Two days ago, I gave a talk about my book for the Oxford Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture seminar. I think it went quite well. In response to some requests from attendees, and my own desire to try and remember things, this post records how I went about preparing to present a 40-minute presentation on theatre and sceptical philosophy over Zoom.

I was terrified that this talk was going to be a dud. The material was dense, and I’d only exhibited it in prose rather than out loud. So, to assuage my fears, I talked to lots of people to get advice about what makes a good online talk. Three key points emerged from this:

1. People will lose attention: try and maintain it with something exciting every 10 minutes or less; and offer opportunities for people to rejoin the talk if they get lost.
2. Provide a story: you need a big narrative, an overall question/problem for your talk in order to ground it and provide a satisfying opening and close.
3. Consider accessibility needs: share a transcript or accessibility copy of the talk, provide a handout with key quotations, and use multiple media.

With all that in mind, I wrote a draft of my talk, which was very bad. It was boring, and I think it was because I was staying too close to the content of my book. I took the decision to completely rewrite the talk: I knew what I had to say, but needed a more exciting format.

I settled on a ‘hub and spokes’ model.

I’d beginning with a big problem: ‘why, between 1700 and 1800, does writing about acting change from praising the actor’s insights to minimizing the critical value of performance?’ And then say that I would be using Hume to help answer part of this problem. This is the story of the talk. It is also the hub, with a single, key quotation from Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (also distributed as a handout).

I’d then venture down a ‘spoke’, each inspired by lines from the Hume quotation. The first asked what idea of the theatre Hume is using, the second what idea of the mind Hume is using the theatre to explain, and the third why Hume ends up abandoning the theatre as a model. At the end of each spoke, I returned to the hub, and recapped things, to that people could rejoin the talk.

The second of these three spokes – the one that engaged most directly with Hume’s philosophy – was prerecorded: this allowed me to be confident of explaining things clearly and to draw on animations and other visual tricks in order to explain what was going on. It also offered a nice change of pace to keep people interested. Other such strategies included: embedding short video clips and images into part one, keeping part three very short, and, throughout the talk, really exploiting PowerPoint’s range of animation features (more on this later).

The fourth and final spoke concerned how we could use material from the first three sections to reread late eighteenth-century character criticism. Such a rereading showed how they contributed to the page’s ascendancy over the stage, and so finished my story.

I did a couple of dry runs of the talk, and even (using the free ShotCut video editor) prepared a complete recording of the paper with which to replace me if my internet went out. It didn’t (thankfully). You can watch the full talk here:

Last, but not least, here are some technical details about how the show was produced and delivered.

• I wrote a complete script for delivery in Word, with notes to myself about when to change slides. This script also became the accessibility copy (minus some of the stage directions).
• I built a PowerPoint using ‘Transitions’ between slides to build a narrative (always moving in the same direction when operating at the ‘hub’), and using the ‘Zoom’ feature to enter into each of the first three ‘spokes’. Within the ‘spokes’ I used the ‘Morph’ transition to introduce movement between slides, and some basic ‘Appear’/Disappear/Fade animations to layer material within a slide.

NB. Due to the amount of animation, I warned attendees about the possibility of motion sickness.

• To pre-record the middle section, I filmed myself using my phone’s camera and a teleprompter app called ‘Oratory‘. I then used Shotcut to embed this video into an mp4 export of my PowerPoint file, and to add additional animations.
• I did the same thing to produce the prerecorded version of the whole talk, having reconfigured the other slides to leave space for an embedded video.
• When I gave the talk I used my laptop (plugged into the router to improve connectivity) and an external monitor.
• The laptop screen displayed my script and the Zoom meeting info. This mean that I could read the script but seem to be looking into my laptop’s camera at the same time.
• I set Zoom to share whatever was displayed on the monitor. This meant that the monitor was ‘hot’, so had to be handled with care as anything shown on it would be seen by my audience. The monitor displayed my PowerPoint slides and then the prerecorded video of section 2, before returning to my slides. I immediately stopped the screenshare at the end of the talk.