Rules & guidelines

  • Organisers will allocate accepted proposals into a programme, and give each presentation a 15-minute time slot.
  • Each presentation consists of no more than 6 tweets. Each tweet should have the official hashtag #brainTC, and be numbered (see example presentation below).
  • Tweets can contain pictures and even links to sources or papers, but the presentation should be understandable by reading just the tweets.
  • The audience can comment and ask questions from the presenter using the official hashtag. The main discussion should happen before the next presentation begins. However, discussions may continue even after the conference.
  • After the conference, abstracts and presentations (the six numbered tweets) will be collected into a proceedings.

Example presentations

The general guideline for the six-tweet presentation is to have an introductory tweet, then four substance tweets and finally a concluding tweet. Each presentation will be introduced by an announcement tweet from the organizers @RealBrainTC. Despite the strict character limits, please aim for clear and good scientific-quality presentations.

To help you prepare your presentation, here are a few examples of previous talks (click the pictures to see the complete presentation threads in Twitter).

Keynote by Riitta Hari @aivoAALTO at the first #BrainTC in 2017:


Keynote by Sophie Scott @sophiescott at the second #BrainTC in 2018:


Presentation by Guillaume Dumas @introspection at the first #BrainTC in 2017:

 

Presentation by Daniele Marinazzo @dan_marinazzo in the second #BrainTC in 2018:

How to draft your presentation in advance

You should draft the six tweets of your presentation beforehand, so they are ready to be sent when your slot opens. This way you can make sure that your tweets meet the Twitter character limit and you have time to troubleshoot if you have any issues with images or other media. The most common tool for doing this is using scheduled tweets in Tweetdeck, but note that tweets with media (gifs, pictures) attached, you lose the ability to edit them (including editing timing) and can only delete. Tweetdeck can only be used to draft the text portion of your presentation and you will have to add the media in when you publish your tweets (i.e. during your presentation). This is less than optimal, but so far it’s still the best tool we’ve found. We recommend you double check the size of your media before your presentation make sure it’s Twitter compatible.

Other tips

  • Use TweetDeck etc. so that you can follow multiple streams simultaneously. As a presenter, you might want to make a column for notifications and another for the conference hashtag.
  • You can pace your six tweets of your presentation to be slightly apart, to give people time to read and understand them, rather than sending them all at once in the beginning of your time slot.
  • The presenter “chairs” the discussion during their time slot, by choosing which comments and questions they answer.
  • Just like at regular conferences, be prepared for asking and answering questions. If your presentation is about a study that has been published elsewhere, it is a good idea to include a link to the publication in the presentation (a link in a tweet takes up only 23 characters).

What if I don’t have a Twitter account?

Don’t worry, it’s easy to make one and get started with Twitter. Here are some links with useful tips.

Getting started with Twitter

Getting started with TweetDeck