenomenon, or it’s something happening on the West Coast, or it was better hidden, or something.)
Pleasant things about Vancouver, though, included the fairly large number of parks within walking distance of my hotel, the mountains ringing the city, the delightfully mild weather, the apparent concern of its citizens for their dogs (all dogs I saw seemed happy, well-adjusted, and calm but pleased to be out and about; they even responded when you smiled at them, which seems rare among big-city dogs), and the interesting city wildlife. Okay, they were mostly pigeons, which are everywhere, but there were some freakin’ gigantic gulls around, and they were fun to watch. On one walk, I even encountered a young mouse, who stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and kind of looked at me like, “Er, what? Should I move, or are you going to go around me? What’s the protocol here?” Rather cute little mouse, actually. (Now that I think about it, I really hope he was wild and just inexperienced, and not someone’s companion who had gotten lost or abandoned. If he doesn’t know how to look out for himself, he’ll be in trouble, poor thing.)
Anyway, I’ll shut up about the meeting and related bits now. Photos will be posted later, possibly tomorrow or Friday. I’m actually glad to be back: being there alone, without Internet service, unable to use my phone without incurring international roaming charges, was kind of lonely. Of course, now I’m sitting here alone in my flat, Nigel still being at his vet’s for boarding, but at least I’ll get to see some actual people I know tomorrow, and pick up my lovely dog. (That will be a relief: while I was away, I had a peculiar dream about Neil Gaiman telling me that he’d found the perfect dog for me to adopt, and when I woke up I had the hardest time shaking the conviction that something had happened to Nigel and the vet just hadn’t called me. Silly, I know, but it was unsettling.)
