Presentation Best Practices
We are excited to welcome everyone to our first in-person conference in three years! Things will look a little different this year, so we wanted to provide some guidelines and reminders.

General Presentation Tips

Each of our sessions is 90 minutes, and we would like to have at least 30 minutes for questions. So presentations should be no more than 15 minutes with four panelists, and 20 minutes with three panelists. Please adjust accordingly if there is a commentator.

Session chairs: Please enforce time limits. We recommend signaling when presenters have five minutes remaining and one minute.

For some more general tips on how to give an excellent conference paper and/or be a great chair and moderator, refer to this guide from the American Historical Association: https://www.historians.org/annual-meeting/resources-and-guides/speaker-resources/information-for-speakers




Welcoming New Folks

Since this will be our first meeting in a LONG time, there will be lots of new faces at the conference, including graduate students for whom this might be their first major, in-person academic conference. With this in mind, we encourage all session participants and attendees to follow these best practices: 

• If you are chairing, consider reserving the first couple of questions for graduate students and/or new conference attendees in the audience. This helps prioritize those who are often the most hesitant to participate.
• When asking a question, please identify yourself by name.
• Please make sure questions are questions, and not long comments in the form of questions.
• Consider making the effort to introduce yourself to other attendees in the audience whom you do not know. Also, introduce friends or colleagues who might not know each other.




Accessibility

Please consider the following practices in order to make your presentation as accessible as possible:

• Where possible, ALWAYS use the microphone for your presentation. Even if you think you “project” your voice, someone might not be able to hear properly.
• Session chairs: Encourage folks to use a microphone for Q&A if one is available. If not, please repeat the question.  
• Please make sure presentation slides are as viewable as possible. This guide from the University of Washington has some excellent best tips: https://www.washington.edu/doit/how-can-you-make-your-presentation-accessible
• If you are pre-recording your presentation, please try and include captioning.

 

Technical Concerns

In general, ASEH and the hotel will be able to provide limited technical support for each session. We recommend that the panelists arrive to their session early to ensure setup and troubleshoot possible issues. When in doubt, follow the “suspenders and a belt” approach to technology: Have multiple backup options!

ASEH will not be able to provide laptops for the conference, so we recommend that panels arrange for one primary person to have all presentations pre-loaded on one laptop, with another laptop as a backup. Make sure you have all necessary adapters to connect your laptop to a projector.

A number of presenters who could not make the trip to conference will have pre-recorded presentations. We have no set policy for these papers, but recommend the following:

• Pre-record your presentation on Powerpoint or other presentation software, and then convert to an MP4 or MOV file.
• You can then upload the file to a cloud server (Google Drive, etc) where your panel has the option of downloading it, or streaming the presentation. We request that the presentation be downloaded onto a laptop. We don’t want to stress the conference hotel bandwidth more than necessary.
• Alternatively you can upload the presentation file to Youtube, Vimeo or a similar service, and share the link with your panel for the presentation. Although this is convenient, there is a similar issue with bandwidth. 

Some folks will hybrid sessions, with one presenter live on Zoom. A few tips to make sure this goes as smoothly as possible:

• The remote presenter should plug their computer directly into their modem. Hard-wired computers help reduce WIFI connectivity issues,
• Exchange phone numbers so you can call/text the remote panelist.
• Be prepared to use the chat function if a mic/sound goes out.

ASEH 2022 Program Committee

March 2022