Denice Szafran, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Buffalo, is putting together a Pecha Kucha session for the annual American Anthropological Association meeting in New Orleans. Pecha Kucha is a new visual format for giving a talk, which features 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each. Here’s her call for submissions over at the Anthropology Cooperative:

I am putting together a session proposal for the 2010 AAA meeting in New Orleans, and would like to call for submissions of abstracts.

The session will focus on graduate student works-in-progress, and will be Pecha Kucha – 20 slides, 20 seconds each. Often the only people who are aware of graduate student work are our advisors and committees, and this will be a chance to show the discipline what we are up to and where we are researching, and get feedback from the audience. This format is an exciting way to do that. With this method we will be able to accept 12 presenters for the session, and all research areas are welcome.

If you are interested, or think you might be, please submit an abstract to me at dszafran@buffalo.edu by February 24 so that I can assemble the invited session proposal by the March 1 deadline. You will be notified by February 27 whether your abstract will be included with our submission (just in case we get more than we can handle).

As Denice notes, Lorenz over at Antropologi kicked up interest in Pecha Kucha with his post in January, Pecha Kucha: The Future of Presenting? It bears some similarity to our speed presentation format that we used successfully last October at the Encultured Brain conference. Lorenz included a bunch of links to learn how and explore more. You can also go directly to PechaKucha.org.

Here’s a video about this new format:

Another example, this one from Wired and introducing Pecha Kucha and then discussing the social uses of signs: