I spent all day Sunday at a stone carving workshop … carving stone. All a lot of fun until the head fell off! Due to a fault in the Hebel block, apparently, so I came home with a headless statue AND a brand new Hebel block to try again.

She doesn’t look TOO bad .. until I give you this link… I was aiming for the statue of Geertruyt van der Oosten who stands near a canal in Delft in the Netherlands. I snapped an image that I used as my screensaver for years. She is so lovely a rotund and smooth, and looks up with such optimism.

My little stone carving is not and does not.

She looks like the Nailed It! version.

I felt far better when my classmates turned out “Nailed It!” ducks and penguins and dogs too. We all laughed with each other as the stone took on a mind of its own. All of us had a great workout for the arms, and I think spent six or so hours in a “flow” state as we attempted something new.

While I was trying to copy the lines of the original from some photographs, I was reminded of the book of Degas Dancers I bought when I was learning pastel drawing. My teacher had us copy a lot of other drawings in our sessions – and for good reason. Trying to deconstruct how a drawing has been made, which colour was layered where and in which stage, how the lines fit together – teaches you to draw better than either step-by-step drawing-by-numbers or trying to just draw without a guide.

Today I was taught about stone carving by a Dutch stonemason called Arie Teeuwisse, who completed the original statue in 1358.

Unlike drawing, where you may create a couple of good guiding lines first and then use them to get your bearings for the rest of the sketch, it seems that with sculpting you need to pick out the dimensions that are the most extreme, ensure you have them right, then build from there. This is why the lovely tummy on the original Geertruyt (which to me looks maybe pregnant ?), on my version looks as though she was sliced down the front. I didn’t allow for this curve before I started on the rest.

I was chatting with a fellow-lecturer during the week, as we have been marking work. Every so often we receive work that looks kind of, sort of right, but with wobbly bits that indicate that the student probably is trying to mimic scholarly writing, rather than has spent enough time working out what constitutes scholarly writing. I really feel for them, because I suspect that when they read academic articles, they find them so impenetrable they think THIS is how one should write…one should aim to use vague sounding language, with huge run-on sentences that really seem to go nowhere near a point.

I always wonder “what did someone do to have them feel this kind of panic when they come to write?”, and “what are we still doing to scare them so much that they do not understand that scholarly writing is above all about communicating a clear message?”.

I have my postgraduate students share their writing on discussion boards, all about different topics, but giving the topic the same treatment. I think that seeing each other’s writing lets students learn from each other. They are asked to read each other’s pieces, and I hope that by doing so, they get a better idea of where they can improve, and what they are doing well.

I don’t, however, provide model answers. Unfortunately, I find that these encourage students who get by through mimicry to give me a piece of writing that is almost a blow-by-blow copy of what is in the example.

But, I am left wondering, given my experience today of learning a lot about sculpting through mimicry, how can I use the good parts of this to help my students learn ?

I am attending the Digital Humanities Downunder Summer School at the University of Sydney this week.

I have been playing with R in the afternoons and using Python to play with some distant reading techniques in the mornings. No, I did not really know R or Python before this.

This morning I have read in the entire text of 10 different classic English novels from Project Gutenberg, cleaned out the junk text at the start and end of the files, tokenised the novels so that the words are countable…then had a play…

I counted the occurrence of the word “kindness” in each novel, then plotted whereabouts the word occurs in the novel,  using the Python Natural Language Toolkit. Fun!

I discovered very unscientifically, that 1) the female authors use the word far, far more often, 2) when used, there was a very clear pattern of it occurring just at the start and just at the end of the novel. There are two interesting future research projects right there. Compared to what was possible (and in which timeframe and by whom) twenty years ago, what we can do at our desktops right now is quite amazing.

Here is what I found out about Pride and Prejudice.

If you get a chance to attend this next year, go for it. The organisers have worked tirelessly to keep things running smoothly and presenters have been very clear, patient and able.  They deliberately kept the cost for the week’s registration very low (AUD150 for the week for early-bird registration). Throw in a couple of interesting night-time symposia, starting and ending keynotes by international experts and a tour of the Rare Books collection in Fisher Library and I am not sure where a librarian-who-likes-to-get-hands-dirty could find better value.

I will just leave this image of rather scary mermaids, from one of the rare books of creatures existing and mythical, here without further comment.

I am writing, writing, writing, reading, researching, writing about kindness and libraries as I finish my candidacy for my PhD.

(and procrastinating by blogging…)

I owe Fiona Bradley a few posts documenting my PhD admin, organising and coping process. She has been so generous documenting what she is doing, and I did say that I would share if she would… but if you want to see that kind of thing, do pop over to her site as she has some smart and useful ideas.

You may also want to check out the last couple of posts from the generous Rowena McGregor , who blogs as metta librarian. (Metta is the Buddhist concept of “loving kindness”, but also present in Hinduism and Jainism). She very nicely recounted there some of the ideas about kindness that she shared when we met in Brisbane at the start of the month, What is Kindness ?

One of my previous procrastination attempts involved creating this image, which is a riff of many similar ones on the web… I registered a domain name and set up a site, but am not 100% sure how public I will make it.

My current idea about kindness is that there are several elements, all of which need to be present for something to be considered “kindness”. Often when people discuss kindness they jump quickly to just one aspect and forget the others, resulting in a discussion of a strawman that is not kindness but a related concept. For example, if one does not know whether one’s action will ACTUALLY benefit the other person does it matter ? Is this still kindness, or merely charity? Is charity a subset of kindness or merely a cousin? And altruism? Compassion? Empathy? Philanthropy? Generousity? And …

Pre-empting any findings, before reading further, my current working definition  is that kindness must involve all of the following elements. Dear Reader – am I missing anything?

1. There is an identified actor (and beneficiary [at least a class of beneficiary])
2. The actor intends benefit to the beneficiary
3. Benefit to the actor may happen, but intention to benefit the other must be a larger consideration
4. There is a power-relationship between the actor and beneficiary. At the time of action the actor has more power than the beneficiary. In an act of kindness, even the poorest person inviting the richest person to dine would, at the time of eating, be in control of the food resources.
5. An act within the actor’s power is involved – either actively doing or withholding something
6. The extent tends to be localised, small and personal.
7. (How much does the actor need to know about whether the act will be effective? and how much does it ACTUALLY have to be effective?)

Like many PhD students, I discovered, when I looked closer, that what I thought was simple and straightfoward (a definition of kindness) is slippery, complex and seems almost unknowable. My original aim, to look at whether librarians and library students are motivated by kindness, has morphed a bit. I have backed up and will now look a little more at useful concepts, definitions, measurements that we can use in libraries when we discuss kindness. I *think* I am not the only one who finds kindness fuzzy but important, so my aim is to create a pathway to more kindness by removing a little of the fuzziness…

I am knee-deep in Zotero, Scrivener, SnagIt and my university library website. I have been reserving, downloading, searching, and requesting new works via document delivery and, very amused to request titles like Quantum Theory of Advertising and A discourse concerning kindness: Being a sermon preach’d in Boaston, on the Lord’s-Day, Febr. 28th. 1719,20. And now published, with some enlargement, at the impunity of many that heard it. And very, very grateful to work somewhere that has an entire unit of people devoted to making sure people like me can access the arcane and useful.

I have discovered that there is no print or online access for the university community to the full Oxford English Dictionary, and that I can instead get to this through the National Library of Australia’s e-Resources with my membership card. And that someone ( I suspect us as librarians) should be sent to a special circle of the Inferno because we accept and provide discovery layers where book reviews create so much noise that one cannot easily find a known item, even when searching on the exact title and author. (Something illustrated when I ploughed through review after review of the OED because I did not believe that it was not there, and became more and more frustrated at what seemed to be my rotten libraraining. How would a regular student have felt ?).

Dooming others to eternal damnation (maybe in the form of constantly being given a 10 minute deadline to locate a known work in a discovery layer full of book reviews, where the work is actually not stocked) is not a very kind wish, though :).

Anyhow, I only popped in here because I wanted to share this little 2 minute movie from the (rather enigmatic, “become a RAKtivist!”) Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. The rhetoric is rather close to something selling Snake Oil. But this is increasingly well-documented and explored Snake Oil … The Science of Kindness .

I bought an Ipad Pro last year because I wanted to hand-annotate the many, many .PDFs of journal articles that I am reading this year. I think better when I write on things. With handwriting. But I did not want the waste of time and resources to print out copies – and then need to store and track them.

I have found, however, that I am using the iPad for many, many things more. To the extent that it has totally replaced my 2011 MacBook Air that was my main home computer on the three or four days during the week when I leave my laptop at work.

I use three different apps to take handwritten notes, which feels a little excessive.

I did try Nebo, where you handwrite and it converts notes into typed text, because I thought I would use it all the time for first drafts. Nope. I think faster than I can write when I am making sure I am neat enough for the text-conversion.

When I start interviews for a project in a couple of years, I will probably use SoundNote. This records audio and syncs it to the spot in my handwritten notes, if I tap that part when reviewing. It also has a desktop version, so it would be possible to take typed notes/record audio there and use the files on my iPad later. Again, I thought I would use this quite a bit in meetings/seminars, but it really is the act of handwriting that creates the connections in my brain and lets me fit new knowledge into what I already know, so reviewing to audio afterward for most tasks seems superfluous.

So, below are the three apps I seem to have settled on for regular use…

1.Writing on existing documents

For annotating academic papers and PDFs, I use LiquidText. This was designed by academics, for academics who are reading journal articles. It is definitely the most expensive app I have ever bought. And worth every cent.

You can excerpt text very easily, add concept maps and handwrite on the page. You can even put one finger at the top of the document and then use your thumb to concertina the rest of the document up like you are scrunching up a page – great for jumping quickly to see a result, or follow up a reference, without losing your place where you have read to.

I also use this for things like marking up the list of students and marks before a Board of Examiners Meeting, to note those to follow up in the meeting. Or to open an Excel spreadsheet of a class list with blank cells and use it to handwrite marking notes and tick off students once marked. And to handwrite study plans for students when I am mapping units completed on to the blank list of units in order – far quicker than trying to type in year/semester next to each one… and then I can just flick the student the .PDF via email.

2. Notetaking at live events

I take notes in seminars and meetings using Penultimate . This is an Evernote App made for handwriting notes. The big advantage is that these notes are added to Evernote like any other note, then my handwritten text is indexed and searchable like typed text – if I write neatly enough.

It also allows me to add images, either directly from the camera or my camera roll. If I receive handouts in a session and want to keep them, I take an image of each page and add it to the note set. I can then scribble on the image as though it was a sheet of paper. Unfortunately I cannot copy and paste text into the document, so if I want to grab a URL, I navigate to the page, grab the entire screenshot, including the URL. This actually makes my notes far more interesting.

Here are a couple of examples from the day long Linked Open Data seminar at the HIVE at Curtin on Friday 27 July 2018. They are from Bill Pascoe’s session on the Colonial Massacres Map ,  Katrina Grant’s session about mapping the landscape from art history and Tim Sherratt’s session about LOD books. All the images were of things I trotted off to the web to grab during the talk – sort of playing along from home with the slides. They will output as a .PDF, but I lose the resolution, which makes it harder to read the URLs. I uploaded a .PDF of my notes, plus the questions raised from today’s session in my last post, for those who asked for them.

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3. Thoughts, brainstorming and doodling

Of COURSE, I have to use yet another app for handwritten notes for casual and informal thinking where I am not trying to save it for later. I like to use Noteshelf .

This can actually be used for both of the functions of the other two, to mark up .PDFs and record handwritten notes. But it does not have the overkill bells and whistles like LiquidText, nor the indexing and retrieval features of Penultimate.

It does, however, have the best writing experience. The pressure of my pen, the output on the page, both seem far more natural and more like I am … me, expressing myself. Hard to explain, but having a different zone and tool for this kind of thinking is a bit like the difference between reading a novel at the beach compared to a scholarly monograph in an office chair. Different modalities needing different settings.

Today I attended the LAMLOD Oz seminar   at the HIVE at work. You can see full details of the presenters and their expertise in the link, but it is described by Eric Champion, who convened the meeting as having three main aims:

• To help Digital Humanities projects to find and develop and share tools and tutorials in Linked Open Data for Australian data.
• To learn best practice from current and developing Linked Open Data projects in Australia, especially those that cater towards non-conventional humanities data such as landscapes, cultural and historical assets such as 3D models and indigenous mapping ontologies.
• We hope to help share the news and wisdom learnt of these projects and to collaborate on ways these tools can be adapted to Australia’s unique cultural heritage and current needs. We aim to provide guidelines via a white paper published via UNESCO.

I took notes. (Using Penultimate . I started describing how, but have turned it into another post, scheduled for publishing on Monday, about Handwriting with Apple Pencil on iPad Pro for academic work.)

For those who asked me to share, here they are as a 42MB .PDF  LAMLODGreenhillNotes2018. For some reason the last part of the day was not saved, but I did take notes of it. The resolution in this output is not really good enough to read the URLs on the webpages, which is really the reason why I inserted their images in my notes. The pages all look a bit like this (fromBill Pascoe’s session on the Colonial Massacres Map):

I came up with 15 or so questions throughout the day, marked throughout my notes. They are further thoughts or things I should follow up – some are questions from the speakers, some are my own questions. They may make sense to you as well, but their context is found in the notes above.

1. Why are we not building the requirement to share data as LOD if it is produced in ARC grants / by local govt funding ?
   1. 1B. Why are we not checking for standards / LOD sets before we start projects and making this a requirement of any brief?
2. Colonial massacre maps needed to “de-identify” the geo-coordinates of sites mapped. Some are sacred sites, some would attract people who are not well-meaning. Is there a time when NOT being accurate is an aim of a mapping exercise ? (Or are geo-coordinates less “accurate” in this case than the storytelling that can be told if information is fuzzier?
3. Could an art object itself be considered to be metadata about a location?
4. When looking at the accuracy of a map, does one need to ask “accurate for what”? (After Katrina Grant showed part of the Italian coast mapped for salience rather than truth. Sailors had to take a lot of extra care around this part, so coast was shown as more convoluted than it is really)
5. What can be mapped? (Can we place layers of stories over landscape, and at what point do they peel away so talking about location becomes meaningless (e.g. dreaming stories …)
   1. 5A What if the only things *worth* mapping were those that cannot be easily mapped?
6. Can we create a model of data-sharing using LOD that Jane-in-the-street (or Jane-working-in-the-public-library) will use ?
7. Can’t someone make a Slurpy App that will do the hard yards if someone has geo-data in a project – harvest and link all geo-points, or in other projects analyse the entity-classes and their data and try to match what is possible to a LOD item elsewhere?
8. CIDOC CRM is worth following up. And look at SKOS too while I am there.
9. If we could expose the research and data behind academic writing (that becomes a narrative) through LOD, then could we argue impact to our academic institutions – or at least share with the scholarly community in a meaningful way?
10. A URI is essential to create a LOD element BUT… they are fixed, static, bound. What if a concept is fuzzy, sitting between two concepts with URIs? People understand this idea very well, but computers do not..
11. Given that knowledge representation is an act of interpretation (very often in Western, European, Anglo-Saxon perspective), can we use RDF to link to varied stories and alternative truths?
12. Local government is crazy for standards when issuing building permits, why can they not be with their knowledge gathering? (LOD for all data generated)
13. Can I use GATE for something I would like to play with ? (A corpus of documents mined and automatically matched to an ontology ) https://gate.ac.uk/2mins.html
14. Does the act of knowing that someone else is viewing the same Augmented Reality scene simultaneously in the same space (and corresponding awareness of their probable emotions/mental state if viewing something likely to elicit emotions) constitute enough of an impact from environment that this would have to be considered Mixed Reality?
15. Check out URIs released today here: http://catalogue.linked.data.gov.au/ 

I would put the peak of Libraryland blogging (liblogging, biblioblogging) at around June 2007 to June 2008.

(Well, extremely white, educated, academic, US-centric, liberal blogging about libraries anyhow…and that is a very different thing. It was not representative of most.)

This is based on:

• being in the thick of it (this blog was part of the international network of reading and commenting)
• being part of the team running an Australian-wide library blogging platform (librariesinteract.info )
• Michael Stephens’ Phd dissertation on Modeling the role of blogging in librarianship was submitted in August 2007.

Wanna see librariesinteract.info now? Obviously the rather high hit rate on the site was noted when we let the domain registration drop and it is a very odd kind of link-bait site now…

A few years ago now I outlined a bit about my history and gifts received from library blogging (What has blogging done for me ? ) and why blogging to me is not just posting, but is hard work and involves a lot of time and being part of a conversation ( blogging and being a node in the conversation )

Meredith (We are atomized. We are monetized. We are ephemera. Do we deserve more online ) and Fiona (What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts ?)  posted in the last week, remembering the impact of this on them personally and (more importantly) on their effectiveness and growth as library professionals. Morgan reflected similar themes when he restarted his (now 16 year old blog) in April this year after a five year hiatus (Restart ).

These are smart, clear thinkers whose ideas heavily influenced my ideas of myself as a professional.  All three modelled how to be a little less hotheaded, a little more measured, a bit more logical and how to edit, edit, edit to blow away writerly chaff. I would love again to read their posts weekly and engage in the comments on their blogs like before.

There were others from around the same time. Several. I am not naming names because I would miss someone out.

My recollection is a group of very passionate, tech-savvy professionals who found each other online and expressed very strong opinions in ways that tried to show respect for each other. A lot of our energy went into smoothing off our rough edges, and I am so grateful for those early experiences that forced me to find a philosophy of charitable reading, that I now find incredibly rewarding and that I try to apply to “reading” people’s actions as well as words.  I am sure it would have taken several years to develop this otherwise.

I am not sure we privately showed a lot of respect for those who had gone before in the profession and seemed to us to have limited tech skills, or were not engaging in the same way or seemed to not realise the implications of All These Things.

And the toys!!!! This was a time where several newer technologies, and ideas about how to use them, had converged to stimulate those who could code, think and hope to create all sorts of free online tools. Last semester I went looking for a Soundcloud replacement for assessment in my units, and there really was no free, likely to stick around platform where students could record and save audio straight from their webbrowser. I felt like some kind of pioneering gold miner who was looking at the now empty and industrialised gold fields in Kalgoorlie saying “I remember when gold lined the streets”.

Hands up all those who remember Google’s attempt at a Virtual World, Lively??? Where I could meet up with colleagues in Canada and stream in movies from YouTube?

We learned about making movies and using our webcams because there were countless free platforms where we could all connect without too much regard to our personal data being harvested, the storage space it would take up on the hosts’ servers, or it costing us more than our time. A new tool would be announced and whomp! a mob of us would jump on to it all together and give it a test drive. When some of the tools stuck like Meebo chat rooms, blogging gave way more to synchronous, but unarchived, chat and even to many of us travelling to other countries to meet in person those with whom we had previously had just blog-relationships. You can see the start of this in my account of the Library Society of the World in September 2008. I think this move away from our self-hosted blogging platforms, as much as us all moving on to other responsibilities and interests, eroded that daily “I will post in my blog or comment on three others this morning because if I do then this great conversation and growth of knowledge and ideas will keep going”.

I do think now I will dust off my Feedly Reader and try to rely more on RSS for my daily reading. I haven’t really used Facebook for about 9 years, and it can get lonely out here with my extra time for thinking, lack of FOMO, and less-tagged facial image, so it would be grand if others migrated a bit outside the walls to blog a bit more.

I am not sure, to riff on Fiona’s post, that we can go back to using the Internet like it’s still 2007 … but I think I liked LINT better when it was an Australian Library blog to which ANYONE could contribute, and had posts about Library and Information Week and Library Bloggers’ meetups, than about linkbait, even with lions…

Thanks to all who played along with my #blogjune challenge.

I was going to summarise these, but…

Both my sons received excellent school reports today, beating their personal bests and getting the best possible feedback for attitude. (During the parent /teacher feedback session for one kid today the maths teacher started the session by leaning her pink-striped head right into our space and saying in the loudest voice “He’s doing BLOODY WELL”).

So, as a spontaneous celebration, the kids’ dad and I took them out for dinner. Two very large teenagers and a Greek buffet. I think the buffet won. Just.

The last half of dinner degenerated into people lining up two salt shakers and the metal table number and lifting them up, waving them about saying “goat”, “car”. One member of the party had never come across the Monty Hall problem. I had. I think there is no advantage to switching and the probability remains at 50:50 regardless of what went before. And regardless of how many salt shakers are shaken at me.

So – no chance to blog anything deeper before bed 🙂

South Africa has a concept of “private use” in their copyright law, unlike Australia. This means that I can make a single copy of copyright protected material if it is for my own private use, with no issues at all.

Slack 12. (2007). Elephant twins. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/slack12/372349033/

Can I make a copy for someone else’s private use?

Well, looks like (as both a librarian and a lecturer) there are circumstances where I personally could do so. The exceptions seem to be similar to what we have in Australia for librarians, but include other wider cases. The permissions for lecturers (below), however, are far wider. I am not sure where the “can do this 9 times only” figure comes from??? I suspect the same type of calculation that was used by Harper Collins to determine that an ebook would need to be licensed again after being issued 26 times.

Going on the guidelines to legal and ethical use of information from Walter Sisulu University , as a librarian I can:

…copy an article from a journal or anthology or a reasonable portion from any other work and may make a single copy available upon request to:

• an individual for the exclusive purposes of private study or the use of the individual who has requested the work;
• a lecturer for research, teaching or the preparation for teaching a class;
• copy a work to replace an edition/copy which has been damaged or lost and for which an unused replacement cannot be acquired at a reasonable price;
• copy an unpublished work exclusively for preservation and security purposes;
• copy, upon request, the whole or a substantial portion of a copyright protected work from the library’s collection for private study or personal use, on condition that an unused edition cannot be acquired at a reasonable price.

A library is not permitted to compile a collection of articles or extracts from works in facsimile form, to place such copies on the “reserved” shelf and allow students to duplicate such reproductions. In such cases it is possible for the royalties payable to be set according to the number of students that are registered for the course concerned.

Further, as a lecturer, I would be able to:

• make a single copy of a reasonable portion of a work for him/herself or request that the library makes such a copy for him/her for the purposes of research, preparation for teaching or class teaching. (Although the regulations are not very clear in this regard, the act is generally interpreted as including sketches, photographs, or illustrations from textbooks or journals for illustrative purposes in the classroom).

• make multiple copies of a reasonable portion of a work for him/herself for classroom use, on condition that:

  no more than nine (9) instances of such multiple copying occur for a given curriculum for a specific class during one quarter; and that only one copy per student per course is made by or for the lecturer and is used exclusively in the classroom or for class discussions(this includes comprehension exercises and poetry analyses).

When one’s “classroom” is electronic and fully-online then this would get interesting I would think.

South African librarians also spoke of applying to DALRO (Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation) to pay for licenses to put some content into e-Reserve. It seems – and I could be wrong – that it is possible to pay DALRO so that one can put into e-Reserve more than 10% or a single chapter of a work. I am a little fuzzy about this.

All in all, however, seems to be a more workable system for university lecturers/librarians than we have here in Australia.

I spoke in April at ALIA’s “Abstract to Paper” session. My part, about how to turn a fully-written conference paper into an engaging conference session, followed on from a presentation from Gaby Haddow and David Wells about how to turn an idea into an abstract that will be accepted and Helen Balfour discussing how to turn an abstract into a conference paper.

I promised to publish my slideset here, and so, a month or so later, here it is. As usual with my slidesets, they are made to be a “partner dance” where what I say does not make much sense without the slides and the slides do not make much sense without me speaking to them … I have briefly tried to capture below the gist … Giving a great conference presentation from a written paper .

2. First thing. If you are allocated 20 minute, prepare for 15. Speakers get excited and digress and emphasise points as they see their audience’s interaction. This is good, but you want to allow time for you to do this. Also it is good to leave time for questions at the end, and for unanticipated delays, like technical difficulties or the speaker before going overtime. By all means, have an extra 5 minutes up your sleeve in case you do need the full 20 minutes, but be prepared also with the 15 minute version and work on the basis that this is the one you will be giving.

3. I told the audience to remember this picture of a small child hugging a small live tiger. It would become relevant later on.

4-7 The presentation was about the crafting that goes into the talk before you are delivering it ….. the only way to prepare for the actual delivery is to practise, practise, practise, practise, until it is so rehearsed that it seems like you are speaking spontaneously

8. Interaction with the audience. I asked them what they thought I was going to say.

9. I outlined what I was actually going to say … and then said it.

10. Hook. No matter what you think, to a large chunk of your audience you have a funny accent and you have funny mannerisms… or let’s just call them “idiosyncratic”. You need to give your audience a chance to get a feel for your pacing and tone before you start telling them anything important… so spend 30 seconds or so on some kind of “warm up” idea, which allows them to fall into your speaking rhythm, helps orientate them to you as a speaker and feel more comfortable coming along for the ride.

11. In the case of this talk, it was the kid and tiger picture. Total gimmick. No other purpose than to wake people up a bit, get their attention, make them wonder where things were going…

12. At most conferences, unless you are first speaker, most people have brains that are almost full and have possibly been subjected to some less-than interesting presentations. A hook is also a way to draw a line in the sand and create a kind of contract with the audience – “okay, I am actually going to try to pay attention to your needs and how you are reacting and try to be interesting and engaging… so having shown you this unusual thing that may have woken you up, I promise that I will keep going in the same vein, as long as you engage with me too”

12-20. Who is it about? The audience. You have had your chance with the abstract and writing the conference paper to be the one driving the ship. Now, you need to remember who is likely to be there and talk for them. This includes the next speaker who is an expert in the same field and may, if collegial, mention one of your points in their presentation. Or your next boss. Or your next employee. Or someone who has no idea of the particular topic, although they are experienced in the profession. Or a new graduate.

The question I asked a the start of the presentation “What do you think I am going to talk about?” is actually a good way to gauge the audience interest, level of knowledge and expectations. It also is a good “hook” that will have the audience listening harder to you to see whether you do actually say what they expected, and also to have clarified for them right at the start where they may have knowledge gaps, so what they should be listening for.

21-23. You need to pitch your presentation as part of a conversation.

When you wrote the conference paper, the references that you used positioned your topic within the existing disciplinary literature and conversation. You have shown that you understand the current research, thinking and where there are disagreements or conflicting views. This makes your point of view stronger if it is clear that you understand what is happening in the discipline, and are not just making things up with very little consideration. Without sounding like you are reading a list for the sake of reading a list, do mention the ideas of others in your session to ground your ideas.

At a conference, you will have – and should have – attended all the other sessions and especially the keynotes. Themes emerge in conferences and, if you are lucky, people make some rather strong statements. Picking up on these and acknowledging them in your session strengthens the conversational aspect and makes the audience understand how your ideas fit into the conference theme.

You can always research the keynotes, the other speakers on the programme and the stated theme of the conference before the day. You should come armed with this, ready to work some of it into your presentation, and leave some places for a bit of spontaneous engagement with the ideas of the last couple of days.

24. How much? 5000 words do not fit into a 20 minute presentation. You cannot include it all. You will have to abbreviate.

25. Some people take a “shrinky dinks” approach, where they try to cover all of the material in the paper in the presentation. This can be important if reporting on a technical process, where leaving out a step will stop the audience from understanding the whole point

26. Some people take an “abridged highlights” approach, as with the 10 minute edited highlights of an Apple product launch event. They still try to include it all, but miss out bigger, less interesting chunks.

27. It is OK to just highlight one part of the paper and focus only on that. There is no crime in stating clearly “There is a whole section on x. covered in the written paper that you can read up on later, but if you want to know more, then please ask in question time or catch me at afternoon tea”. I have seen very successful papers where they just covered the theoretical or practical side of the paper, or went in depth into one of three case studies and relied on the audience’s ability to generalise.

28-29. You know the “so what?” of your paper. If someone asked you for a two sentence explanation of the most original, interesting, valuable points you were going to make, something that would compel them to chose your room instead of a concurrent session, what would you tell them? Know this. Make sure your audience know this by the time they leave. Repeat it at the start, middle and finish if you need to… but this should be your guide when deciding what to cover and what to leave out.

30. – 31. What do you want your audience to take away from your paper? What are the main points you are making ? Ensure that these are very clearly identified during the paper and make sure you re-iterate them at the end.

32 (Hence I repeated my takeaways)

• Include a hook
• Make it about the audience, not you
• Ground your topic in disciplinary conversations and those specific to the conference
• Know that you will leave something out and be OK with that
• Make sure that whatever is unique, interesting, novel about your paper has been highlighted
• Make it clear to the audience what your main points are and what you want them to have learned during your session

33. Always be prepared for, and leave time for, questions.