FAQ: New at NWAV50

Why did you add project launch presentations?

Our main motivation for creating this new type of presentation was to create a space for scholars to introduce and get feedback on a new research project at a time when such feedback could still meaningfully influence its development. While such feedback is useful to people at all stages of their careers, we hope it will be particularly beneficial to those just starting out. We need and welcome these new voices.

We also thought that project launch presentations would help offset the serious consequences of the COVID pandemic on sociolinguistic data collection. With project launches, researchers who have been unable to collect and analyze new data still have the opportunity to engage with the NWAV community and receive professional credit for doing so.

Finally, a perennial problem at NWAV has been not knowing how to evaluate abstracts that summarize research that is clearly incomplete but is nevertheless compelling. We hope project launch presentations are a good solution to this problem.
 

Why are there no posters at NWAV50?

We recognize that posters can be a very effective presentation format for many projects, but we found the challenges of finding adequate space under pandemic conditions and the hybrid format of the conference to be insurmountable obstacles to holding a useful poster session.

Poster sessions also provide a means of including more papers in a program than would otherwise be possible. We accommodated more papers in the program by shortening the default paper presentation time to 10 minutes.