BIO 542L: Graphic Publication for Biologists

Preparing a presentation

Important References:


Information

For decades, scientific presentations have relied on “slide shows”. The word “slide” itself comes from the earliest member of the genre, the lantern slide, a piece of film with a positive image sandwiched between two pieces of thin glass, with the edges taped. These would slide in a rail or tray into the optical path of a projector. Lantern slides were virtually obsolete by the 1960s, having been replaced by the “35 mm transparency”, a 2" × 2" cardboard, plastic, or metal mount containing a piece of film with an image area of 24 mm × 36 mm (the name “35 mm” refers to the diagonal measurement of a movie camera frame taken on the same film).

The earliest presentations were “slide shows”, with the slides used to photographically illustrate certain topics. The slides were otherwise peripheral to the presentation, which focused on the speaker, who often used a blackboard.

Beginning in the 1970s, there was a trend toward using the slides as the focus of the presentation, by including slides of graphs, diagrams, and even brief text that introduced or amplified the speaker’s remarks. This is currently the norm (if not the standard) at scientific meetings.

The early days of the “slide-directed presentation” were fraught with technical issues. Biologists had used photographic evidence of microscopic presentations, organisms, and habitats since the earliest days of photography, and the technology for doing so was standardized, but photographing graphs, diagrams, drawings, and text was a different issue. Even film choice was problematic, as scientists experimented with films originally intended for the graphic arts or other applications.

In the 1980s, machines that made slides from computer images became widely available. Although these were first used for technical applications, they became common for business presentation. Technical users ordinarily already had computer images to photograph, but business users needed computer programs to make the presentations—thus was born “presentation software”, of which Microsoft PowerPoint is currently in widest use.

Before the widespread availability of computer projectors, most business users sent the completed PowerPoint presentations to “service bureaus” that photograph them onto film. At a cost of $5-$10 per slide, this exceeds the resources of most graduate students. Cal Poly ITAC used to provide the same service at around $2 per slide, and there was hope that the Biological Sciences Department might eventually own such a machine (although it seems less and less necessary as computer projectors become more widespread).

In addition to slides, PowerPoint has the ability to produce color or black-and-white overhead transparencies, various formats of paper hardcopy, and web pages. Transparencies are useful for classroom situations, where overhead projectors are more common than slide projectors. Web pages allow talks at meetings (at least the slides) to be published for a worldwide audience.

PowerPoint presentations can also be given directly from a computer, using various sorts of projection devices, but this turns out to be less satisfactory than one might imagine: There are problems with the version of PowerPoint, the size of the presentation (and the storage medium it is kept on), and the power of the computer used for presentation. Eventually, most of these problems will be solved, but at this point it is still sometimes unwise to rely on computer presentation without having slides, overheads, or some other form of backup.


Assignment

Create a scientific presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint. The nature of the content is not important. You may create your own template, or use an existing one. (Be sure to pick one that is stylistically appropriate for a scientific presentation. For example, confetti is appropriate only after you get your Nobel Prize.) Your presentation should contain at least seven slides with at least one example of each of the following elements:

Prepare a “presentation” from your PowerPoint file, either paper handouts, or a set of “Save as HTML” web pages. Neither the original .ppt file nor a self-running version using the viewer qualify as presentations.

Turn in the .ppt file and any HTML files on 3.5" diskette, CD-R, CD-RW, or Zip disk (CD-RW and Zip disks will be returned). Other parts should be turned in as hardcopy.