Rethinking That Conference Paper
Best to go and see Eric Scheeff and Philip Bourne's Structural Evolution of the Protein Kinase–Like Superfamily. On the left menu, you can jump to places in the video, read relevant selection from the paper etc. On the right hand, you can simply read the whole paper. Through the site, a researcher can publish any"publications from the PLoS (Public Library of Science) ... PLoS publications are open access so the full text of the paper is available for free and unrestricted access." SciVee doesn't accept any non-Open Access papers.
While I am enthusiastic about the ability to virtually present one's paper - AHA should really pay attention here - I don't think that the Humanities academy in the US is very receptive to the idea of public presentation/re-presentation of published papers. Not to mention that the commitment to Open Access itself is quite spotty - the various history journals listed at the Directory of Open Access Journals are either based outside of the US or have intermittent publishing history. Please see Linda Hutcheon's What Open Access Could Mean for the Humanities for a good overview of issues involved.
Still, until we decide that open access digital publishing should be an essential part of our scholarly apparatus and assessment, we can use technologies like SciVee to at least expand that staid conference model.
It would be a fairly simple exercise - with the built-in usage of Instant Messaging and comment features -to collaborate, workshop or conference together on a topic and theme with colleagues around the world. Perhaps even a necessary exercise.