The 47th Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology, ICOHTEC's first digital meeting, July 15–17, 2020
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The theme of the 47th symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) was "A History of Technology for an Age of Crisis." Discussing crises was highly attractive for many scholars, and two-thirds of the papers covered this theme. Such a focused conference is unique in the history of ICOHTEC, known for developing topics by organizing sessions at meetings every year.1
The symposium was scheduled at Eindhoven University of Technology, a center of research for the history of technology in Europe. The Program Committee received and evaluated more than two hundred paper proposals.2 After the committee, chaired by Stefan Poser, had almost completed preparations for the entire event, the COVID-19 crisis forced us to find another solution for this conference. The local organizers invited us to be one of the first international conferences in the humanities to go digital, [End Page 873] and as a result, the symposium took place online, July 15–17, 2020. Eindhoven University's Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences was its technical and organizational core, from where Jan Korsten, Angelique Bakker, and Erik van der Vleuten coordinated the conference with ICOHTEC's Program Committee. Assisting them was a crew of student-assistants, who operated the virtual conference rooms, bringing together participants from all over the world, each in their own room or office. The Eindhoven technical support team ran a net reaching from the North American West Coast and Latin America to Europe, China, and Australia.
Going Digital—an Experiment
ICOHTEC was transferred entirely to a digital format: the Opening Ceremony, the keynote event, the Kranzberg Lecture (named after the founding father of ICOHTEC and SHOT, Melvin Kranzberg), all scientific sessions, and ICOHTEC's traditional jazz night. This was an experiment. When it was clear that the regular conference could not take place, we decided to digitally conduct the event in July. The alternatives to a digital meeting were cancelling the conference or postponing it for two years, since preparations for ICOHTEC's next symposium on the 26th International Congress for the History of Science and Technology in Prague 2021 were already in place. Once a survey showed that a third of the participants wanted to join in this experiment, ICOHTEC went ahead. As this was a first, we will describe and evaluate the conference in more detail.
Sessions started at 1:00 p.m. Central European Summer Time and continued until 8:30 p.m. This timing allowed a maximum number of participants in different time zones to attend. A few hours before the sessions started, local organizers in Eindhoven sent the participants an overview of the day's program, links to the conference website and social media, and reminders about the procedure.
The platform used was Zoom, which served ICOHTEC well. Participants received a personal password to enter the Zoom rooms. Each room had its host, a student assistant, who prepared the room, allowed participants in, and provided technical support to the chairs. The platform turned out to be easy to use for speakers, participants, and chairs. Nearly all presentations were live, with PowerPoint slides shown through the "shared screen" option. Most presentations came through clearly, despite occasional connectivity or sound weaknesses, followed by lively discussions with ten to thirty people in the audience.
In addition to the regular sessions, there was a special COVID-19 crisis session with contributions from Eindhoven, the United States, India, and Brazil. At the sessions devoted to our annual book and article prizes, most winners, as well as those receiving an honourable mention, presented [End Page 874] their work. This was an advantage of the online meeting over those in the past, as winners often could not arrange attendance in the few weeks between the juries announcing the winners and the actual conference. One of ICOHTEC's standard attractions, the jazz night, when the ICOHTEC band Email Special plays, could not take place, but participants...
