Voyages of Discovery: An Arts and Sciences Colloquium and Poster Session

Schedule of Presentations
Information for Presenters
Information for Poster Session
Information for Reference Consultants

Introduction

On October 25th, 2014, the Barony of Carolingia will host an Arts and Sciences Colloquium and Poster Session at the First Parish Unitarian-Universalist Church, located at 75 The Great Road in Bedford, MA.

The East Kingdom event announcement can be found here.

Event Description

The day is intended to provide a forum for arts and sciences researchers to gather together and share what they are learning, using all the useful tools for knowledge transfer that are available in a modern, conference-style setting.

This is an day to talk about your process, your surprising discoveries, your successes and even more importantly your fruitful and instructive failures. There is no competition and no judging – the day is designed around pure knowledge transfer.

Site will open at 10am and close at 6pm.

A more detailed Call for Presenters is below; the format of the day will be as follows:

• Lecture-style presentations with a question-and-answer session at the end; presentation slots are one half-hour, with fifteen minutes of presentation and ten minutes of question-and-answer. Those presenters who are comfortable with a longer presentation are welcome to request two adjoining slots, for a forty-minute presentation and fifteen minutes of question-and-answer.
• A poster session. This will be a hall set up to display poster-size presentations of research topics (either hanging or free-standing trifolds). There will be an hour during the day while the posters are attended by their authors; the room will be open throughout the day for interested folks to walk through and read at their leisure.
• A reference consulting table and reference book petting zoo. Trying to figure out how to frame your research question? Not sure where to look for a particular piece of information? Just wondering what the heck is “Boolean”, anyway? Stop by and ask our reference consultants; internet searching will be available, and there will be various reference books to consult. Please feel free to bring your own cool reference books to share; there will be someone minding them all day.
• Breakout rooms and lounge space for kibitzing and further exploration of topics that caught your interest during one presentation or another.

Coffee and other beverages will be available throughout the day; a lunch is available for a separate fee and must be reserved by October 17. You are entirely welcome to bring your own lunch; there will be ample space for lunch and there are also a number of nearby eateries, both takeout and not. This is a modern-dress gathering; there will be no feast or other activities.

If you are interested in presenting, either as a lecturer or a poster contributor, please contact us.

Call for Presenters

We are inviting presentations on research topics having to do with SCA areas of study. The format is lecture-style; slides and other audio-visual tools are not only allowed but expressly encouraged. Use this opportunity to present the information that is awkward or difficult to present at a competition or in a class in a medieval setting. A question-and-answer period will be part of each presentation slot, but this is not intended as a setting for roundtables or hands-on teaching.

Some examples:

• Experimental archeology – “I have been reading historical descriptions of how this thing was made, but it isn’t clear exactly what they mean. I tried it out with this set of experiments, and this is what I discovered the first three times it didn’t work, and this is how I eventually settled on a process.”
• History of an art – “I recently staged a courtly masque of this particular French type. Here is the historical record of this kind of masque – engravings, musical scores, extant descriptions – and here is how I put this together. Here is what this would sound like.”
• Analysis – “We have a lot of information of various kinds about household economics in Germany at this particular point in time, but I haven’t found a good summation and representation of typical households of a certain social strata – here is the summation I’ve developed, and I think these graphical representations make several aspects a lot clearer.”

There are many, many possible subjects for these presentations – if you are curious as to whether your topic would be a good fit for this format, please do contact us directly and we would be delighted to discuss it.

For new presenters: we are compiling a list of volunteers who have agreed to offer advice and assistance on how to give a good presentation, how to prepare a poster, and other relevant technical skills. If you are interested in these resources – or *being* one of these resources – please let me know.

For those who are interested in a poster display rather than a lecture, the same sorts of topics are equally appropriate. Please consult our Information for the Poster Session.

We are excited to host this – please come and play!

tiny urls:
http://tinyurl.com/m63j5hq
http://tinyurl.com/voyod