I've been starting to get back into the PhD mindset of late. Much as I've enjoyed a lot of the marking I've been doing of late it's refreshing to be able to think creatively for a while: retaining a critical approach, but being less judgemental. My supervisory team is coming together in the background, but in the mean time I presented to Edinburgh Napier Business School's annual research conference today. I found myself mixed in with some final year DBA students, but they (and the audience) were welcoming and generally kind.
First up was the latest iteration of my 'background ideas and inspiration' Pecha Kucha, first presented last December. As is often the case only a minority of the audience were aware of PK, so the concept of managing that amount of visual information is to some extent a novel one ??? fortunately zoo TV and ever-diminishing attention spans have us well trained. It seemed to go ok and my narrative kept pace with the pictures. I like this form of presentation and I hope it survives beyond a point where the novelty wears off, maybe only then will it be fully exploited and the truly creative work will come out.
The second part of my session was built around a one-slide 'poster'. This was therefore a trial run for a conference presentation I hope to give in Aberdeen on 19 June: iDocQ is being hosted by Robert Gordon University and 'is an opportunity for new researchers working in the field of information science to present their research to their peers and gather feedback on their ideas'. That all sounds good to me and was suggested by one of my putative supervisors, which is always a reasonable place to start. The idea is to produce a poster, to which each contributor will talk for 10-15 minutes... but the posters will be projected on to a screen, so there's only so much detail that can be included. After a few iterations I have something which covers key aspects of my proposal and I hope will hold up in an environment where others have more to say. Today's evidence suggests I should be ok, that there's enough on the slide to talk about and for people to understand what I'm trying to do. Certainly there's enough there for people to say afterwards: 'nice ideas, but you need to find a closer focus'!
That's all fine, so I'll keep turning up at conferences with my novice hat on to pick up ideas and gather the thoughts of others. Once iDocQ has passed I'll stick the poster up on here ??? until then it's still a work in progress, afterwards I can work on the next draft, and the next... (repeat to fade).