20×20 at iDocQ 6

I attended the sixth annual Information Science Doctoral Colloquium (iDocQ) on 23^rd June. It was my third time attending the event and, as always, I learned a lot from the experience. This year’s iDocQ was held at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and was co-organised by one of my fellow Centre for Social Informatics PhD students, Lyndsey Jenkins.

My contribution to the day was to give one of the 20×20 presentations based on my research. Sadly, several weeks’ illness followed by a long recovery (and the pile-up of work because of it) meant that my presentation was put together at the last minute and my slides were only delivered to the conference committee the night before the event. (Bad form, I know.)

As you may know, the idea with a 20×20 is that you have 20 image-based slides that auto-advance every 20 seconds. So you really have to have your timings down. I had ordered my slides in a manner that meant if I finished speaking early, I could start talking about the next slide before it advanced and that if I over-talked, the next slide would be relevant enough to let me finish. (It’s all about segues!)

However, I (kind of) knew what I would say to each slide, but I couldn’t remember what order the slides were in. So there were a couple of instances where I’d finished talking about one slide but had no idea what the next slide was, so I couldn’t keep talking!

Yeah, maybe a bit more practice would have been good.

I suppose the good thing is that I was very confident in my delivery. And that’s a very good thing!

I have been invited to speak to a group in Edinburgh at the end of August, then I’ll be presenting a conference paper in September. Only I’ll be sure to give myself a bit more time for preparation and practice for both of them!

Anyhow, Thesis Summer is off to a good start and I am feeling confident that I will be successful in reaching my summer goals. So stay tuned for more great updates!

[Photo credits to Hazel Hall]