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| SciX 2020 Program Chair Prof. Mary Kate Donais |
To signify the latest addition to the FACSS family, and
reflecting Mary Kate’s ongoing efforts to bridge the physical and social
sciences at the conference, SciX 2020 was planned to have an art and archaeology
special theme. Rather than a symposium
or two, art and archaeology would be elevated to its own multi-session conference
section chaired by SocArchSci delegate to the FACSS Governing Board Dr. Andrew
Zipkin. Student Ambassador Jayde Hirniak
was slated to chair the all-student invited speaker symposium; one of four
sessions planned. SocArchSci Past
President Prof. Rachel Popelka-Filcoff would deliver the keynote address for
the entire conference. The stage was set
to make archaeological and art conservation chemistry a high-profile and much
anticipated facet of SciX, this year and in years to come. The conference was scheduled to be held at the
Nugget Casino Resort in Sparks, Nevada beginning on October 11th. New evidence has recently suggested that a full
year before the planned conference, while SciX 2019 was underway at the Palm
Springs Convention Center in California, the novel coronavirus that would
eventually be named SARS-CoV-2 was already loose in Italy.
Interview
AMZ: Welcome Mary Kate. This year you were the Program Chair for The
Great Scientific Exchange conference, which turned virtual on fairly short
notice after the onset of the pandemic.
From my perspective, you had a very heavy lift on your hands to make
this a great virtual meeting. That is
the main topic I would like to focus on today but first, can you tell me a
little about how you originally became involved in SciX?
MKD: I would love to.
Initially, I started attending the conference, like many attendees, as a
graduate student. So, I started then,
transitioned into a job and continued attending, transitioned into a faculty
position and still attended – and truthfully it has been my high priority
conference. If I am only going to go to
one conference per year, SciX is the one I choose to go to. Fairly early on as a junior faculty member, I
was introduced to some of the leadership at FACSS and SciX, and I went out on a
limb and volunteered to organize a session.
At this point that was over 10 years ago, when I chaired that first
session with a few invited speakers.
That went on to subsequent sessions with more speakers and I was elected
to a position, and eventually ended up volunteering to be part of conference
leadership. This year I arrived as Program
Chair for the conference.
AMZ: Thanks for that background on how you got
involved in the conference. Before this area
was a major part of the conference, before there was an art & archaeology
section, you were planning that one or those two themed sessions year after
year on your own. What motivated you to
keep doing that, given that archaeology really seems like a topical anomaly at
this physical science conference?
MKD: A lot of what drove me is that, for me
personally, it was a new area of research.
I stumbled onto it; I am an analytical chemist by training and started
collaborating with a Classical field archaeologist at my college. I was intrigued by this great, small
community of researchers who did really interesting and diverse things even
though they all fell under this cultural heritage analysis field. I figured that if I was fascinated by all the
great work that these researchers did, maybe attendees at my favorite
conference would also be intrigued.
Truthfully, it was a great way for me to meet other people who were part
of this new area that I was trying to get involved with.
AMZ: I am certainly glad that you persisted all those
years. You invited me about four years ago
as a speaker and I’ve been involved ever since.
It’s a great meeting and a really distinct environment for an
archaeologist to be in, compared to the big national archaeology meetings. Moving on to this year in particular, as
Program Chair you made art and archaeology a special theme for the entire
conference and you recruited Past SAS President Rachel Popelka-Filcoff to give
a keynote address. Now, before the
conference went virtual, before the pandemic, when you were just talking about
what the themes for this year would be, did you face any skepticism or pushback
from the FACSS Governing Board or the other SciX 2020 officers about making
heritage science a major part of this year’s meeting?
MKD: Actually, it was absolutely the opposite. I was highly encouraged to pursue that as a
theme for the conference. Everyone had a
lot of confidence in me being able to do that because I had been organizing,
spearheading, those sessions for many years within the conference. They felt that I had the connections within
the research community to be able to pull this off successfully. And just the fact that it provides diversity
to the conference; it’s something new, it’s something different. As well, the original location of the
conference in the southwest, where a lot of indigenous culture research goes on
in the United States, was also an advantage because there are a lot of relevant
researchers based in that general geographic area.
AMZ: It’s great to hear that the support for this
went so deep among the organizers and the board. You were Program Chair in a year of profound
crisis that made it impossible to hold a traditional in-person meeting. And SciX is a very personal meeting; it’s
like a homecoming for a lot of people.
They come back every year and see their colleagues from grad school and
from former jobs and maintain those connections, as well as forge new ones. It’s not the sort of event that translates
easily into a virtual format. So, my
question is what was the greatest challenge that you faced over the past
several months to transforming SciX into a viable virtual conference?
MKD: The biggest challenge is that there was no
roadmap to how to do this. That we were
creating things as we went; we had to figure out new timelines which was
especially difficult given that we started out with already having plans for an
in-person meeting. We had to take all of
those existing parts and rearrange them, reimagine them, into a something that
our attendees would recognize as SciX while also making the changes needed for
a successful virtual meeting. We did it
with a lot of polling of members and previous attendees, getting feedback at
multiple stages of planning to make sure that what we ended up with as the
final product addressed as many of the high priority aspects of the conference
that our attendees value as possible. But
also, not being intimidated to step out on a limb and come up with some new
things to try because if this was a year to experiment with new things, there
really was nothing to lose. We put in
some new {features} for the social aspects, the networking, that our attendees
want to have and that are such a vital part of our conference. That was the hardest thing to adapt to a
virtual meeting. Some of those ideas,
when things get closer to normal, or actually back to normal, we may keep as part
of the conference. I believe the final
statistic is that about a third of our attendees this year had never attended
SciX before.
AMZ: Wow; I had not heard that number from you or
anyone else on the conference committee before today.
MKD: A lot of them are people for whom travel is more
challenging, I think. This was a great
low-cost opportunity to try out the conference, but they may not have the
budget to attend the conference in-person in the future. So, if we can somehow provide enough virtual
content that could keep them interested in the future…this is going to be a
decision for our next leadership team for 2021 and onward. It will be really exciting to see how things
change over the next couple of years because of what we have experienced this
year and see what new things SciX will be able to do as a result.
AMZ: Speaking as one of the organizers myself, for
the art & archaeology section, it was really fascinating to see how things
changed over the course of the summer. We
went from dealing just with heritage science subjects to being combined with
forensics in a new topic area. Suddenly,
I was working with {Security and Forensics chair} Rob Lascola and looking at
these nuclear forensics abstracts and having to work out where these talks made
sense in our program now that we’re all part of the same topic area. It ended up being a really valuable
experience; Rob and I would not have worked that closely together otherwise. In addition, as you mentioned, there were
these virtual events that were entirely new.
For example, the student and early career researcher virtual happy hour
that The Society for Archaeological Sciences co-sponsored with the Archaeological
Science Group at Cornell. We had people
join the happy from all over the world who were unlikely to attend, or even be
aware of, SciX otherwise. Even outside
of SciX, we’re doing more of those now as an ongoing partnership between
SocArchSci and the Cornell student group.
I really think there is potential for adding value by keeping a virtual
component to in-person meetings in the future.
Do you think that sounds viable?
MKD: I hope so.
I hope that we’re going to be able to include more of that global
community in SciX generally and within the art and archaeology section because
so many exciting things are going on in so many parts of the world that
traditionally are not well-represented at SciX, even though we’re an
international meeting. We can run with
that and build momentum going into 2021.
AMZ: One final question. If you could give a single piece of advice to
someone organizing a virtual conference or workshop for the first time, right
now, what would you tell them?
MKD: Have a really, really, good team to work
with. I think that made the difference
for me – being able to rely on the others and not try to tackle too much of it
myself. Don’t be discouraged or
intimidated by trying new things. Some
of them worked really well, much to our surprise. We had no idea how it would go. So, be bold and confident in trying to experiment.
AMZ: Thank you Mary Kate. I appreciate you taking the time; it was
great seeing you.
MKD: Thank you Andrew.
--
Andrew M.
Zipkin is the Vice President for Intersociety Relations at The Society for Archaeological
Sciences and an Assistant Research Scientist in the School of Human Evolution
and Social Change at Arizona State University.
Mary Kate
Donais was the Program Chair for The Great Scientific Exchange (SciX) 2020 and
is a Professor of Chemistry at Saint Anselm College.
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