Henry Farrell thinks academic conferences go on too long.
Mr. Farrell, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, uses a blog post for The Monkey Cage to call for a system that would keep presentations at the American Political Science Association moving along—and that would cut them off after five minutes, or perhaps 10 as a compromise.
Mr. Farrell takes the idea from Ignite, a Seattle company whose software keeps slide shows inexorably plugging forward at 15 seconds per page for a total of five minutes. Mr. Farrell says this approach has become popular at technology forums, and could easily be adopted in academic settings.
“I don’t think I have ever seen a conference presentation at APSA that couldn’t have been improved by being cut down to five minutes with inexorable advance,” he writes. “Indeed, I don’t think I have ever given a presentation that couldn’t have been so improved.
16 Responses to Making Academic Conferences Short and Sweet
cwinton - September 23, 2009 at 4:33 pm
I think the three minute rule for pop singles should drive the policy on how long a talk on political science should last. An alternative might be the 10 second sound bite.
kathden - September 23, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Mr. Farrell’s suggestion gives me no reason to doubt his claim that any of his presentations would have been improved by shortening them.
jbuchronhe - September 23, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Stanislaw Lem described just such an advance in his science fiction novel, “The Futurological Congress”. The congress of the title was just such an academic symposium that was kept moving along by assigning numbers to all of the usual cliches and jargon that make their way into a conference presentation. The protagonist of the novel, who is attending the conference, knows the meaning of none of the numbers being used but he hears the number 42 recurring often. He later finds out that that number signified the end of the world.
nederman - September 23, 2009 at 7:47 pm
I doubt that Mr Farrell is a politicial theorist. If so, he would recognize that some topics require a great deal some intellectual sophistication that requires time to present. On the other hand, many empiricial presentations could to winnowed down to, say, 15 seconds. It all depends on the topic.
wisensale - September 23, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Anthropologist Joseph Campbell convinced me many years ago that this can be done with his “History of Western Civilization in Two Minutes” presentation.Drive on a freeway outside a capital city of any state. First note the church steeples. Then note the church steeples are dwarfed by the capital dome. And then note that the capital dome is dwarfed by corporate skyscrapers. Such is the history of western civilization.SW
11216278 - September 23, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Regarding “wisensale” ‘s observation just above, it would be a far reach to identify Joseph Campbell as “Anthropologist Joseph Campbell. He was a comparative mythologist, or a folklorist. His undergraduate degree was in English Literature and his MA in Mediaeval Studies. He had some early anthropologists among his influences, particularly Sir James George Frazer, and Oswald Spengler I think, and his work was somewhat ethnographically informed but was not particularly informed by explanatory developments in Anthropology.
wisensale - September 23, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Yes, thanks for the correction regarding Campbell’s background. but your comments got me thinking about another quote: “While society has problems, universities have departments.” SW
mbelvadi - September 24, 2009 at 7:11 am
If serious people think that live talks can be improved by forcing presentation slides to move at a particular pace, then surely the art of rhetoric is dead. This would seem to me to be a technique that would only be useful with speakers who abuse powerpoint (and their listeners) in the first place. And it will only result in people redesigning their slides to have maybe one word each, to match the 15 seconds per sentence that they intend anyway, unless you also limit the total number of slides.
11159995 - September 24, 2009 at 8:47 am
If “Nederman” is Cary Nederman,then he may also have inferred that Prof. Farrell is not a political theorist because the Association for Political Theory long ago adopted a rule that presenters should limit their initial statement to brief 5-minute summaries of their papers. The bulk of the time in each session is therefore given over to dialogue between the presenters and the audience. This is what has made APT meetings so very much more interesting and lively for those attending than the APSA meetings. All APSA needs to do is to follow the lead of this sister organization.— Sandy Thatcher, Penn State Press
rabler6084 - September 24, 2009 at 9:20 am
As Sandy Thatcher notes, similar formats have been in use for some time in other societies. The Association of American Geographers organizes 90 minute sessions of ten to twelve speakers who have prepared poster-style presentations on their topics. At the start of such sessions each presenter summarizes the main points of his or her findings orally for the entire group. After these introductions the speakers disperse to their poster boards and the audience members visit those in which they are most interested. The entire group may or may not re-convene for ten or fifteen minutes of general discussion to conclude the session.
rabler6084 - September 24, 2009 at 9:30 am
Continued . . .A well structured session of this kind offers the advantages of a quick overview of recent research on the session topic and then the opportunity for both presenter and audience members to engage directly on the subtopics of greatest interest to them. The usual reaction of academics to the suggestion of a five minute presentation is to recoil in horror. Those (presenters as well as audience members) who have tried the format usually agree that the quality of their exchanges greatly exceeds that usually experienced in the standard session. The AAG did not invent this format; it was imported about 15 years ago from an Arctic Science meeting a member attended. –Ron Abler, International Geographical Union
jdxxxe - September 24, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Re the comment by 11216278, above: there IS such a thing as an “explanatory development in Anthropology”? Really. Re presentations in general — if you are not familiar with the Gettysburg Address PowerPoint Presentation (http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/), you should check it out…it’s masterful (and less than five minutes in length, as is indeed the original inferior text version on which it is based).
larryc - September 24, 2009 at 10:14 pm
We have all heard, once in our academic careers, a captivating 20 minute conference presentation.None of us have heard two such presentations in our lives.By all means, cut the time. I just did a post about revitalizing the OAH and one of my points was how to change the conferece:http://northwesthistory.blogspot.com/2009/09/my-plan-to-revive-oah.html
jdxxxe - September 24, 2009 at 10:30 pm
There is the useful quote, “If I had more time I would have written less” — variously attributed to Mark Twain, TS Eliot, and Cicero, or perhaps all of them. A five-minute presentation is, for me at least, vastly harder to put together than a 20 or 30-minute one, at least in part because it requires ruthlessly scrapping beautiful elegant prose composed by my favorite author (i.e., me). Such elegant phraseology consigned to the (virtual) rubbish heap of language! So hard to select what has to go, since it’s all so excellent…
laoshi - September 30, 2009 at 12:15 pm
I use PowerPoint in teaching literature, and find that 5-10 minute “mini-presos” are much more effective than 15-20 minute presos. A lot can be presented in a short time, and audience members/students need breaks to digest the new information, and/or ask questions about it. For conferences, challenging presenters to shorten their slideshows can be useful for time management, but also allow participants the interaction/discussion time post-preso that ensures that learning occurs.
ottonomy - October 15, 2009 at 9:30 pm
@larryc: “We have all heard, once in our academic careers, a captivating 20 minute conference presentation. None of us have heard two such presentations in our lives.”At the Open Education conference in Vancouver this summer, I was treated to more amazing 20 and 45 minute presentations (with questions sometimes incorporated) than I could possibly attend. Good thing I can watch the videos at http://openedconference.org This was a small conference with a tight focus, so such long presentations might not be as possible for a large conference with hundreds of presenters like the APSA, but I was glad that the sessions were as long as they were. There is certainly value in a quick summary, but there is also a time for longer formats to really get into the research. If I were organizing a conference, I would consider making presenters do both. If you like the short version in front of a big audience, you can choose to go watch the long-form preso later.