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aandvarchaeology · 2 months

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How-To Presentation

Imagine this: It's the first year of university. You, a bright-eyed and bushy tailed freshman, riding on the high of having declared your major and successfully defending it in the face of well-meaning relatives ("Oh, I did Archaeology for a few semesters when I was at uni, before I came to my senses. Are you sure you don't want to be a business major? Or maybe pre-law, you were always so good at arguing - ") have just sat down in your very first seminar. The professor walks in, spends an hour going over the syllabus, and then announces that to pass the class, everyone will have to hold a 30 min presentation on a pre-determined topic. You can feel your stomach sinking somewhere below your knees. A cold chill grips you. You hate public speaking and the longest you've ever had to talk in front of the class in high school was 10 minutes. What do you do now??!

Well, you click on the read more.

Step 1: Don't panic. Let's get an overview of your topic and make a plan.

WHEN TO DO THIS: Same week as you got your presentation topic

First things first, as soon as you get your presentation topic and your deadline, even if that deadline is 8 weeks from now, IMMEDIATELY hop on your computer and get yourself some literature. There are some topics that are so well-researched and well-published you can walk into any library and immediately find 12 sources, and then there are topics that you have to special order books that went out of print in 1945 for. You do not know what kind of topic your topic is until you go to the library, and special ordering books takes time, sometimes A LOT of time. FINDING these books also takes a lot of time. So always make sure you HAVE the time to do this! A good starting point to have ist 2-5 books (depending on availability) with your presentation topic directly in the title.

If you have absolutely no idea whatsoever what your topic even IS, go to Wikipedia. DO NOT use Wikipedia as a source. You're going to read the article, find out what your topic is about, and then go to the list of sources at the bottom and get THOSE from the library. If you can't find anything other than those, or if your topic doesn't HAVE a Wikipedia article, go see your professor during their office hours. Do this NOW, not two weeks before the presentation. If your professor is sick, write them an e-mail NOW and go ask your TA. You need to make sure they can see you did your best to find stuff early on - if something goes wrong, profs are a lot more likely to give you extra credit or be extra nice with your grade if you have a paper trail proving you tried to resolve any issues you had early on. They won't be able to help you anymore two days before the presentation.

As soon as you have your 2-5 books, you sit down and just flip through them. Skim whatever catches your eye, look at pictures and graphs, read the table of contents. This is going to give you an idea on how much you actually have to stress about your research. Are all your books really old and super thin? Bad sign. Did you immediately find tons of books published in the last 10 years and those bitches THICC? You can probably relax a little. Then, as you're skimming, you're going to form a very rough idea what your topic is about. Things to look out for are:

How complex is your topic? The broader and less specific, the more research you're likely to have to do (example: If your topic is "The late middle ages", good luck. If your topic is "Burg Eltz during the late middle ages" you're going to have it a lot easier.)

What time period are you in? Always know your backround!

What is the state of research? Look out for things that should be there but aren't!

Is there some kind of controversy going on? Do some sources contradict each other?

Now you know a little bit about your topic, and can plan for the following things:

How many more sources are you going to need?

How long until you have those sources in your actual hands or on your actual computer?

How much research are you going to have to put into this?

Step 2: Initial research and structure

WHEN TO DO THIS: Within the week you got your hands on your sources.

If you've completed Step 1, your should have an initial list of sources. Pick the most general of those babies, turn to a relevant chapter, and get excerpting.

Q: How do I find the most general source?

A: The most general source is the one that goes into least detail while giving the broadest range of information. A good place to start are dictionary entries (make sure you're using a dictionary relevant to you subject, not the Encyclopedia Britannica...) or books with something like "introduction to..." or "overview of..." in the title. When in doubt, look at the table of contents!

If you're presenting to something very Basic™ at the beginning of your university career, your professor or TA will most likely have provided you with a list of "basic literature" for your course or subject. Look to these. If your topic is more complex, a good way to determine if a source is what you're looking for is reading the introduction chapter of your book and seeing if you recognise things you need.

Q: How do I indentify a relevant chapter?

A: Use your logic. If your presentation topic is late medieval castles, and your book covers castles of all time periods, you don't need the chapters talking about early- and high medieval castles, or post-medieval fortresses. DO NOT read the whole book. Skip everything you don't need. If you're reading a relevant chapter and the author starts talking about things you don't need to know, flip ahead until they do.

Q: What is excerpting?

A: This.

Image description in alt text.

You're going to write down the title of your source and you're immediately going to write that down in the citation style it has to be in for your presentation. Highlight it to make it easier to find later. Then you're going to write down all relevant information and the page number you found it on, and everything you're too lazy to summarize in your own words you're going to copy down directly in quotation marks. The quotation marks are important - you need to know when to say you're quoting someone directly in your presentation. I know this looks like a fuck ton of work, and it is. But it's going to do these things for you that make it absolutely worth it:

You're going to remember A LOT more of the information

You're going to be able to bring the book back to the library on time (pro tip: Also immediately scan relevant pictures)

You're going to be able to just copy-paste the already correctly cited title into your list of sources

When you're writing your presentation notes you're not going to have to flip through the whole book in search of the one bit of information you vaguely remember. You can just print out your document, highlight what you need, and have it there in one look.

In my experience, doing excerpts saves you about three to five days of work, spares you an unholy amount of frustration, and makes it A LOT easier to not accidentally plagiarize because you wrote down something and forgot it was a word-for-word quote.

As soon as you worked through your general source(s), you can structure your presentation. For Archaeology presentations, there is a general formula you can usually follow that looks roughly like this:

1. Introduction

2. Main Part: Your Topic Goes Here

2.1 History of research for your topic

2.2 General information: What time is your topic in, what are important monuments or finds, what is your topic exactly

2.3 All the information you have if your topic is very narrow (a certain type of pot, a single monument, whatever) or one or more examples if your topic is very broad (a prehistoric culture, a type of wide-spread monument, a time period)

3. Conclusion. This is the place to either summarize, bring in your own opinion, or go into detail about a controversy surrounding your topic

Find out how you want to structure your presentation (maybe this isn't the way to do it! Adjust to your topic!) and what examples you want to show. If this part is giving you trouble, e-mail your TA or your professor or visit them during office hourse. Again, do this IN TIME. The earlier, the better, AT LEAST two weeks before your presentation, better WAY before that.

If you find you need to special order sources from your library, now is the time to do that. If you're smart, you might want to make a list of all sources you can find that could be relevant to your topic while you're at it.

Step 3: The whole body of research

WHEN TO DO THIS: Depends on the length of your presentation and the complexity of your research. A minimum of 2 weeks before you have to present for a 25-30 min presentation. The busier your schedule, the more sources you have, and the longer your presentation should be, the earlier.

So, now that you know how you're going to structure your presentation, you know what you need to research and what to leave out. Go through your initial list of sources and determine if they are still relevant, now that you know what you're looking for. Identify what informations that you want to put in your presentation are missing from your sources, and find sources that are about them. If you were really smart you already did this after you structured your presentation and now just have to pick books out of a list.

As soon as you have your sources, work through them by excerpting just like you did with your overview literature. Do this from most to least relevant source, in case you misjudged your speed and have to leave out a source. Make sure to always note your page number and immediately copy out relevant graphics!

Step 4: Your presentation slides

WHEN TO DO THIS: The week before your presentation. If you don't want to spend a whole day on this start around 5-4 days before your deadline at the latest and do a few slides at a time.

If your prof gave you a guide for PowerPoint presentations - find that. Use that. Copy the structure of your presentation that you made in Step 2, add your pictures that you already copied out into your excerpting document, and cite them according to the style your professor wants them to be in. If you already did this in your excerpting document like I told you to, this should just be a matter of copy and paste. Don't forget to add your list of sources at the end!

This is also the step where we start thinking about time. A good rule of thumb is that you should have one slide in your presentation for every two minutes of talking. I like to add a few more, because I also always have a title slide, a structure slide, and a list of sources slide, and I don't spend 2 minutes on "Hello everybody, my topic is [x]!".

As soon as you have your slides in about the number you think you need, talk through your presentation OUT LOUD and time yourself. Just say what you remember. If you're more than 5 minutes under target, you need one more slide for every two minutes you're under. If you're more than 2-3 minutes over target, consider what information is actually important to your topic, and try again, leaving everything out everything not relevant, until you land within 2-3 minutes of your target time.

Step 5: Presentation notes and practicing

WHEN TO DO THIS: The day before your presentation at the latest, better 2-3 days before. Your brain is better at memorizing things if you're not stressed out of your mind!

Now that you're reasonably sure you're on your target, time wise, it's time to make your presentation notes. This is a matter of personal style, and you've got to figure out what works best for you. For me, I need a lot of visual cues, so I usually print out my presentations (or sketch the slides if my printer is acting up again) and add the information next to the slide it's on. I also like to add cues like "show structure x" in a different colour to remind myself to engage with my audience, like so:

Image description in alt text of first image.

But maybe this doesn't work for you! Maybe you like to write out your whole presentation word-for-word. Maybe you like note cards. Maybe you like to use the presentation mode on PowerPoint to add your notes directly into the document. It doesn't matter what you do, as long as it makes you feel safe presenting and you can reliably remember all your information.

Whatever method you use, make sure to write down all your information. In Step 4 we talked through what we remembered from our research. Now is the time to grab our excerpt documents and make sure all our information is factually correct and that you didn't leave out anything. This will usually add around 5 minutes to your speaking time.

When you have your presentation notes, you're gonna practice your presentation a few times. This is, again, a matter of personal style. Some people just need to read through it once, and they've got it down pat. If you're inexperienced in giving presentations, I recommend talking through your whole PowerPoint using your notes at least one or two times. If you want, you can use a mirror to also practice gestures, or memorize the whole text. No matter what you do, the goal is to automate a little bit. Your body remembers things it's practiced. If you talk through your presentation a few times, it'll be much easier to manage presentation anxiety, because you likely won't have a blackout in front of the class - you'll just go into autopilot and say exactly what you practiced.

Another important aspect of this step is, again, time. This is the time to really fine tune your landing. If you know you tend to talk a lot faster in front of an audience, practice so that you're 2-5 min over your target time. If you know you tend to talk a lot slower, pick a point about halfway through your presentation and memorize what minute you're supposed to be at when you reach it. Look at the clock occasionally during your presentation. If you reach your marker and it's later than its supposed to be, speed up. You can also practice talking faster.

And now all there is to do is present! Good luck - not that you need it, with your excellent preparation!

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