Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting Preview

I hope to be blogging this meeting over the course of the next few days. Last STS meeting I attended computer note-taking was completely frowned upon but hopefully this one will be more modern.  I'll be talking tomorrow in session 070. Scientific Communication, (4:00 to 6:00 pm, but I'm guessing my 20 minutes will be closer to 6). The conference has oodles of concurrent sessions from 8am to 6pm and then evening events. I'm staying at home - probably an hour and a half away with traffic (30-45 minutes without) - so I might miss half of the first session and will not stay for evening events.

I hope to make it to the 8am session tomorrow because the session on quantitative applications of actor-network theory (ANT) has another speaker from Maryland's iSchool as well as N. Contractor from Northwestern (I discussed his book a few times in my comps preps posts) as well as L. Leydesdorff from Amsterdam (scientometrics person - I have discussed quite a few of his papers here).  Of course this session is up against one on analytic cultures in defense and intelligence and another on peer review with PM Edwards of North Carolina. (crap! why are there so many good concurrent sessions??). Nothing in the next time period looks like a must-attend, but we'll see. Then there's a session after that on: Practicing STS in the Federal Civilian and Military Sectors... hmmm. The end of tomorrow is my session, and I'm sure I'll be wiped out by then.

Friday also has a lot of good sessions, including one on LIS by a librarian from Virginia Tech: "Coping: Library Science, Information Science, and the Modal Transformation of Scholarship". That's competing with one on terrorism/counter-terrorism and one on using information technologies.

Saturday has sessions at the same time on datasets and on public engagement. Later, there are competing sessions on piracy and re-thinking military stuff given netcentricity (I'm paraphrasing). In the afternoon there's a session on electronic records - I probably should be interested in that, but probably won't attend.