In any case, I do agree that conference presentations should make the most of the live, visual, and interactive medium. One of the best conference presentations outside the industry track was Paul Bennett’s talk on “Refined Experts“, in no small part because he made the presentation very interactive, as well as emphasizing visual materials over formulas.

I find that senior researchers take this approach more often than junior ones, and my speculation is that the senior ones are less concerned with proving themselves–and thus focus more on communicating with the audience.

So that aside, there is still a qualitative difference in how danah chose to represent her material, and how almost, if not all, other SIGIR academic and industry researchers presented themselves. Not just a difference in quantitative skill and polish, but in qualitative approach.

True, slideological slides can’t be shared as usefully. But I’m still wondering: In terms of giving a conference presentation, the purpose of which is to invite people to read your paper in more details, should academic presenters move more in that direction?

No right or wrong answer. Am just interested in your (and your readers’) opinions, and reasons for those opinion.

I don’t expect graduate students or even faculty to be superstar presenters. But presenting is a skill, and there were a number of presenters whom I wanted to send to Toastmasters for basic training. That strikes me as a bigger issue than the choice of presentation format.

Specifically with regard to danah’s “slideological” presentation format, it does have the unfortunate side effect that the slides aren’t useful as a stand-alone artifact (which is why she isn’t sharing them online). Of course, you can turn that around as a positive: she made it worth being there live. My personal style is somewhere in between.

Of course, there’s the hope that future SIGIR conferences will be videoed, or even live-streamed. That would be nice.

It makes me wonder.. should the rest of the academic community be moving in this direction as well? Would we be better off giving more” slideological” presentations? Or is it more of an eTech-ian cultural norm or fad, rather than a more universal aspiration?