This page is a reflection on my experience at HNR 2026 and the work I presented with my friend and colleague Paul Guhennec. It was a 3-day conference on July 20th-22nd, and had many attendees. If the conference page is still archived, check out the other presentations here. Our presentation was a development of a project I completed for the EPFL DH class "History and the Digital," taught by Jerome Baudry and TA'd by Paul. We applied (and in the process rapidly oscillated between disillusionment and fascination with) network studies to understand a collection of architecture competitions in French-speaking Switzerland. This writeup contains some text from my original report in the History and the Digital, in which I collaborated with André Da Gloria Santiago, Nathanaël Henri Marcel Marie Lambert, and Jérémie Mosè Graziano De Faveri. They did not participate in any work related to the conference, and decided not to after I asked them if they would like to.
This was the first chance I had to attend a medium-sized conference, and although the three days were tiring, I particularly enjoyed the keynote presentation by Scott Weingart, as well as the roundtable at the end of the conference. I also thought several of the presentations were fascinating, but was disappointed by the limited amount of Q&A time. That is typical for academic conferences, it seems. The theme of the conference was source criticism, a well-chosen topic especially relevant for a field which is particularly at risk of misinterpretation and hypertheorization.
TODO: a short section on the history of competitions, standardizations, photos.
TODO: transcribe the slides from the presentation on the dataset.
TODO: revisit the section on the ideas of Paul
