Some Tips for Presenters
Our Work-in-Progress conference has a long tradition of being a friendly, supportive and collegial conference, and over the years it has been the venue for many first-time presenters. If this is your first conference we want you to feel comfortable about presenting, and hope that the experience will be a positive one, with not only general approval for your paper, but also valuable feedback that will assist your overall research project. With a view to this, we have prepared the following list of guidelines. Even if you have presented before, please read the list: these are the (usually) unwritten assumptions that underlie all academic conferences, and a consideration of them will enhance everyone’s experience of the conference.
Papers are to be twenty minutes in length, and session chairs will be instructed to terminate the presentation at that point. Running overtime is unfair to the other presenters, and the ability to judge the length of a paper is a professional skill that is well worth acquiring.
Ensure that the abstract accurately reflects the content of the paper. All papers develop and change in the writing, but if the audience is expecting a certain type of paper, and receives something unrecognisable from the abstract, they are less likely to be as receptive.
In Progress? is a work in progress conference. By this we mean that it is assumed that the paper derives from an uncompleted thesis or other research. It should not imply that the paper itself is incomplete, or based on research that hasn't yet been done. Even early in a project, there are interesting things that can be said about it: discussions of the theoretical framework or analysis of other research in the field; or the results of a pilot study in the area. Such discrete papers are inherently more interesting than those which are merely outlines of methodology or expectations about the research to be done.
The conference is interdisciplinary. This means that many or most of the people in your audience will not share the same critical apparatus or academic register as you. You cannot address this audience in the same way that you would a seminar in your home department. Make sure that you have not made assumptions about knowledge that might be specific to your discipline. At the same time, be open to the sorts of insights that interdisciplinarity can provide.
We intend to provide the common technical facilities (sound, OHP, slide projectors, and data projection) but remember: when used appropriately technology can enhance a good paper, but all the technology in the world cannot rescue a bad paper. Using data projection or overhead transparencies merely to list dot-points or section titles is rarely worth the effort. If your paper needs visual titles to help the audience keep track, then maybe it is too complicated for an oral presentation, and you should consider rewriting instead.
