Flipped Conference - LD2021 has a new style!

Welcome to the 2021 Languaging Diversity conference!

This year our conference will be different from all the previous ones in the LD series as it be held 100% online on the Underline event management platform:  https://underline.io/ 

As we know, an online conference comes with particular challenges: How does one overcome the problem related to participants’ different time zones? How can one increase attendees’ involvement and interaction during hours and hours of sitting and listening to online talks? We are happy to announce that we will address these issues by proposing a flipped conference format, which boils down to watching content beforehand, and use the time of the conference to hold real-time discussions during targeted Q&A sessions. The pre-recorded videos of all the papers or posters presented at the LD2021 conference will be made available two weeks before the actual conference on the Underline platform for participants to view them and start formulating questions ahead of time, which will be addressed during the scheduled live discussion. This content will also remain available on the platform after the conference ends, so later down the line you will be able to go back to what caught your attention. This new virtual format allows us to deliver the same amount of content in a compressed timeframe, while encouraging more interaction between attendees during the actual conference and its social gatherings.  

Please note that the opening ceremony and the plenary sessions will not be made available before, but will be streamed live. The same is of course true for all Q&A sessions. 

During the conference there will also be plenty of occasions for interaction and networking. Lounge areas and informal gatherings like birds-of-a-feather meetings will be available to LD2021 participants to share updates and build newcollaborations.

There are three things about the flipped format you need to know and get ready for: 

1. Your 20-min talk will be pre-recorded and made available on the Underline platform at least two weeks before the actual conference so that the audience can watch it at their convenience (no matter their time zones or schedule). We will soon be sending you detailed instructions on how to record your video presentation, which should be submitted by September 15, 2021. Thank you for respecting this deadline. Underline will handle all the technical support for video uploading.

2. Your paper will be scheduled in a thematic panel in the conference programme. Each paper will be devoted a 20-minute Q&A session, which will start off with a 3-minute ‘elevator-pitch’ by the participating speaker (who will introduce themselves, their research question, goals and results). A chairperson will articulate the discussion with questions that will have been asked before (using the question box available on the platform) or asked live by the audience attending the Q&A session via video or chat.

3. Before and after the conference, Underline will take care of formatting your presentation and it will be published as a full publication on its own rights with a (perpetual) DOI number. We have negotiated with Underline that your talk will be made available in open access on their platform. You will receive a release form to allow the diffusion of your talk. 

In the same flipped way, three-minute poster presentations will be video-recorded in advance and submitted by September 15 2021. By the same date, poster presenters are also expected to submit their poster in PDF format. Posters will be discussed at the conference during live Q&A sessions during which authors can be approached for questions via video or chat. 

Please confirm your participation with paper/poster by June 30 2021 to ld2021@univ-lille.fr. 

You can also join us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/langdiv2021?lang=en