April 28, 2020. KDRU 98.1
Transcript:
AG: Hello! You’re listening to KDRU, 98.1. I’m Ashley Gilland, and today I’m here with Dr. Katie Gilbert, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Humanities and Ethics Center at Drury University. She is also the Program Consultant for the Missouri Humanities Council. The Humanities and Ethics Center was a co-sponsor for the 3rd Annual Humanities Symposium which took place last week in partnership with the Missouri Humanities Council. The Symposium was originally going to take place on Drury campus on Earth Day, April 22, but due to the coronavirus outbreak and social distancing guidelines, was moved online into a two-day period in the form of Zoom webinars and livestreams on Facebook. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts on this unique experience.
KG: Thank you so much for having me, Ashley, I’m really looking forward to it.
AG: Absolutely. Could you start by telling us a little about the history of the symposiums and this year’s theme?
KG: Sure, yeah, let’s see, this is our third, and there have been two before that, so the past two years, we really really lucky to be able to link up with the Missouri Humanities Council and kind of serve as a host and cosponsor for their Humanities Symposium, as part of, actually, our Humanities and Ethics Speaker Series. So, originally, we shifted from our center having a speaker series on campus in the spring to creating a symposium. I headed up the first two symposiums. The first one had to do with humanities, technology, science, and the future, and then last year’s had to do with Humanities and Democracy, and this year’s was Humanities and Water, and this year’s was headed up by the Associate Director of Missouri Humanities, Ashley Beard-Fosnow, and in my position as Director of the Humanities and Ethics Center, I collaborated with her to kind of arrange all the logistics of having it on Drury’s campus again.
AG: So the Missouri Humanities website says, “Participants will learn how our water tells the story of our region politically, culturally, environmentally, and spiritually. How would you say this community-driven theme was affected by using an online format and the atmosphere of the Symposium?
KG: Yeah, so, in the past two years we had everything in person on Drury’s campus. One of the goals since the beginning has been to expand out across southwest Missouri, so, Ashley had actually aimed to bring it beyond only Drury’s campus this year and to expand it into a two-day event, so most of it was going to be on Drury’s campus, but we also planned to have the main talk in the evening with Pat Stith take place at the Springfield library and we were trying to draw in other people, so I think it had a surprise effect in that the combination of people around the state being at home and looking for things to do, combining that with streaming it actually I think increased our audience. So, we had a high rate of registrations, and I think in some ways we were able to reach people who might not have been able to come during a work day in person. So that was what kind of seemed like a potential problem being kind of an experiment with a positive outcome, which I was surprised about but really happy about, too.
AG: Awesome! And what was it like discussing themes related to and on the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day while having to stay home?
KG: Yeah, right? So we’re all inside our homes, and I think that can feel sometimes like you’re a little bit cut off from nature, so I think that the theme of water- it’s funny, when I would mention the themes from earlier years, people would instantly kind of be able to imagine it, and I think one of the interesting things about water is, sometimes people had a hard time imagining, “What does the Humanities have to do with water?” And I think the irony is, it’s specifically because water is so central to the human experience that we actually don’t even think about it, but it shapes everything about the human experience. So we were at home, but we were thinking about things like climate change, the role that water plays in kind of, religious histories and religious traditions and ceremonies, so all these key questions that have to do with even access to water that then shape, kind of, communities and the way we organize ourselves and the human experience, it really hit home how absolutely central water is to the human experience in a range of ways. So we also, we had an artist, for example, talk about his work in painting, and Allan Chow, who is now located in Kansas City, and we were able to look at his paintings and kind of think about his own experience in the way he thinks about water and the effect water has had on his work. So, it was interesting because at the same moment that we were kind of isolated in our homes, we were branched out in so many different directions in thinking about water and connecting to people who were in so many different locations around Missouri, and even outside of Missouri, that it was an interesting combination of individual isolation combined with massive connection through the online format.
AG: That’s great. What was it like making this transition to a virtual event in such a short amount of time both for coordinators and speakers and setting up registration and everything?
KG: Yeah. So, the Associate Director of the Humanities Council, Ashley Beard-Fosnow really did an incredible job of very quickly transforming from an in-person experience to online. So obviously I kind of took care of canceling a lot of the things we had set up for Drury to be in-person. We had a big luncheon set up too for the afternoon talk, [it] was gonna be combined with the luncheon that was with Karen Price who wrote a book called The Price of Thirst: Environmental Humanities and the Global Water Crisis - actually that’s the title of her talk that’s related to her book. I was especially excited for that luncheon because for the Humanities and Ethics Center winter break read, we read two chapters of her book, and so it was gonna be an opportunity for students to, you know, attend a luncheon and meet her in person, so there were pieces of the transition that were, you know, it is disappointing when you don’t get those, but Ashley did just an incredibly rapid-fire job of contacting all the speakers, seeing who would still be able to participate in an online experience. It did change the line-up, so there were some people who ended up being able to not give a talk online, at the time that we had thought about having them do it, and in that case actually Missouri Humanities zipped down to Springfield and recorded a few different speakers for them to participate but not necessarily give their full talk, and they created a really beautiful film - short film - that is available online. So it was a combination of things, it was rearranging the line-up when certain people we found weren’t able to participate through the online shift, looking for people who could step in and take up those roles, and then creating some film footage of people who weren’t necessarily able to give a full talk, but were able to talk for a few minutes to share some of their thoughts. So it kind of generated, actually, new forms of presenting in some ways.
AG: I know you said there was a pretty high rate of registration, so, how many people attended the Facebook livestreams in comparison to the Zoom webinars and were there more viewers and comments posted after the live events?
KG: That’s a great question, I actually realized that I haven’t checked to find out the exact breakdown in numbers, but I think having it both be a pre-registration via Zoom and a Facebook livestream, I didn’t quite understand how that was gonna play out, but then I got it once I saw it, and I think it worked well because - So there are limits on the number of people you can have on Zoom at one time, so if we had the symposium be something you would register for, it would cap the number of attendees I think for the entire event at something like 500. So, if you’ve got, you know, 9 speakers, let’s say, you could get to that number pretty quickly and then everyone would be cut off. So Ashley created individual registrations for each talk so that we wouldn’t have strict limits on the numbers. So that helped give a sense of, ahead of time, how many people there would be and then the streaming online opened it up to anyone that hadn’t registered, and what worked surprisingly well was that it gave two methods of submitting questions during the question and answer period, so you could write in a question on the Zoom format with the Q&A function, or you could type in a comment on the Facebook page, that way there were kind of two streams of questions coming, and I think with almost every presentation, we had enough questions or so many questions that it filled up to the very kind of endpoint of the conversation, and in some cases, there were more questions that could be answered, so in that case, the kind of neat thing about having it be in that format where people are typing them in is that the speakers are then able to get the questions and provide answers even after the talk is over ‘cause you have these written submissions and you can write back. So, in some ways, it kind of opened up new possibilities that aren’t normally available. Usually when a talk is over, the speaker, you know, is gone, and with an in-person talk in this way, it extends the communication past that time limit which, it’s kind of neat that that’s possible.
AG: How did the intimacy of the online question and answer discussions compare to an in-person audience setting, like were the types of questions different, or do you think more people felt comfortable asking questions?
KG: Well, that’s a really interesting question, I think maybe it does take away the element of shyness, if people have shyness, because it is just typing a few words into a screen. I think that the other thing that goes away is the kind of verbal cues, or even softening words that we use in person, so I think it kind of causes people to ask the question in a very kind of direct, stripped down way, so a lot of the time we preface questions with things about what we really liked about the talk, or what it made us think of, and things like that, and then we kind of get to the question, and what I noticed online is people get to the question right away. So, I do think that is, I mean it’s super efficient, it works, but I do find the online experience, in that sense, I do miss [those] in-person, human exchanges. There is something that just cannot be replaced with those that is kind of a general human, almost, energy? I guess? Or, you know, kind of an intimacy in a kind of neutral way I guess, that doesn’t happen online. So, I think it probably brought out people who might not ask questions normally, it did make the questions kind of succinct and directly to the point, so it’s very useful and pragmatic, and again offers the possibility of extending the conversation past the presentation, but I would say it’s a little bit more mechanical than that human experience in person.
AG: Did you get any feedback from the presenters about how it felt different doing an online lecture and with audience interaction or lack thereof?
KG: Yeah, so, that’s a really good question. I think that’s probably feedback that’s being gathered still, but I think that, I mean, all of the presenters seemed to be really appreciative of being able to share their work to an audience of people that were so interested in it instead of maybe simply having something be canceled and not be able to participate, so I think what I noticed in some of their closing comments tended to be a gratitude that we were still able to connect, right? And I think there’s also a sense of optimism about it, that we’re able to make human connections even in the midst of a pandemic, right? And you know, some people are more experienced with the technology than others, but it seems like the speakers we had, all at some point in their past had done some sort of online presentation in the past, so it seemed like they were quite comfortable with it.
AG: So, Missouri Humanities released post-event surveys for each event, what did these reveal about the demographics and was there any feedback that you may not have gotten from the in person event?
KG: That’s a great question, so I haven’t gone through those yet, usually the Missouri Humanities’ kind of, PR person collects all those and does kind of a collection of the data that then gets shared. Missouri Humanities is incredibly good at collecting that feedback and analyzing it and using it, they’re very consistent in every single event they have in doing that, and I’ve always been super impressed. So, yeah, it will be very interesting to see. One of the things about this symposium that I’m anticipating, and I can at some point just let you know if it’s true, with the two in-person symposiums in the past, we always wanted to reach out past an academic university audience, but it was harder to do because we often had academic speaking and it was on campus. This time, a number of our speakers didn’t come from the academic world, but came from organizations like The Water Shed here in the Springfield area and an architecture firm out of Kansas City. So, I think, and this is my guess, that the audience will be a broader mix of academics and non-academics coming together, and I think that’s actually great because that’s what, kind of, state’s humanities councils are supposed to do, they bring the humanities to places that aren’t necessarily traditional academic institutions and help people see the ways in which the humanities are at work in our lives long-past, you know, college and grad school if you go to grad school. So, my guess is that it’s gonna be more of a mix than we’ve seen in the past.
AG: You mentioned there’s been sort of a long-term goal of expanding the reach to southwest Missouri - do you know if you drew many people from outside the Springfield community?
KG: I think so, yeah. I think that the breakdown of numbers will confirm it, but I do think that people were tuning in from places in Kansas City and St. Louis, which actually those are beyond southwest, even. So, yeah, I think it’s just so much easier to access the talks when you don’t have to drive to a campus and take off a day from work or part of the day from work, so that’s something else I’ll get back to you on, but I think it really did, just having been there for the talks and seeing the questions that were coming in, I think it branched out well beyond Springfield.
AG: So, all benefits and shortcomings considered, would you consider doing an online symposium like this again?
KG: I think that my takeaway is that streaming our in-person events is a really smart way to go. But, I think that people look forward to having that human connection again and being back in person, but I do think either streaming them as they’re happening to a broader audience is really smart, or recording all of them and making them available later. If you stream them, I think people can actually send in questions, and that is an advantage because then people who can’t be there physically can participate, but I do think that are- for example, with the luncheon that I hoped students would be able to attend, it was an opportunity for people to have those moments of just casual conversation that happen even between talks and the connections that people make. I think there’s something invaluable about that, and I would never want to lose that. So I think what it’s taught me is, if we need to do something online we can, but something feels missing in not having it in person, so it’s not that I think a replacement’s a good idea, but instead I think adding streaming and adding post-event recordings is a really smart way to go.
AG: Yeah! Well, congratulations on a successful online event. Where should people go to access the webinar videos and where can people find more information for future humanities events?
KG: Yeah, so if people visit the Humanities.drury.edu that is the Humanities and Ethics Center blog and we have a link there under our events for the semester under the Fall 2019- Spring 2020 events, the Symposium with the Missouri Humanities Council. The quickest way to get to the Symposium is probably to go to mohumanities.org and it’s actually one of the program highlights on their front page and I think it will be there for the upcoming future and there will be links to the videos, they’re doing a bit of a technical editing cleanup process, and all of the videos will still be there to access.
AG: Okay! Well, again, thank you so much for being here, I’m Ashley Gilland and you’re listening to KDRU, 98.1.
KG: Thank you so much Ashley, I really enjoyed it.