Does Not Follow Procedure

Because I tend to get bored, having nothing to do but lie around twiddling my thumbs all day, I rashly proposed a poster for MLA'13, which the organizers rashly accepted.

This means I have to actually make a poster based on my very boring citation-counting project, which is so clearly going to interrupt my thumb-twiddling schedule that I don't know why I ever thought this was a good idea in the first place. I'm having all kinds of questions about poster-making.

Like, do I have to cite references? The helpful poster advice sites talk about a references section, but...uh...I didn't actually do any research in the literature before undertaking my little project. I will hang my head in shame now. I know, it's ironic, considering my entire project is about citations, that I don't have anything to cite myself.

Obviously I should have reviewed the literature first, if only to make sure someone else hadn't already done what I was thinking of doing, but better, but I had an idea I thought was mildly interesting, and I was lazy and wanted to get started, and I just skipped that.

So I did not, in fact, refer to anyone else during the course of my work. Should I pretend I did, or should I just omit references and boldly declare, "Behold, I am a wretched novice researcher, and I didn't consult prior literature"?

The thing is, trying to find something to cite after the fact means more work, which, with all this thumb-twiddling to be done, is not entirely what I'm after. That, plus the fact that I think people in general should make a lot more bold declarations that begin with 'Behold' than they do, is kind of inclining me towards just admitting that I skipped the very important review of the current literature that we're always telling students they should start with, and leaving out the references section.

Or maybe there's a paper somewhere that describes the horrible things that happen to people who don't review the literature before undertaking a research project, and I can cite that.

Ha--actually, if I can find it, I will totally cite that. Don't even think I won't.

Reading Aloud: Not For Presentations!

I don't usually use slides for presentations, because we usually do 'hands-on' demos where we project the computer screen and have people follow along ("now if you just select this MeSH term...").

However, I'm weirdly interested in peoples' tips on how to do better slide presentations, or on how to avoid horrible errors when giving presentations with slides.

I'm supposed to be writing a novel right now, so just enjoy this list of things NEVER to do, from scicurious.

One of my favorites--by which I mean, one of the ones that annoys me personally the most--is the one where someone puts up a slide and then just tells you what's on it without providing any additional information.

At that point, it would be faster if you'd just give me the slides and I can read them myself, thanks. I read kind of fast anyway, so listening to someone read what's on a slide I finished reading myself two minutes ago is...argh.

This is why I'm not usually wild about online tutorials that feature slides and screencaps--a lot of times, I'd rather just read the information than have someone's voice explain it to me, because I read faster than most people talk, and if the voice is basically just reading a script over some illustrations, well, I can read it myself, thanks!

Obviously, if it's a video demonstrating how to actually do something, that's different. These can be great. I've reinstalled my hard drive and learned some knit stitches following YouTube videos! Love it!

And I'm sure some people learn better when a human voice says something than when they read it in print, so I'm not knocking tutorials for everyone. I just don't necessarily care for them myself.