I will be tabbing the King’s College Empire Debates 2013, starting tomorrow so keep refreshing this blog for updates from the tournament.

Looks like around 50 teams in the tab, but that number can change based on tomorrow morning’s registration.

one of the experiments I hope to try at the tournament is collecting a cross-section of videos of the “top room” each round. Round 1 will be a randomly selected room and after that, I will try to put the camera in the room that has the most points.

Why do this? It might shed some light on the habits of debaters who appear in most of the videos as well as their style. There are a  ton of research questions that can be answered with this data. Are there things these teams never do? Always do? Are there distinctions in style that are noticeable? the data might have to be coded in some way in order to provide for a nice qualitative analysis of it.

Otherwise it would be a nice thing to have as a digital archive of a set of practices and norms that have no future except change. Debate formats always change and are always changing. It would be nice for future debaters to see these shifts happening over time.