Lightning talks

I would like you to prepare a 5-minute talk on something that is “data-adjacent.” What does data-adjacent mean? It means that the talk must have something to do with our class, and with data or data science. This can be a tenuous connection. Some ideas for lighting talks:

You will video-record your talk, and upload it to the internet so that your peers and I can watch it. As you look through the example lightning talks I have linked below, you will see that the people who did the talks were designing their talks to be delivered live, in front of an audience. This means that the video of the talk is perhaps not as professional as it could have been if the presenters were creating the talk to be seen as a video. In order of video professionalism, I would rank the NICAR talks the least professional, then rstudio::conf, then eyeo (most professional, almost as if the talk was designed for video). I would like you to aim for more professional, because you are designing your talk to be viewed as a video.

Talk inspiration:

I recommend you watch at least two of these examples to get an idea of the sort of thing I’m asking for.

Format

For the talk, you will need to produce slides with images and/or text. This is another place where “less is more,” as I’m sure you are aware from seeing presentations with too much packed on to the screen. You can use any program you would like to make slides– Keynote, PowerPoint, Google Slides, etc.

Your first slide should include the title of your talk (make it interesting, please!) and your name. It can also include an image, if you would like.

In my experience, I get the best-looking videos when I use the widescreen slide format (16:9) to produce slides. This allows the video of me to be “picture in picture,” rather than off to the side. It took quite a bit of trial and error for me to figure this out, and it may be different on your particular computer.

Length

Your talk should be 5 minutes long, give or take a minute (in other words, it can be as short as 4 minutes or as long as 6 minutes). This both is and isn’t very much time. From the Visualization in the Wild presentations, you should have an idea of how long 2 minutes is, so this is a little more than twice that.

I recommend practicing your talk several times with a timer in front of you, so you can get your wording and timing down. You may want to try recording your talk several times as well, to work out any technical kinks.

Recording

In your recording, I would like to be able to see both you and the slides. The easiest way to do this is to record yourself through Zoom, with your computer’s video camera on and sharing your screen for your slides. I’ve recorded a video showing how I do this particular technique. I know everyone has Zoom, and it seems like most people have webcams, but I’m happy to talk about alternative options if you need that (for example, if you don’t have a camera on your computer, but do have a smartphone with a camera, we can talk about “calling in” to your own Zoom session with your phone).

When I make videos, I use the Zoom “record on this computer” option, and then edit the video file to remove the beginning and end (me getting everything set up, and then turning everything off), as well as take out any places where I obviously misspoke. I’m not expecting you folks to do any video editing (although you’re welcome to, if that’s something your’re comfortable with!), so the option that probably makes the most sense is “record to the cloud,” so the video gets stored in the St Thomas Zoom server. Of course, this means you need to be very prepared when you start recording, and it may mean you need to do a few tries to get a recording you’re happy with.

Submitting your lightning talk

Once you have your video, I would like you to share it in the Discussions portion of Canvas, as a new Discussion. Please format the title of your discussion as follows: [ snappy video title ] [ your name ]. This will allow us to know what your video is about, and who it is by. In the text of the discussion, you can just share the link to your video.

If you did your video using Zoom cloud recording, there are sharing settings available right from the web interface. The privacy settings are pretty strange to me, so I’d recommend setting a password for your video in order to ensure it doesn’t get shared more broadly than you would like. You can use something simple as the password, and let us know in the discussion post what it is. If you decide to do your video differently (for example, record to your computer and upload to OneDrive, or post to YouTube) you can share the link to whatever is appropriate.