Firstly, I’ll note that I’ve been guilty of taking photos of other people’s slides. Secondly, a lot of what I’m going to say here is based on those experiences. Your mileage may vary, depending on your own information processing system.
Stop taking photos of slides (and posters) at conferences
I understand the impulse; there’s information on the slide that you want to capture, and you don’t have your laptop with you. You’re limited in your options. So you quickly snap a photo. There, now you have the information.
But, you’re limited in what you can do with it if you don’t convert it into another format. If you’re one of those people who do the work to convert the information in the image into another format, well done. No need to read any further because the rest of this post isn’t for you.
If you’re one of those people who take the photos at the conference, thinking that you’ve done something productive because now you have the information, but the photos sit on your phone (or laptop), what have you really done? The information remains locked up in the image.
- It’s not searchable, unless you add metadata to the image.
- It’s hard to extract the information from the image to another format. Most of the time you’re going to have to retype it all. Some OCR systems will pull out the text.
- Where are you going to capture the extracted information?
- The information in the image is decontextualised from the speaker and event.
- It’s hard to add your own thoughts to the information.
- It’s hard to link the information in the image to other information.
Let’s assume that people aren’t going to take notes on their laptops during your presentation. If you’re a presenter, you have a few options to make it easier for participants to capture the information you’re sharing.
Suggestions for presenters to make information they’re sharing more useful
- Make your slides available before your talk.
- Include a QR code or short link on your title slide, taking audience members to your presentation.
- Make your slides available in a format where the text can be easily copied (i.e. not PDF).
- Make it available to download in multiple formats (or a single, open format like OpenDocument or even plain text).
- If you’re feeling especially brave, enable comments on your slides, so that anyone can ask questions right on the document, which you can respond to later.
- Contextualise your slides in a broader information landscape, by adding a post alongside it (e.g. why you did the work, what other work it connects to, lists of references or an annotated bibliography).
- Record audio and video of your talk and make this available alongside the downloadable slides. If we assume that you’ll practice the presentation at home, it’s trivial to record at the same time.