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20th World Congress of Philosophy |
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Column: What tangible results of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy held in
Boston in August of last year, are in the works? A printed proceedings
would be expected by all. But unlike other academic conferences, the 20th
World Congress has also launched an extensive online undertaking, The
Paideia Project On-Line (http://www.bu.edu/wcp/). |
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The world wide web has been an important part of the World Congress, from months before the event. It was a massive project even then. For starters, I had to include the information in the ninety-plus page circular in the four main languages of the Congress (English, French, German, and Spanish), and several forms had to be created in each of these languages, and we elected to create each in four different file formats (64 total forms!). Additional pages were available in Chinese, Japanese and Russian, and still others detailed the exhibition hall, tourist attractions in Boston, and more. From there we began placing the entire program of the Congress online. Imagine trying to schedule 2,500 individual presentations into a set number of rooms confined to a six-day period. The schedule seemed to be a Heraclitean flux as requests for particular time slots and changing travel arrangements all had to be accommodated. "I don't think we could have organised the Congress without the website," reflects Program Coordinator Kevin Stoehr. "Basic information and scheduling information was made accessible to an unprecedented degree. A website allows for global coverage, which is absolutely necessary for organising an international conference." All this was peanuts, however, compared to the work done after the Congress. After months of preparation, on January 15, 1999, The Paideia Project On-Line was finally launched. The centerpiece of this project is the online archive of contributed papers, which ultimately will number more than 1,000. The Paideia Project On-Line is likely to be the largest online publishing project in philosophy to date. While some of the pre-Congress website's material was retained, we began The Paideia Project On-Line by redesigning the homepage. Although the archive of papers is the largest feature, the new website also includes information on the Congress and its organisers, details of the printed proceedings, and other features, such as a forthcoming image gallery with photos of the Congress week. The early months of this online undertaking have presented several challenges to myself, managing editor Stephen Dawson, and executive editor Alan Olson. We first needed to establish the publishing standards we would use everything from font choice to paragraph structure to footnote styles. Keep in mind that while such standards are already universally accepted in the traditional print media, there are no such guidelines yet for the Web each online publishing project is breaking new ground. "Because we are publishing on the web," says Dawson, "there are a number of technical considerations that must be addressed." For example, browser incompatibilities are a source of constant worry. Another concern is the question of how best to deal with Greek and Russian fonts, as well as logical and other technical notation. However, there are advantages to web publishing that are unavailable to more conventional modes of publication. For example, The World Congress site is equipped with a search engine that provides users the ability to perform full text searches. Furthermore, The Paideia Project On-Line is open to anyone with access to the web. One can plausibly argue that, in the long run, an author's work will be more widely disseminated if published in the online archive rather than in the printed proceedings. We are already seeing an increase in traffic at the site. In March alone the site saw visitors from nearly 60 different countries. From the point of view of technology implementation there are many ways that future conferences including the 21st World Congress in 2003 can improve on the work we have done. The use of databases, such as Microsoft Access, as backends to websites is becoming widespread already (surely commonplace by 2003), allowing changes to the official program database to be automatically reflected on the Congress website. The latest office application suites allow you to create documents in native HTML, so that the Congress organizers could create a template that authors would use for their papers, thereby reducing the time needed to prepare a paper for online publication (possibly leading to online publication prior to the Congress). Other, more exotic features such as videoconferencing (already in use at the annual Computers and Philosophy conference), will lead to webcasting of conferences, allowing you to view lectures either live or from an archive, from your home or office. Papers could even be read in one part of the screen while a webcast of the author presenting the paper is given in another part. These and many other technological advances will continue to alter the way philosophy is presented, published, and in general 'done'. Thomas Stone is the webmaster for the World Congress of Philosophy and is also creator of EpistemeLinks.com.
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