Support Roles, Session Details, and Presentation Guidelines

SUPPORT ROLES

Room Host

The host creates the Zoom room/link and manages all the back-end settings, such as security settings, accessibility features, co-hosting privileges, recording, etc. The person in this role is in charge of allowing attendees into the session if there is a waiting room.

Session Chair (co-host)

This chair’s focus is to open the session, introduce the session’s presenters, and moderate post-presentation Q&A. They may wish to open the Q&A with a minute or two of silence while the attendees gather their thoughts. The chair should be ready to ask questions of their own or prompt the chat moderator to highlight one of the questions or comments shared in the chat. The chairs and chat moderators may wish to be in touch ahead of the conference to establish protocol for their sessions.

Chat Moderator/Room Monitor (co-host)

This person will monitor behaviors of attendees in the chat and remind people in the chat of any guidelines established with the chair and/or presenters ahead of time. The moderator/monitor may wish to collect questions that appear in the chat during the presentations into a separate document (e.g., a Google Doc) that is then shared with the session chair during the Q&A. The session chairs and chat moderators may wish to be in touch ahead of the conference if to establish protocol for their sessions.

PRESENTATION GUIDELINES

Given the atypical modality of this year’s conference, we offer a truncated version of the traditional “presentation guidelines” document that circulates every year. To keep things simple, we offer the following tweet from modernist scholar Johanna Winant:

For those using document readers, Dr. Winant’s tweet reads, “. . . conference papers usually have this rough structure: 2 minute example, 3 minute zoom out to bigger project/conversation, 3 minute scholarship wrap up, 4 minute close analysis, 3 minute stakes.” The framework of Dr. Winant’s tweet, as you can infer, is rather relevant to the 2021 Woolf Conference theme, no?

In addition to this suggestion, we ask that presenters consider their audience: fellow Woolf readers and scholars who will, for the most part, be very familiar with the primary texts the presenter analyzes. For this reason, it may not be a good use of time to summarize plots or to quote long passages (though presenters may want to provide attendees with copies of long passages ahead of time).

Here are a few additional presentation tips, especially if you plan to use a PowerPoint (much of it synthesized by Beth Rigel Daugherty):

• Sans serif fonts are ideal for virtual presentations/electronic text

• Use white or very pale background and dark print

• Keep things very simple:

  • large font; no more than 6 lines; no more than 6 words per line (and fewer in both cases, if possible)

  • visuals with clear captions

• Consider a brief outline of what you're going to do at the beginning to orient everyone, a structure that follows that outline, and then a brief recap at the end

• In addition to an access copy of your presentation, consider providing a handout via a Google Doc or Zoom file attachment (email these items to the Zoom Room Host, Chair, and Chat Moderator ahead of time in case you have trouble attaching documents)