Textualities ’16: Blogging Back

Textualities ’16, what a great experience!

---

The Textualities ’16 Survivors: the Faces of Accomplishment (photo by Maureen O’Connor)

 

Preparing for the mini-conference series was quite a stressful time. Nonetheless, that could only make the sense of achievement even greater. But let me talk about the road to Textualities from the beginning.

It all began by assigning individual roles so we could organise the mini-conference series. I volunteered for managing the Twitter account along with Michelle Murphy. Setting up the account and tweeting from time to time to introduce speakers and remind people about the conference was easy enough; live-tweeting would be a different story. Once I became part of the whole, the next step was to choose a topic for my presentation. I just knew that I wanted to do something on the contemporary Irish short-story (what I did for the Wikipedia Editathon). I had read Billy O’Callaghan‘s stories and I really like them, so I decided I would do something on that. I was very indecisive as to in which aspect to focus (and still am, regarding what angle to take for the dissertation). In the end, since not many people knew about the author, I decided to make it a very brief introduction to his most recurrent settings and themes (islands and loss).

Me, myself and Prezi

Working with the Pecha-Kucha time-limit was quite a struggle but once it all fell into place it felt great to be so concise (a bit like a short story, actually)! I had never used Prezi before but I really like its features and I’ll stick to it for the foreseeable.

 

Pecha Kucha Time, a whole different category

Textualities ’16 went great on everyone’s part. It was a very enjoyable day in which we all learnt so much from our peers across disciplines (theories of the monstrous being among my favourites). Not only were the presentations good but many interesting points and discussions came up during the question rounds. I´ll just say that it felt great to be part of it! My only complain:  live-tweeting kept my eyes away from the presentations at times; live-tweeting is hard work but everyone was very engaged and we got #Textualities16 trending!

After this experience, I’m looking forward to taking part in another conference. Hopefully, it won’t be long.

You can watch my presentation below (English subtitles available):