Keynote (Powerpoint) and presenting a persuasive argument

I'm not anti-Powerpoint (or Keynote) by any means--far from it--but I am frequently disappointed by the material that people use it to frame. I promised a link to an essay on this matter by the rather wonderful Edward Tufte: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. This isn't the article itself, sadly (for which you'll have to pay a pretty nominal sum), but if this is your introduction to ET's work, enjoy!

I shall invite Ingrid Pearson (a colleague at RCM) across to Guildhall for lunch and an afternoon reviewing Keynote-framed arguments (what an offer, eh?) to see if I can persuade her not only that it's not the software's fault that these things turn out badly more often than we'd like (which she already knows, of course), but--a bigger challenge--that Keynote can actually contribute to the development of an elegant and memorable argument.

More seriously, pro- or anti-slide software aside, how do we frame practice-based research arguments successfully? The doctoral student presentations at 'MIDAS VII' were certainly food for thought.

software + projector = digital whiteboard

At the end of last week I attended the two-day ‘MIDAS VII' conference: our six-monthly standing business meeting and the annual research student conference, hosted this time around by The Royal College of Music in London. Darla Crispin (RCM Head of Graduate School) was our chair for these couple of days, which she ran with her usual light touch and perceptivity. She was running (in the other sense) the London marathon the day after the conference, which I hope turned out well for her—it was a very hot day for the runners, I think.

I few delegates asked about the software application I used during the ‘reportage’ session at the end of Saturday. I said I’d write a few notes here about this and the other two programmes I’m using on trial for doing that sort of electronic whiteboard job.

The app I used on Saturday afternoon is Cmap. You can read about it and download it here. Their website practices what they preach: it takes the form of a hyperlink-rich concept map itself. It’s freeware, the result of a research project funded by a consortium of American universities; there are versions to run on most platforms. I was using it in a very simple way, just to record key notions and cluster these according to their themes. I tend to use it in my teaching and supervising this way and have been doing for a few weeks. It seems very stable. You can link ideas by lines (as per a ‘mind map’), but the software is actually designed to build what it calls ‘concept maps’. As far as I can tell, without delving very deep in to theory, the difference between these ways of representing relationships is that ‘concept maps’ always include a word on the linking line to describe the nature of the link. At the moment, I find this more annoying than helpful. I’d much rather be free to choose whether to record this definition or not, which is very easy to add to a mind map (via an intermediate node) if I want to.

I use the programme frequently and as a ‘digital whiteboard’, it works well. You can colour nodes very easily and group them (then expand or minimise the group) in a couple of key-strokes. It produces an attractive map and has the most gentle of learning curves. You can save your maps in the programme’s own format (which you can share in an online ‘soup’ as they call it … you are given storage space on the university’s server when you sign up to download the programme) or as PDF, JPG, XML and a few other media that I don’t know about!

It’s Cmap’s pleasing visual output that pulls me away from Tinderbox when I’m preparing a map to share with a group. Tinderbox (currently OS X only; Windows in development) is a more sophisticated environment in which to think, not least with its integral multi-perspective ways to read the same data, but it’s a bit ‘bare bones’ in appearance: rather muddy default colours; square boxes (that don’t expand to fit text contents without a bit of work); no ‘snap to frame’ possibility. It’s a very good piece of software for organising ideas, for sure, but although I trust it’s an attractive piece of code (I’m sure the developer would have it no other way), it is not itself very attractive. Can we have brains and beauty in one parcel, or is that going against the natural order of things?

Finally, Mindjet's MindManager (OS X and Windows). This is new to me, but I’ve got off to a good start with it. My gripe is that the programme tends to presuppose that the items you record in it are linked (as opposed to “might be going to be linked”). As soon as you place one item near other, it connects them. Now, my way of thinking is to ‘brainstorm’ my ideas first (i.e., scatter them to the four winds) and then work out their relative proximities and relationships. The programme prefers you to build your map in a more systematic manner than I like to, but I’m sure some will find this less of a bug-bear than I seem to.

Leiden and Valencia

I’ve not posted here for a long time now: I’ve found it really difficult to meet my own aspiration to write a little and often. There is such a back-log of things I had hoped to write about that it won’t be possible to do so now; having realised this, it’s become easier again to write something rather than nothing.

I went to Valencia yesterday, courtesy of Hector Perez Lopez’s invite to speak at the international research seminar series that he organises at the Universidad Politecnica. This was the first time that I’ve worked with an interpreter to give a paper, but Lobke Sprenkeling (a research student and recorder-player) did an excellent job moving between her second and third languages (she’s Dutch) and, along with Hector, allowed me to roam freely within my topic. The material I presented was an extension of a paper I gave in Leiden at the last MIDAS meeting in December, which was hosted by Frans de Ruiter. Both of these invites have been welcome and timely: I’ve used them as a lever to get myself to clarify my ongoing thinking and to learn how to build a multimedia document in Keynote to illustrate my points.

The material I surveyed and critiqued in these papers included:

Valentine, L. 2004. The activity of rhetoric within the process of a designer’s thinking. PhD thesis with CD-ROM, University of Dundee.

Meyn, N. 2006. Excavating the future: acting and the art of classical song. DVD. London: GSMD.

Dixon, S. 1999. Chameleons 2: theatre in a movie screen. CD-ROM. Privately published. Accompanying article: ‘Digits, discource and documenation: performance research and hypermedia.’ In The Drama Review, 43.1 (T161), spring 1999, 152-75.

Murnau, F. 1926. Faust: a German folk tale. DVD. Masters of the cinema series. London: Eureka, 2006.

I am eagerly awaiting the delivery of two new multimedia research reports, one of which may well be in the post by now (the other is still being worked on in post-production, it seems):

Bilson, M. 2005. Knowing the score. DVD. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. [micro-site here]

Emmerson, S. Forthcoming. Around a rondo. DVD and DVD-ROM. Queensland, Australia: Griffith University Press.

As a small example of our practice-as-research zeitgeist, without knowing of Stephen Emmerson’s ‘Around a Rondo’ project, Hector has himself been working with technologist colleagues in Valencia to code an intuitive-to-use, platform-agnostic multimedia writer. Here’s a link to the abstract of their recent conference paper in Cambridge. One of the features they are tweaking will allow readers to listen to an audio clip or watch a video clip while the relevant score scrolls by synchronously, ticker-tape style. This facility is something that I know Stephen’s document will be providing, having seen a preview of it in Leiden. It’s an impressive achievement and, like most really good ideas, looks like something which I can imagine taking for granted within five minutes of first engaging with it. When containers are that good, they disappear.

novel models

Having made explicit the container-shapes-content truism, I want to know what non-traditional containers have researchers adopted to communicate their (performance-based) insights? What are the alternatives to ink on the page? What do they look like? How do they work? Really look like? Really work? I’m speaking from my limitations here, but it is terribly hard to imagine something into existence without reference to what is already known. I have identified a sample of ‘digitally framed’* research outcomes and I'm now tracking down copies to explore. These documents are novel in terms of their container (pioneering, even) and I hope that they help my concrete mind engage with something—that they offer me models to critique.

In chronological sequence, the documents are:

Chameleons Group, The. 1995. Chameleons 1: theatrical experiments in style, genre and multi-media. CD-ROM. Studies in Theatre Production, Exeter University. Volume 13. [http://dpa.ntu.ac.uk/ “believed to be the first theatre CD-ROM to have been published in a refereed academic journal”]

Kolb, D. [<2003] Socrates in the labyrinth: hypertext, argument, philosophy. CD-ROM. Eastgate Systems Inc.

Valentine, L. 2004. The activity of rhetoric within the process of a designer’s thinking. PhD thesis, Dundee University. [Louise’s thesis takes the form of a ‘regular’ PhD (hard-bound, paper sheets … you know the sort of thing) and CD-ROM which opens to reveal the entire ‘regular’ PhD text plus imbedded still, moving and interactive images.]

Meyn, N. 2006. Excavating the future: acting and the art of classical song. DVD. London: GSMD.

* Why did I not go with the apparently relevant word “multimedia”? Digitally framed is intentionally broader in scope: I mean to include digital documents that are wholly comprised of text and include a query interface, which, if not present, would significantly reduce the usefulness of the report. Following a different argument, something might be ‘multimedia’ in the everyday sense, but still not achieve the quality of allowing content to be appropriately media-ted in the sense that I am trying to articulate.

back to School

It's already week six of the new term at Guildhall, which has flown by. In the second half of this term, I shall concentrate on research activities, both my own (the December MIDAS paper in Holland and now a firm date to speak in Valencia as part of the international research seminar series which Héctor López hosts there for the Universidad Politécnica) and working to establish and develop two student research groups at School, one for BMus and one for MMus students.

I had a very enjoyable lunch with Mark Bernstein (the designer and main driving force of Tinderbox) over the summer break; we met while he was en route to a conference in Denmark. As well as passing on many helpful ideas and comments that day, Mark has kindly offered to make introductions between the musicians and musicologists who he knows use the programme in their work: there are a fair number of us, it turns out. Organising this, and getting in contact with Eva Nässén (who teaches at the Göteborg School of Music and Drama and who is also talking at MIDAS in Holland) are my immediate priorities.

I am going to trial using Tinderbox in the research groups as a 'thinking out loud' tool; blogging will also get a look in today and tomorrow, when I will be talking with all of the new postgrads about the whys and wherefores of developing their self-reflective skills (on which they are assessed as an integral part of their award).

accessibility and fragmentation

Remember these? My iBook doesn't have a drive to read 3.5" discs, let alone something that can lift data from their 5.25" ancestors (born in the days when floppies were floppy). Even the most cursory survey of the history of storage media will reveal that we are living in a period of rapid flux, and there's no sign of long-term stability on the horizon that I can see. If research communities are to admit the usefulness of multimedia and hypermedia in their reporting practices, then that very usefulness demands that the data they encode must remain readily accessible in the future--and not just in the next five or fifty-five years, but preferably in five-hundred-and-fifty-five years too. Once the thing itself has been located, it's just about as easy to read from the pages of a book printed in 1451 as it is from one that rolled off the presses yesterday. The same is most definitely not true for digitally encoded texts: notes I made on the sources which I read for my PhD and typed up little over a decade ago in I-forget-which DOS word processor are severely mangled when I try to open them in any of the currently mainstream programmes that sit on my laptop. Books published on paper can be opened and read pretty effortlessly; 'books' published electronically cannot.

In recent months, I have been looking at software designed to assist us make, sift and exploit research notes, especially those applications that can handle multimedia data efficiently. The package that I've lined up to explore in depth is called Tinderbox, but I'll not write about it in detail yet. (A couple of days ago, I booked my place at the Tinderbox workshop for researchers that meets later this month in Denmark; as an out-and-out novice, I'm very much looking forward to seeing how more experienced users work the programme.) There are plenty of other apps to consider, many of which are freely available, being the result of collaborations between academic researchers. Here's the snag, though: we face the problem of fragmentation. Ideas encoded in this programme are almost certainly not going to be legible in that one. These programmes are unembarrasingly experimental, but most of them--even those that are presented by their development communities as relatively easy to get started with--have fallen at the first hurdle of having me use them because they are dependent on software I know nothing about and cannot prioritise time to learn. This is my loss, I realise, but also a sign of something not yet having come of age. Two that I would really like to explore further (at least as far as getting them running on my laptop) are: Compendium (built to run on OS X 10.3, which is not the current one; I'm ignorant enough not to know whether running it on my 10.4 machine might involve risks I'm not prepared to take. "When in doubt, don't" my nan used to say, which has stood me in good stead during many an IT crisis) and ARTware (which requires VisualWorks Smalltalk to be installed first--the download and installation instructions for that were sufficient to put me off).

Software stays still for such a short period of time (a year or two at most) that it seems unlikely that the number of users ever clustering around one or two of these niche programmes will reach the critical mass necessary to elevate them to effective community tools. A tipping point may emerge if 'agnostic' data format standards can be agreed, which would allow ideas to be encoded in a manner which is utterly transparent to a variety of software packages. There's a biting point to be found between short-term improvements in data richness versus long-term (in)accessibility issues. For a community that has developed its insights on the processes of publication and peer review for several centuries now, this matters a great deal!

back online

I've been without broadband for a week or so: one of our next-door neighbours moved out and it seems that someone flipped the wrong switch at the exchange. I was surprised to learn that there are any physical switches left to flip these days, but it turns out that there are.

I'm posting an image here to check that I have understood how to: it's relevant, but I wasn't aiming for 'a picture conveys a thousand words' status this time, as you'll see! Orange Tupperware as a nod to Orange, who have now reconnected me to the outside world.

I received my grant from Guildhall, so it's full steam ahead with this project. I've got stuck into articles that discuss the history and future of multimedia documents, because I find that engaging with those background issues always helps me to focus. There's lots to come to grips with and I must remember not to get too side-tracked: those discussions form the backdrop to my work but are not centre-stage.

hyperlinks

I've discovered how to make hyperlinks now: the reason why it wasn't obvious before is that Blogger doesn't function fully in Safari. In Firefox, I have a toolbar full of buttons. For good measure, here's a link to Umberto Eco (always worth reading) on The Future of the Book.

Pictures next: I need some screen shots of the different programmes I've mentioned so far.