Wednesday 22 February 2012

The next talk is coming up.

I'm currently preparing the powerpoint slides for my paper at the "3000 years of Colour" conference, and I'm having the usual problem again: I need an intro bit explaining what I was doing, then some words about methodology and experiments, then the intro to the experiment design and the data gained from it.
And by the time I can get into talking about the analysis, this means quite a lot of time has gone already. And I need to keep it much, much shorter than I would like to. This is such a common problem when you're working in a niche field - I usually end up taking about 5 minutes to explain what I am doing, and why, in a conference paper. Many of the conferences on experimental archaeology only give you a 20 min slot, so that means a quarter of my allotted time is gone before I can get properly started with my research and results presentation.

Can somebody please invent something to slow time during a talk? That would be so, so nifty sometimes.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Can you use a service like Dropbox to provide additional information. That way you can cut the background explanation to a minimum and if they want to look up your methodology etc they can just download it from your public files in Dropbox (or similar). Put the URL of the files up on screen while you give the intro. 20 minutes for a presentation is nuts - the conference I go to gives speakers twice that.

a stitch in time said...

The problem with using add-ons for a talk is that yes, you can offer them for anyone interested... but the information is not available during the talk. And methodology, in this case, is something I want to cover (or at least mention) during the talk, due to different special methodical problems with textile crafts connected to the experimental approach.
And 20 min is quite normal for archaeological conference talks - it just means you have to learn how to give intros in a very short and concise manner. Mostly, I don't mind that restriction too much, but the spinning experiment is a really huge topic with lots of necessary background explanations...