This isn’t about visualization, per se, but it’s inspired by Edward Tufte’s rant about Powerpoint, and since he’s considered the grandfather of visualization studies…

Last week, I was at a conference in San Diego, and one of the most interesting talks that I’ve attended was deeply marred by the presenter’s decision to illustrate interesting anecdotes or original insights by others by showing a screenshot of a blog post. (I won’t name names here, but it was a presentation on visualization.) I missed the first half of the presentation, but counted screen grabs from five different blogs in the second half. Every time the presenter put up another screenshot of a blog post, I cringed.

To illustrate, here’s a slide made by me in a similar style from the blog post Neuroscience and Web 2.0: Participation may vary over at the Nature Neuroscience Action Potential blog:

Edward Tufte has a well known rant titled The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint where he argues that Powerpoint weakens reasoning abilities and prevents any sort of meaningful analysis by imposing temporal limits for analysis (e.g. the time the slide is present on the screen).

Of course, Tufte’s strong line against Powerpoint has its detractors: Don Norman is one. Norman argues that bad presentations are just plain bad, and that many presentations are bad. He takes as given the “undesirability of the long, boring talk in which the speaker reads things to us that we are perfectly capable of reading to ourselves”. The speaker I saw didn’t read the blog post on his slide, but came pretty close. Yet this created a tension in his listeners—they were attempting to listen to him, but simultaneously trying to read the blog post on the slide.

Screenshots of blog posts are a surefire way to make a presentation bad. The images are incredibly dense in text and they often include links to other blogs, frequently used tags, etc. These images are often low resolution, and include distortions introduced by resizing the image to fit the slide. The text is difficult to read, but because it’s text, one feels as if one should be reading it. Why else would the speaker put up all that information on the screen?

The slide competes with the speaker. Effective slides should be the speaker’s best sidekick—there to support the speaker when needed, but not to upstage him or her. Blog posts by smart, engaging bloggers compete with smart, engaging speakers for the audience’s attention. A better option would be to take a couple of words that are an engaging quote from the post and use that as a starting point for an anecdote or to echo part of the story you are trying to tell.

The keynote at this conference was given by Larry Lessig, who is known for his distinctive presentation style. If you’ve seen one of his talks, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. Lessig’s slides typically contain one or two words that he wishes to emphasize, and he flips between those slides rapidly, while talking.

The overall effect is an engaging, almost hypnotizing presentation. The minimal text used on the slides focuses the listener’s attention, but still requires the listener to listen to the talk. Not everyone will be able to give talks like Lessig (or should even try), but there’s a lot to be learned from his style.

Here’s my attempt at translating the same Nature Neuroscience blog post into a presentation (a Lessig-ified presentation??):

PS. I highly recommend reading the blog post in its entirety.