The British Society for the History of Science is delighted to announce our first digital conference, using the social media platform Twitter. This one-day conference, on the theme of global and international histories of STEM, is a great chance to get creative!
Embracing the novel ‘presentation’ style with this new platform, we encourage potential speakers to submit your abstract in the form of a ‘Tweet’. With a maximum of 280 characters, you may include in your abstract ‘Tweet’: hashtags, tagged accounts (i.e. @accountname) emojis and one image.
Additionally we also require your Twitter handle (eg @BSHSNews), your timezone, the title of your proposed presentation, a speaker biography (max 100 words) and preferred language. Given the international theme, we are endeavouring to tweet as many papers as possible in both the original language and English. Please be aware that, whilst we will aim to accommodate your language preference, this will depend on our recruitment of translators.
Submissions should be sent with the subject ‘Proposal for BSHS Global Histories Twitter Conference’ to office@bshs.org.uk . The deadline for submission is 17:00 GMT on Monday 2nd December 2019.
Whilst the conference focuses on international narratives, we welcome presentations on other related themes – including the local and the global. Postgraduate students are also strongly encouraged to submit abstracts.
GUIDANCE FOR SPEAKERS
-- Papers will be tweeted from BSHS twitter account (@BSHSNews) but you must have a public Twitter account to reply to questions. This can be a personal or organisational account.
-- Presentations are allowed a minimum of 6 and a maximum of 12 tweets.
-- Each tweet must be numbered (1-12) and start with the hashtag #BSHSGlobalHist (ie 1 #BSHSGlobalHist, 2 #BSHSGlobalHist etc)
-- Your presentation should begin with an introductory tweet, then have 4-10 “body” tweets, and end with a summary tweet.
-- The speaker is responsible for ensuring they have the correct copyright and permissions for the material to be placed on Twitter.
-- Speakers can include any kind of media in their tweets (including images and gifs) as long as they are suitable for a conference that will be open to all.
-- For accessibility purposes, all media needs an image description (max 420 characters, see https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/picture-descriptions for more information). If images involve colour to convey information, ensure colours are well contrasted so that they are easy to decipher by those who are colour-blind or visually impaired.
-- Whilst media is encouraged, links to extra text explaining the research is not allowed. Speakers are welcome to use their own accounts to expand and share anything during the discussion.
-- Presentation tweets must be sent to the organisers prior by 20th January 2020.
--You will be allocated a time slot when your presentation will be tweeted on the BSHS account, based on your geographic location. This will be followed by a 15 minute discussion period when you must be online to answer questions. ----Ensure you give us your time zone information when you send in your proposal.
This conference has been inspired by the Underpinnings Museum Twitter Conference #UPMTC, organised by Lorraine Smith. You can find out more about their conference: https://underpinningsmuseum.com/archive-twitter-conference-12-01-18/_