Every year, all over the world, hundreds of calls for papers are submitted and hundreds of congresses take place, all of them devoted to some aspect of antiquity. With such an enormous amount of international activity, it is rather difficult, if not impossible, for an individual researcher, or a researching group, to keep in track of every single academic activity related to their specialty, not to say of general academic activities at international scale. It is a very common phenomenon listening to complains from students, young researchers or even consolidated ones about the lack of information on some activities they would have been interested in participating in. The members of this project have checked this experience, even personally, happening in different countries, always talking about classics and antiquity studies. Fasti Congressuum was born by and for students and researchers on Antiquity as an independent project and a tool against this situation.
TopOrigins Of The Project
Every year, all over the world, hundreds of calls for papers are submitted and, consequently, hundreds of congresses take place, all of them devoted to some aspect of antiquity. With such an enormous amount of international activity, it is rather difficult, if not impossible, for an individual researcher, or even for a researching group, to keep in track of every single academic activity related to their specialty, not to say of the general calendar of academic activities at international scale.
Even at a more national or even local level, it is a very common phenomenon listening to complains from students, young researchers or even consolidated ones about the lack of information on some interesting activities they would have been interested in participating. It is known that a congress is not only a proper place to show academic work but also it is the venue where social academic networks take place. So, it is a pity when scholars do not share their job not because they have other meetings to attend or they have academic duties, but also because they do not receive any information about the event.
The members of the present project have checked this recurrent experience, even personally, happening in different countries, always talking about classics and antiquity studies. By one hand researchers have to confront those difficulties, by the other they should be as much international as they can and they must try to share their work not only for researching reasons but also for receiving a better place and foundation in their home universities.
Up to now, the way of learning about Call for papers and Congresses was limited. Researchers have easy access to their own universities’ events via email and panels. In some well know universities such as Oxford or Sorbonne-Pantheon everyone can see posters of Congresses. In those universities, secretaries play an essential role in diffusion receiving information about different events and promoting them through a common space online. Most of the universities do not forget to keep in touch with the most prestigious centers, but most of researchers work in middle and small universities, which are out of this chain of information.
In small and medium universities, only local and semi local information about Congresses reach to researchers. For example, it is quite easy to promote a national Congress between colleagues but external or foreign Congresses seem too far away.
Email is other important way of events’ spreading. Most of researchers try to keep in touch with colleagues via email and some of them try to share information about their own Congresses. This way may be very useful but it requires counting on contacts in order to be in the chain of communication. Young PhD applicants and young professor are not always able to be inside big mail lists easily.
The last way of information is e-mailing group. There are some e-mailing list like Classicists (1997) or Archport (2015), in which anyone can be registered and receive a wide range of different information. A big amount of congresses are diffused this way but there are some problems. The first of them is the saturation of information: a researcher can receive five or six e-mails every day. It can be a real waste of time to read everything and select useful information since those e-mailing list do not filter information. It is common to receive information about exhibitions, new articles or a Call for Papers. Tags are not employed and so information is not selected. In the end, a researcher must waste an amount of time filtering this kind of information.