Our Pre-Holiday Break Activity: Preparing for Conference Presentations in 2026

Authors: Annamari Korhonen and Dorothée Kraus, Tampere University

Research teams at both Tampere University and the University of Copenhagen have started to review, organize and gradually analyze the data they have collected over the last nine months. In order to share our first observations and analyses of the data, both research teams are currently planning the conferences they will attend next year, and have started to prepare presentations for these.

In order to present findings from our research, we need to find suitable conferences where relevant researchers from different universities meet. Sometimes the researchers come from different countries in Europe, sometimes even from all over the world. A conference usually takes place over two and five full days. On a conference day, researchers listen to talks and presentations of colleagues, have lunch together, and discuss their ongoing research projects. At conferences, we are able to spread knowledge about the NewWorkTech project, share our findings, and get new ideas on how to advance with our data.  

For a conference to be suitable for us, its topic must fit our data, methods, and interests, and English must be among the allowed presentation languages as not all researchers speak all languages of the NewWorkTech countries. When preparing a presentation for a conference, either one researcher in our team takes the lead or some of us work together in deciding which data we want to present and discuss, and which research question we aim to answer.  

Then the writing of an abstract begins. The abstract is the presentation proposal – essentially, a shortened version of the presentation we will prepare, already giving away the findings so that all colleagues know what to expect. We send our abstract to the organizers of a conference and they decide whether our presentation fits the overall topic of their conference, and whether they think the presentation is beneficial for other attendees of the conference. We then receive their feedback and know whether we get to prepare a full presentation for the conference week. A presentation is usually between 20 and 30 minutes long, and there is always time for questions and discussion. So if you hear us saying that we will show your data at a conference, this is what it means. We always make sure to pseudonymize the data as agreed so that participants are less recognizable.