It would be great if one of the results to come out of NecronomiCon Providence 2013 could be an up-to-date online directory of active researchers. Perhaps titled something like ‘Directory of Current Scholars of H.P. Lovecraft’ (DOCS-HPL). Listing basic email and website details, any university or association affiliations, plus a short list of the top ten main current-and-planned areas of research interest for each person.
Perhaps someone might undertake to get a well-designed paper form circulated to all scholars at NecronomiCon 2013, with a main-lobby drop-off box for completed forms? By “well-designed” I mean with a clear check-box system that enables rapidly focusing down on types of personal research interest within the general taxonomy of our research areas, to save a lot of pondering and hair-splitting and “I’ll have to get back to you on that”. The Taxonomy might be cribbed largely from S.T. Joshi’s excellent indexes and might look like:
Lovecraft -> Biography -> His relationship with… -> Everett McNeil; or
Pulps -> Publishing Industry -> Censorship; or
Philosophy -> Contemporary Developments -> Speculative Realism; or
Lovecraft -> Fan Cultures -> Contemporary -> Cute Toys.
Could be a good ice-breaker for someone, and someone who’s tech-savvy might even input the data straight into the database via a portable device — and thus save a lot of transcription time later on. MS Office Excel-to-Omeka would be one good off-the-shelf solution to put that together, and to get it online in an easy-to-maintain and elegant form. Omeka is mature and is specifically designed to present online academic collections, and it works a lot like WordPress.
I spoke to Neils about this, as I’d like to see the scholarly research aggregated myself. There’s an opportunity to turn the main website for the convention into a touchstone, to build on the community formed by having 1200 Lovecraft aficionados from all over the world in the same place at the same time…
As I understand it the academic papers from the convention will be collected in a single volume at some point. Not sure if there would also be transcripts of the panels in that, although sending mp3s of the panels off to some cheap transcription service in India might not cost too much.