Why isn't Edward Tufte here?
Prevention Action has invited me to the SPR conference in San Francisco, my first trip out of the office since the Society for Child Development Research meeting in Boston in 2007.
The first few sessions make me wonder if I am getting out too much.
The quality of the science and thinking about application to policy and practice is excellent. But nobody seems to know how to present.
People who know more about math -about multi-level modeling, effect sizes, structural equation modeling- than I would ever want to know do not seem to comprehend that 60 slides into a 20 minute slot do not fit.
I'm starting a campaign, doomed to failure, to have Edward Tufte give the opening address at the next SPR meeting. Maybe all presenters at all conferences should be taken to labor camps for compulsory training a month or so before they prepare what they are going to say.
Tufte, possibly the world's leading information design theorist, published an essay called "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint". It is a catalog of presentation crimes and the sins of PowerPoint. Tufte pleads: do not put words onto slides and, if you break the rule, never read the words on the slide. (The audience can read the slide much more quickly than the presenter can speak it).
If I remember the essay correctly, Tufte gives three more essential pieces of advice.
One, use slides for pictures and some graphs, i.e. anything visual
Two, use handouts for dense tables and a summary of the talk
Three, keep the talk simple and memorable.
The audience is much more intelligent than presenters anticipate. They can take in at least three sources of sensory information, pictures on slides, data on handouts and observations in speech.
In another sense, presenters overestimate the intelligence of their audience. We cannot process 60 slides in 20 minutes; it takes us a long time to work out what is going on in a diagram; and – unless it's just me – not all of us know what's going on in a statistical table.
Maybe its just me that needs to be sent to labor camp for training? I could find out what all these tables mean. On the other hand, when I bump into a presenter who really understands the art and science of it, I seem to be able to understand even the most complex statistical model or research design.