You will not give a live talk. Instead, you will create a 10-minute video of your talk that will be broadcast during the conference. That video will be followed by a live roundtable discussion and a Q&A (where you will appear in a live-streamed video chat).
This year’s ICER will centralize all videos on our virtual conference platform, Clowdr. During the conference Clowdr will automatically stream the videos followed by live virtual roundtable discussions and Q&A sessions.
Clowdr makes it easy for authors to upload their videos and provides authors the possibility to improve the automatically generated captions.
After the conference the videos will be archived on YouTube, making it easier for members of the community and the general public to access and discover ICER 2021 content after the conference. When you upload your talk video, you will be asked to indicate that you accept YouTube’s Standard License. This allows us to upload your video on your behalf.
Paper Presentation Requirements
All presentations must:
- Be recorded. This avoids bandwidth problems, allows high quality captions, allows attendees in inconvenient time zones to stream later, and allows us to archive the talk videos publicly on YouTube.
- Be exactly 10 minutes long. Your video will be fully automatically streamed at the scheduled time by Clowdr. If your video is longer, only the first 10 minutes will be played. If your video is shorter, there will be a gap where the audience has to wait until your 10 minute time slot is up. The ten minute duration allows time for enough time for roundtable discussions and Q&A after the video, reduces video chat fatigue, and also increases the likelihood others will watch the archived video online.
- Be in 1080p format (1920×1080 with a 16:9 aspect ratio). This resolution ensures that any small text that might appear is still legible to any visually impaired viewers, or viewers who are particularly curious about a tiny detail on a slide.
- Be uploaded to Clowdr. The conference takes place within Clowdr, and thus the video must have been uploaded into the platform in an appropriate format by the appropriate deadline (so Clowdr can produce captions and prepare the video for live broadcasting as well as for on-demand viewing).
- Read critical textual content. This does not mean reading everything on your slide, but everything that you want attendees to notice, ensuring that blind attendees get the same information that sighted attendees get.
- Describe critical visual content presented. This also ensures that blind attendees get the same information that sighted attendees get.
- Don’t rely on color to communicate information. There are numerous kinds of colorblindness, and the diversity is such that color is not a reliably accessible signal. Consider alternatives such as contrast differences, pattern differences, or labels.
- Be captioned. After you upload your video to Clowdr, Clowdr automatically generates captions and then notifies you so you can improve the captions.
Authors will be notified when Clowdr is ready for video uploads (around July 5). The videos must be uploaded and captioned before July 17, 2021, AoE.
How Paper Sessions Work
Because your presentation is recorded, you might wonder how the recordings will be used during the synchronous portion of the conference. The research paper sessions will be less like a performance and more like a viewing party all happening within the Clowdr virtual conference platform. We scheduled talks into sessions containing two papers. Our schedule contains two parallel tracks that take place in two separate rooms (Talks A and Talks B). Thus, there will be two sessions happening at the same time. Each session is scheduled at a specific time in a specific room. Most sessions are 40 minutes long and follow the same structure:
- Before the session, the session chair and the presenters will arrive at in the backstage area (a video-chat) of the session, and the audience will arrive in the session’s room.
- Time T+0: Paper 1 Video. At the start of the session, Clowdr automatically starts streaming the pre-recorded video of the first paper.
- Time T+10: Paper 2 Video. Clowdr streams the pre-recorded video of the second paper.
- Time T+20: Roundtables. Clowdr opens up roundtable discussion (shuffle rooms). Audience members click to enter a video-chat with a small group of other random participants to discuss the two paper talks they just saw.
- Time T+30: Q&A Clowdr brings the audience back to the talk room where the audience gets to watch the video-chat between session chair and authors streamed from the backstage and can ask questions (which they came up with during the roundtable discussion) about the two papers via text chat.
Availability of Videos Beyond Paper Sessions
During the entire conference, inside Clowdr, there is a page for your paper. That page also embeds the video of your talk. Any registered ICER 2021 participant can go to your paper’s page and watch your video at any time during the conference.
After the conference we will archive the videos to the ICER 2021 YouTube channel, where they will be visible publicly.
Thus, be mindful of the dual-use of your video: it will be live-streamed just before the roundtables and Q&A at the conference, but it also will be available on demand and could be seen later, out of context, by anyone on YouTube.
Paper Presentation Recommendations
Think about how to construct a video that people will want to stream and watch together with fellow attendees.
First, because 10 minutes is so short, be very mindful that you cannot present every detail of your paper. You may need to skip many details about your method or elide some of the key results. Think of the presentation as a compelling summary of your work that helps everyone learn the gist of your discovery, while convincing more interested readers to spend 30-40 minutes reading your paper.
Because pre-recorded videos are a different medium than an in-person talk, reconsider which conventions to follow. For example, most in-person presentations involve a person talking, gesturing, and pointing to static content on a slide. While that can work well in person, that doesn’t translate well to video. Video, on the other hand, also enables other media, such as animation, music, and sound to convey ideas. Think carefully about how to engage the audience, and recognize that the more you surprise them with your choices, the more likely they are to pay attention. Some surprising choices might include:
- Create a YouTube influencer-style highly edited narration, like this Contrapoints takedown of gender critical feminists.
- Use kinetic typography to bring your text to life, like this rendering of MLK’s I have a dream.
- Mimic weekly news commentary, like this Last Week Tonight episode on policing.
- Animate your lecture, like this Brene Brown piece on empathy.
- Dance your dissertation, like this 2019 winner of the annual contest.
If you’ve always wanted an opportunity to explore beyond the conventional PowerPoint presentation with voice over, consider this an occasion and encouragement to do so. While PowerPoint might be the most familiar, the recorded nature of the videos opens up other possibilities for tools. Apple’s Keynote presentation software is particularly good at creating more dynamic, animated presentations with rich media. Movie creation software like iMovie and Windows Movie Maker allow you to incorporate music, overlays, and transitions.