PRESENTATION GUIDELINES
While the
review panel made every effort to respect each submission’s proposed
presentation style, pragmatic considerations of matching schedules,
other submissions, and space limitations mean that
you may have been
slotted into a different presentation format than you proposed.
Please
check the program to be sure.
What follows offers
general considerations for
presenting at the
Symposium, followed by specific considerations for each of the
presentation formats.
General
Considerations
An academic conference like the Symposium is meant not simply
as a chance to to present finished work, but more importantly as an
opportunity for scholars to share work in progress with other scholars
and with an engaged audience.
- Audience members see how other scholars working on similar
or parallel questions construct their objects of study, handle evidence
and interpretation, and make arguments about the significance of their
work.
- Presenters get substantial feedback from the audience about
the persuasiveness of their work, as well as suggestions about other
ways of understanding it.
- Conversation will be organized by a moderator, an
established local scholar whose job it will be to help identify and
consolidate interesting results of the discussion.
Presenters should feel free to solicit help from the audience,
and the audience should feel empowered to offer their personal and
scholarly responses to the work they hear. Both sides are welcome to
disagree, to explore unanticipated connections between their work, to
consider the nuances or significance of the work presented, or engage
in any other kind of free and frank discussion. (For more, see "The Art of Asking Questions.")
Specific
Presentation Formats
Aside from the more general expectations of conference
presentation outlined above, each presentation format and style comes
with its own expectations, whether you are reading a paper as part of a
panel, participating in a roundtable, or present a poster.
Panel
A panel session generally
will
comprise
three
presenters each speaking for
15 to 20 minutes,
followed by 15 to 30 minutes of discussion.
A presentation may be a written
essay read out loud (the
convention in the humanities), a more informal presentation delivered
from notes or a PowerPoint presentation (the social sciences and
sciences), or some combination.
While writing and pacing your presentation, estimate 2 minutes
for a double-spaced page.
Media clips should not overwhelm
your presentation, and the general expectation would be no more than
30-60 seconds per clip and no more than 3 clips in a single
presentation.
EQUIPMENT: Most rooms
will have a computer/projector
set up for your use, and (if you've requested it) a VCR/DVD/CD
player. PowerPoint presentations are best saved as a "PowerPoint Show"
(choose .pps on the "Save As" menu), and though it's a good idea to
email yourself the file as a backup plan, your best bet is to bring
the file on a flash drive. Mac users will need to
bring a mac-to-PC flash drive adapter. For more, see our equipment guidelines page.
Roundtables
Roundtable presenters, like panel
presenters, are likely to
have written an essay approximately 10 pages long; unlike panel
presenters, roundtable presenters will not perform the entirety of that
essay. Rather, a roundtable generally will comprise 4-5
presenters each speaking for 5-10 rehearsed minutes
about their work, followed by 30-50 minutes of more
free-ranging discussion among presenters and audience. That
reading (estimate 2-minutes per double-spaced page) might include 1)
reading a synthesized version of your full longer paper, 2) reading the
intro part and then talking through the rest, 3) talking the intro and
then reading select passages or discussing one or two particularly
compelling examples. Because time is a limited commodity in this
format, any media clips should be very carefully considered.
The idea here is to get the
audience up to speed with what you
are doing so they'll be able to discuss your topic intelligently in the
Q & A that follows. In that spirit, roundtable presenters are
expected to have carefully read one another's work
ahead of time and prepared questions for one another (email addresses
are given in the program). The Q & A can
be a good place to discuss more fully things you weren't able to work
into your presentation; thus, it can be useful to have prepared some
minute-or-so-length parts of the longer essay for ready response to an
appropriate questions.
EQUIPMENT: Most rooms
will have a computer/projector
set up for your use, and (if you've requested it) a VCR/DVD/CD
player. PowerPoint presentations are best saved as a "PowerPoint Show"
(choose .pps on the "Save As" menu), and though it's a good idea to
email yourself the file as a backup plan, your best bet is to bring
the file on a flash drive. Mac users will need to
bring a mac-to-PC flash drive adapter. For more, see our equipment guidelines page.
Poster Sessions
For physical, practical, and intellectual guidelines to creating your
poster (and a video of a past Symposium poster session), see our
Poster Session Guidelines.
A poster session
generally will
compromise
8-10
presenters who occupy a single room; each presenter stands by
their work for the entirety of the 75-minute session and
discusses
it one-on-one with the circulating members of the audience.
As an option, presenters may have prepared a handout for
interested viewers to take with them (a modified version of the poster
or the data set). It is recommended that you bring a pen and
notebook to record viewers’ comments and suggestions, because
you'll get lots of 'em.
Additionally, because the poster should be able to stand on its own,
more or less, be sure to include your title, author’s name(s), and
contact information for
viewers who may be interested in contacting you later.
