SAA Conference, Vancouver 2017, Part 2

twitter meet up - complete with badge ribbons!

Conferences can be a bit hit or miss for me, depending on how sociable I am feeling. The downside to being an introvert is that it can be really difficult to do the networking and discussion thing that is an important part of the whole conference experience. I think people are often surprised at how quiet I can be in person given the amount of social media stuff I do. But that is why I love social media, it makes interactions easier (most of the time).
I actually managed to make quite a few connections this year at the SAA conference. Just like giving presentations, networking becomes easier with practice, and I find myself in a place where I finally feel like I know what I am talking about (it only took 9 years post PhD but hey). One networking event that was a lot of fun was the Twitter meet-up, though I didn't stay for too long due to the dreaded jet-lag. It is interesting to meet all these people in person that you only know through their Twitter names. It's like meeting new people, but you already know a bit about them through the things they post so you can avoid that whole awkward introductory small talk bit. It was nice to find a bunch of people who actually read my blog (hello!) - whilst I have all the stats on visitor numbers, I get very few comments so it is hard to know exactly who my readers are, and it's nice to know that people find my informal ramblings interesting.
In addition to a hectic schedule of papers and posters, I ended up going all the way to Vancouver to catch up with people from the UK, including the publishing team for the Archaeological Journal and publishers for a book I am working on. I also finally met in person our postdoc for the NERC project, Dr John Blong, who will be joining us in Newcastle next week. So all in all it was a very busy and productive week, spreading the word of archaeological science at Newcastle.