The program, registration information, travel and hotel information are posted on the conference website. Transportation will be arranged to and from campus from the conference hotels each day. The conference will take place in the Erik Jonsson Academic Center (JO) in rooms 4.614, 4.122, and the 4th Floor Arts & Humanities Lobby.
Presenters are encouraged and expected to attend the entire conference, to participate in many of the sessions, and to pay other presenters the courtesies that they wish to be paid. VMST is an intimately-sized conference that is focused on participation and interaction. Frequent, longish breaks are spaced throughout the day, in order to continue the conversations of the sessions in a more informal fashion.
Lunch will be provided each day, coffee and light snacks during breaks and before the first session of the day. A reception with appetizers will be served on Friday after the keynote, and we will have a conference dinner on Saturday (ticket required).
Any questions about the conference program or intellectual activities should be directed at Matthew J. Brown. Questions about logistics should be emailed to Magdalena Grohman.
Most sessions will be regular papers sessions, which will have 2-3 presenters and be organized on a shared theme. Each presenter will have 20 minutes to present their work, and Q&A will be held at the end of the session for the entire panel. (Presenters who finish before their allotted 20 minutes can use the balance of their time for a quick question or two). Session chairs and audience members are asked to work together to ensure that all presenters are included in the discussion.
A/V will be provided in the session room. Please coordinate with the session chair in the break before your session to get your A/V in order. We recommend you bring your presentation as a PowerPoint or PDF on a USB drive. It will also generally be possible to hook up a computer or laptop to the A/V equipment using VGA or HDMI or to access the internet from the presentation computer.
The goal of a lightning talk is to introduce the audience to your ideas or your research with the aim, not of giving a full argument, but of sparking conversations afterward. There will be a brief Q&A at the end of the panel. The lightning talk session will be followed immediately by lunch, where the speakers will be encouraged to sit separately and discuss their work with those who join them at their table.
Lightning talks will be on a strict schedule of 5 minutes per talk and 30 seconds between talks. Presentations will proceed in the order found in the final program. The speakers should be ready to transition as the talk before theirs comes to a close.
The timing of the session will be governed by an automatically advancing slide show. Presenters who wish to use slides should send their slides in ahead of time (by May 17), preferably in PPT format or as images. (I can probably convert PDF or Keynote, but I’m less confident that the formatting will work out, and it will be more labor intensive.)
You can send any number of slides for your presentation, so long as that number is evenly divisible into 5 minutes. If you do not want to use slides, a title card with your name and talk title will display for the full five minutes. Likewise, if you send one slide, it will display for the full five minutes. Five slides will display for a minute per slide, 10 slides for 30 seconds per slide, 15 slides for 20 seconds per slide, etc. We cannot accommodate custom timing requests or animations within slides.
If you submitted as a panel, the organization of your session is largely up to you, based on what you submitted in your proposal. Please contact us if you have any questions or would like to know more about our expectations for your session.
By registering to participate in the VMST annual conference, you agree to take active responsibility to promote the aims, values, and norms described in our Statement.
The conference organizers have designated ombuds for the conference, who can receive confidential reports of inappropriate behavior and work with the organizers to determine appropriate responses. The ombuds names will be listed in the program, and they will be identified to the attendees in the Welcoming session.