Readers of this blog and those who have seen me present know that don’t use Powerpoint – partly on principle (it leads to dumbing down of communications) and partly because I want to do things that Powerpoint can’t do:
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hold semantic content
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copy existing web pages
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jump from slide x to slide y in the middle of a presentation
So I use XHTML for my slides. (If you don’t know what that is, it’s just ordinary HTML conforming to modern standards).
There’s a downside to this – it’s difficult to “give people copies of my slides”. That’s because:
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I select from ca 5,000 un-slides [see below] and never know which I am going to give. No-one wants 5,000 un-slides
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I can’t remember which slides I used and in which order
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Many slides don’t make much sense if my speech is absent.
That is why I am always grateful to people who video my presentations.
There may be an answer. I mentioned this when I last visited the ICE-man, Peter Sefton, in Toowoomba and he’s addressed these issues in his latest post (Desktop Repositories: Smashing up PowerPoint). (I am planning to reply to Peter’s posts but there is so much in them it overwhelms me):
Les Carr has been experimenting with desktop repository services. He started by wondering how he might manage the thousands of PowerPoint slides and presentations he has, moved on to converting them into images, with embedded textual metadata, then put them in ePrints on the desktop and started speculating on how slides might be reassembled into new presentations and exported.
These workflows are exactly what we have been looking at with The Fascinator Desktop, our nascent eResearch repository platform. Our goal is to index and understand everything on an academic’s desktop, including presentations, documents, video, images, audio, data of all kinds, everything; via a plugin architecture which will be easily scriptable. We’re in the middle of a two week development sprint getting some of the pieces in place for this, so I thought that picking up on Les Carr’s PowerPoint work would make for a good target for the end of next week.
PMR. There’s too much to reproduce here, but we are working closely with Peter:
A lot of this is similar to Jim Downing’s Lensfield project – we have talked about harmonizing our projects.
PMR . And most relevantly to my problem:
If we had all that in place we could finally help Peter Murray-Rust with his presentations, which are made up of web pages selected from a huge library of un-slides many of which included embedded data visualizations. By indexing all his individual pages we could let him ’shop’ for the ones he wants, order them and then create a presentation-by-reference which could be de-referenced and blogged or reposited. Peter, can you make your slide library available to us for experimentation?)
Yes, I can and will. The main problem is that a lot of what I have is simply scraped and comes to zillions of Mbytes, so I’ll look out for simple ones and post them to you. (I should (== I don’t but ought to) have these exposed on our web site and I’ll be trying to do this anyway.
I’ve been looking for this for many years – maybe it’s finally starting to happen.