The Art of Scientific Presentations (GEOG8260)

Just a reminder that Wednesday (April 25), each of you will deliver your Pecha Kucha presentation to the entire group. Please come to class with your graphics (set to 20 seconds a slide) on a removable flash drive. I'll also ask you to prepare a title for your presentation - I'll use that to arrange the schedule for our final session and do a bit of advertising.

Also please bring along a laptop or notebook so that you can make notes on each of your peers. I'll fold your comments feedback into my own so that students can use that feedback to prepare for our second Pecha Kucha session in front of a larger audience.

We're down to our final two class meetings, so we are now entering the final push for our Pecha Kucha presentations. In class next week (April 25), each of you will deliver your presentation to the rest of the group. Please bring in your complete set of 20 visuals and be ready to tell your story in only 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

All of us will provide written feedback on each presentation, and you'll be able to use those comments to tweak your structure or visuals to give an even stronger presentation for the week following. In our final meeting on May 2, we'll throw the doors open and invite people from outside the class to join our audience.

Bring your title
Please remember to conjure up a title for your presentation (even if you are not using a 'traditional' title slide as part of your graphics). I'll use your titles to organize the schedule of talks for our last class and I may include them in a bit of 'advertising' for our final class.

Keep calm and carry on
Finally, a lot of people (me included) find that delivering a presentation is an emotional, as well as intellectual, challenge. At it happens, one of the presentation blogs I follow posted a short entry about dealing with anxiety around public speaking. If you start feeling nervous about your talk, read through 'How to remain calm before a presentation' - it might be just what you need.

April 18
Next week, your assignment is to bring a complete electronic draft (a draft - no necessary your final talk) of your Pecha Kucha graphics to class. You'll use these visuals to deliver a practice talk to one other student in the class. This exercise will help each of us talk through our presentation and test out what ideas work in the constrained format of Pecha Kucha (and which ones maybe don't). Please remember to also bring a timer (either electronic or analog) so that you can tell how well your talk fits into 6:40.

I'd also encourage you to ask yourself: What is the arc (or shape) of my presentation? I've included a link to great video by Nancy Duarte (check out her team's outstanding blog here) explaining how structure and story can help you make a real impact.
Nancy Duarte, Sparkline Overview

Chartjunk links

Chartjunk - all visual elements in charts and graphs that are not necessary to comprehend the information represented on the graph, or that distract the viewer from this information.

As Tufte said 'Above all else, show the data'. Here are a few links to help communicate visual information more effectively.

information aesthetics on communicating data clearly

The problem with pie charts

The Economist argues that charts are 'Worth A Thousand Words'.

Another reminder that next week, our class will meet on Thursday afternoon (not Wednesday) at the IonE Building on the St. Paul campus at 1:30PM on April 5. The website for Paul's photography is www.paulnicklen.com. His presentation at TED, which was recorded last year, is available here. It's been viewed by more than three hundred thousand people. We'll have about an hour to talk with Paul about his career with National Geographic and his approach to communicating complex issues to a broad audience. Please come prepared with one or two questions to get the conversation started.

Links related to our conversation on fonts
The scourge of Arial
When you should use Comic Sans
Why you hate Comic Sans
Fonts common to all versions of Windows and Mac
Video: "Helvetica, period!"

April 11
For our class meeting on April 11, please read this article by Michael Alley and Katheryn Neely arguing in favor of adding 'sentence headlines' to visual aids.

Also, please prepare two slides that use text to communicate (1) a concept and (2) a quotation related to the main theme of your Pecha Kucha presentation. I've included the two examples I showed in class yesterday below (click to enlarge).

"If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare."
- Mark Twain

Pecha Kutcha is a style of presentation that uses strict constraints to foster creativity and force speakers to be thoughtful about the way they spend their (very limited) time. I've posted the links from today's discussion, along with a PDF version of the slide template for your storyboarding exercise.

Link: Lessons from the art of storyboarding

Remember: Due to Spring Break and an off-week following, our next class will meet on March 28. Be ready with your storyboards for paired discussion!

Line: What, if anything, is Big Bird?

Video: Engage through story

Exercise: Structure your talk using the slide template [PDF]

Hi folks,

As promised, here are a few links to topics discussed in last classes' lectures, plus an article that describes the cost of visual complexity.

Reading
Bergen et al. (2005), How attention partitions itself during simultaneous message presentations

Links
Get those logos off the screen!

The TED Commandments

Bill Gates and visual complexity

Gates, Jobs and the zen aesthetic

The visual transformation of Bill Gates the presenter

Next week
For next week, please bring (or email me) two photographs of billboards or posters that catch your attention using simple design. And remember, take your own photos (rather than use Google)!

In our last class, we talked about the power of photography and the exceptional effectiveness of photographs as visual aids, and this topic will form the core of our next presentation exercise. On February 29, I'd like each of you to give a short (5-minute) presentation on one idea related to your research using only photographs as visual aids.

Each of you should have received an email from me with comments on your Takahashi-style presentation. Included in that email was a list of terms that your audience identified as jargon. In your next presentation, I'd like you to explain what one of your 'jargon' concepts means. If your jargon list was short, please explain another concept that's central to your research subject or theme instead.

I've posted a PDF with slides from last class right here.

Where can you get images?
This exercise also gives you the chance to assemble a library of images related to your research that you'll be able to use later in the course (and beyond). The best source of images is your own photographs, so you might want to use this as an opportunity to take a few pictures of your lab, your research subject or something else that links you and your research topic. Otherwise, I'd recommend visiting Flickr.com and searching for images uploaded under a 'Creative Commons' license.

Other links
I'd encourage you to look through Garr Reynolds' online presentation about the major take-away ideas from John Medina's 'Brain Rules'.

Next class
And finally, a reminder that next class (Feb 22), we will meet on the St. Paul campus and be combined with a communications workshop run through the Institute on the Environment. Go to IonE Seminar Room R380 in the Learning & Environmental Sciences Building.

Yesterday we talked about the importance of understanding our audience, and the challenge of envisaging our research from someone else's perspective. For next class, I'd like each of you to write a brief (300 words or so) biographical sketch of a real audience you may have to face in the future (you can also consider an audience that you've addressed in the past and want to reach more effectively).

In your sketch, try to address the questions we raised in class. What's the setting of your presentation, and who are you addressing? What do they already know about your topic? Are they experts or novices? Where sources do they rely on to get information about your research? What issues are important to them? What preconceptions about your topic or tools that you'll need to fight against?

Please bring printed copies of your sketch to class. We'll exchange them and have a discussion in pairs and after class, I'll ask you to turn them in to me.

OK, I'll give you a few more details about your assignment.

Next week, each of you will give a brief presentation using the 'Takahashi method'. I first learned about this approach through a he 'Presentation Zen' blog, which featured a short post about the method and a nice story about its development.

For your version, I'd like you to focus on one important idea related to your research. Because you'll only have 5 minutes to give your presentation, you'll need to select an idea that is sufficiently narrow to be discussed briefly but is also also accessible to non-experts (the rest of us). Please try your best to respect the constraints of the format: one idea, 20 (big) words, 5 minutes.

Finally, I mentioned that using 'standard' fonts can help avoid common formatting problems in PowerPoint or Keynote. You can scroll through a list of 'safe' fonts that are installed on all Windows or Mac machines right here.

Know your audience
Also next week, we'll talk more about understanding our audience. Depending on the occasion, we may end up speaking to people with very different backgrounds or interest in our subject. If we simply give the same presentation to everyone, we'll probably end up missing the mark and be either too technical or too simple. Ken Haemer, who's a retired manager from AT&T put it nicely when he said "...designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it 'to whom it may concern'".

To get ready for that discussion, I'd like to you read two (short) articles that have very different perspectives on the way that scientists (or researchers) communicate.

Preston Manning, 'Communicating effectively with politicians'
Tim Radford, 'Of course scientists can communicate'