Bad to the “Bone?”
By: David Wyld
Tags: Technology, Tech, Business, Online, Conference

Introduction

Ah, the academic conference! In the good old, pre-COVID-19 days, such meetings were typically something akin to “geeks gone wild” (trust me, I’ve been to more than my share!). Before all the “fun” that 2020 ushered in, the academic conference did provide a forum where professors and researchers could gather yes to exchange their latest findings, but also have a few days away from their classrooms and labs and either kick back with a few alcoholic beverages to network with their colleagues and maybe even take the family on a trip to Orlando or Las Vegas (or both)— hopefully on their university’s dime at a fancy resort!

However today, just like almost every non-life saving meeting of two or more people, these conferences have almost all gone virtual — or at least extremely hybrid! And yes, that means while there’s no need to travel and no need to even wear pants for your presentation, academic conferences have to deal with the same tech issues that accompany every virtual meeting we attend these days, with attendees routinely having connectivity issues and presenters not quite knowing how their message is getting across to those listening — well likely multitasking — to their presentation.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Now unless your academic conference has a presentation on a new treatment for the coronavirus, it is unlikely that your group will make much news these days. However, the most recent annual conference of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) did make the news and yes, became something of a social media sensation in the process. No, there wasn’t a discovery of a new giant dinosaur announced. No, there wasn’t a finding that our dino ancestors weren’t wiped out by an asteroid. Rather, what would otherwise have been a little noted online gathering of paleontologists garnered quite a bit of media attention for the way a tech device that has become rather routinely employed for online meetings — a content filter — impacted the conference. And while yes, while the situation does have elements that make one chuckle, it also calls attention to issues that can arise when content filtering gets in the way of actual, needed conversations online and how all organizations — from businesses to educational institutions — need to be aware of how devices meant to filter out possibly objectionable content can get in the way of enabling online meeting participants to communicate effectively today.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

The “Naughty Words” of Paleontology

Now for all of us who have delivered presentations, taught classes or led meetings online — both pre- and post-pandemic, we all know that many times, no matter who the audience is composed of, you simply don’t get true feedback from just those who ask verbal questions. Rather, many participants in such meetings prefer to ask their questions in writing to you, whether in real time if a chat function is available or at the end of a presentation. So, this written feedback is invaluable to the presenter, as it enables he or she to interact with audience members to be able to clarify any misunderstandings and/or to raise any issues with the presenter — and likely in any large group, any question/concern/suggestion raised by one attendee will likely represent an issue that others have as well. So what happens if the written feedback has to go through a filter and that filter is waaaaaaay too strong for the occasion? Of course, communication problems — and yes some hilarity about the perils of modern technology — will ensue!

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash

This very thing happened in early October 2020, when the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology was not held in Cincinnati as planned, but rather, was conducted as a virtual conference. The online meeting platform for the SVP conference was provided by Convey Services, a Roswell, Georgia based firm that provides what is yes, a very needed service — what they term “cloud conventions.” But even as the first presentations for the conference were being delivered, participants noticed an issue with the meeting platform. That was because, as you can see below in a Reddit post from Stephanie Drumheller, a paleontologist at the University of Tennessee and an SVP member and conference participant, the meeting platform came with “a pre-packaged naughty-word-filter.”

The filter had the unintended consequence of filtering out words that might have been questionable in some contexts, but that were essential when it comes to discussing paleontology research — including “bone” (kind of key when you are talking about fossils!). And as you can see in Dr. Drumheller’s Reddit post above, her example was a participant having to change the name of an actual place in order to beat the filtering algorithm — altering a reference to “Hell Creek” to “Heck Creek.” As the presentations were ongoing and more questions and comments were typed in by virtual attendees watching them, more words were discovered to be banned by the filter, leading to some interesting situations — and yes, social media posts by SVP participants. These included “sex”…

…”publis”…

… and “stream.”

Thomas R. Holtz Jr., a paleontologist at the University of Maryland, created a spreadsheet of banned words reported by conference attendees so that meeting organizers could keep up to date on the issue…

…and as of the end of the conference, the list had grown to include the following words:

Table 1: The “Banned” Word List

Hell

bone

ass

Fuca

jerk

knob

pubis

pubic

pubes

sexual

stroke

stream

Wang

Dyke

sex

erection

ball

asses

iffy

crack

lies

enlargement

Fuck

damn

Beaver

enterococcus

flange

dinosaur

penetrate

lie

crap

Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19ok1-mr4LQnSlR7RAsqfsjynN0x815QS3YMatfnPpyA/edit#gid=0

And yes, you read that right, as even “dinosaur” was on the pre-packaged list of banned words!

Now certainly, the “naughty words” list drew many chuckles and funny comments online…

…and yes, the conference organizers were able to work with Convey Services to quickly update their software to allow for the paleontologists to actually discuss how, where, when and what type of dinosaur bone they found in their presentations — so problem solved.

But correcting the filtering algorithm is by no means the end of this story. That is because the “naughty words” experience generated far, far more publicity for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Conference could ever have expected — or dare I say even wanted. People discovered the conference precisely because of the banned words controversy…

… and major media sources covered the conference precisely because of it…

Such coverage produced articles with chuckle-worthy headlines including:

However, what was not funny about the situation was an issue that arose over the fact that the platform banned the use of “wang.” This was first pointed out to conference organizers by Jack Tseng, a Vertebrate Paleontologist and Functional Morphologist at the University of California. As you can see in his tweet below, he saw a cultural issue in the banning of this particular word, in that it was a common surname of many Chinese researchers in the field.

As such, this caused an even higher even level issue for conference organizers — even though “wang” — like the other words — was corrected in the filter. However, Dr. Tseng was quoted in the Vice article stating that:

“At first, when fellow conference attendees noted on Twitter that ‘Hell’ and ‘bone’ were banned, I was very amused by it.”I figured the filter was simply over-tuned to prevent many slang words used by schoolchildren from being shown in a professional meeting. I became disturbed when I saw that the crowd-sourced list of banned words included ‘Wang.’ I personally know of several vertebrate paleontologists by that surname. It didn’t seem right, so I typed in other synonymous slangs into the Q&A platform and realized the bias that I tweeted about.”

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

Analysis

Of course in the end, the nature of the story (and the fact that it made folks — for the most part — laugh, which is indeed needed today) generated even more buzz for the conference in the media — and social media — culture we live in today. So while the word filter certainly created a problem — and yes an issue that was rather quickly fixable (even if it had to be done on a word-by-word, after the fact basis) by conference organizers and their platform provider, it could just be considered another one of a long list of stories that just attests to the difficulties — and pitfalls — of doing things online and through virtual means today that until the coronavirus outbreak were largely done in person, including the academic conference.

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

However, as more and more of our professional, business, and educational activities have shifted online since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the “naughty words” incident with the recent Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference does highlight issues that managers and administrators do need to have on their radar today. This is because as this story shows, there is a balance to be struck between just how much oversight and protection one can — and should — offer in the online environment. Indeed, devices such as content filtering always provide a tradeoff between the need to ensure civil and polite behavior among participants and the desire to have productive conversations. And yes, there are both practical — and legal — reasons for organizations to want to have filtering in place to ensure that there is nothing offensive taking place. However, at the same time, as this incident shows, the filtering can indeed stifle conversations. And when the matters being discussed do involve language where the terms being used can have multiple meanings — such as “bone” and “sex,” there can be a real complexity to the dialogue. One can think of many other fields — perhaps even your own — where similar conflicts can, and perhaps even are, occurring between content filtering and actual productive conversations due to the homographs (words spelled the same but with multiple meanings) that are omnipresent in the English language.

And so yes, the paleontology case shows just how delicate a balance there is between stifling conversation and protecting civility in the modern age, and how difficult this balance is to achieve in the online environment. This story shows just how important it is for managers, administrators, and yes, software developers and service providers as well, today to be responsive and flexible in just how content filtering is set up and executed in practice in real-life encounters in virtual meetings, classrooms, and yes, conferences. It also shows how there is a need for both constant oversight in such matters, and yes, the willingness and capability to learn from what are not perhaps “mistakes” such as what happened with the SVP conference as much as they are the challenges of modern life and technology.

Photo by Jeppe Hove Jensen on Unsplash

And yes, there will be more stories like this to come, especially as our shift to using virtual tools like “cloud conferencing” is only likely to grow in the coming years — pandemic or not. The challenge is to be aware, to be flexible, and yes, to be understanding. But these tools are unfortunately necessary — as one actual conference attendee reminded people in the Vice article:

“‘I would hope that actual swears or slurs would be censored, since paleontology is not a field that’s immune to racist/sexist jerks,’ noted Brigid Christison, a masters’ student in biology at Carleton University.”

The important thing for all of us to remember today is that we will need patience, understanding, good communications, and yes, operational flexibility as we all work through this grand experiment in shifting much of what we have done formerly in-person to virtual environments. And yes, watch out for those homographs!

About David Wyld

David Wyld (dwyld@selu.edu) is a Professor of Strategic Management at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is a management consultant, researcher/writer, publisher, executive educator, and experienced expert witness.

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