The Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association prides itself on its inclusiveness as a professional organization. It is one of few such groups where conference presentation panels may include professors with PhDs seated beside independent scholars, working artists, and undergraduate or graduate students who hope to make a career of the academy. The annual MAPACA gathering is sometimes a budding scholar's first foray into the presentation/publication arena. The following are presentation suggestions the MAPACA board and area chairs hope emerging scholars will find useful:
Presenting a paper is not necessarily the same as reading a paper. While reading aloud is a perfectly permissible means of sharing ideas and information, significant content may be lost when, for example, a long paper must be cut short because of time. To read past the 15 or 20 minutes allowed for your part of a panel is unfair to other presenters, who must cut their own presentations short.
If reading a paper aloud, consider that a well paced reading of a double-spaced page will take between one minute, 20 seconds and one minute, 45 seconds. At a minute and a half per page, the maximum length for a 15-minute paper is 10 pages. If your paper is longer, you may not be able to share your ideas in the allotted time. Flipping through the last half of a paper gives listeners a sense of imbalance, since ideas generally are supposed to grow stronger and more engaging as the piece nears its conclusion.
If you choose to read your paper, try to speak to the audience even as you read. Look up from your paper, make eye contact with different people and speak up and out, not into the desk. Finally, remember that nervousness often makes people rush; practice reading to someone else to get a solid grasp of what speed you should be reading.
One alternative to reading verbatim is to summarize your main points for the presentation and make available copies of the full paper for conference participants. That way, even someone who was unable to attend your session can be exposed to your ideas. Another alternative is to make use of the various multimedia tools available for speakers, scholars, and presenters. Graphic representations of your main points, whether text or pictures, will help participants remember what you had to say. Imagine reading a paper that describes the content of 40s pulp magazines while you project their lurid covers on a screen. For photographs, a slide carousel is a simple but effective means of presentation. You may take your own photographs of locations, book covers, food, or anything else you wish to discuss and have them developed as slides.
If you have a laptop computer and a digital projector (or can borrow them from your institution), you will find Power Point a useful tool for making slides, particularly with animation. Composite DVDs are especially effective in film or TV presentations but also can be useful for fields as disparate as architecture, death, music, sex, and food. If technology is completely foreign to you, you might try having important points or pictures made into posters at a copy shop.
Physical examples of a subject are always good. If you have a collection of some kind, display it. If you're discussing an unusual food, bring some. If you have an instrument, whether musical, medical, or medieval, bring it to pass around or demonstrate. If you're describing unusual music, bring samples and what you need to play them.
Remember that glitches happen. Batteries die, bulbs burn out, tapes break, CDs get corrupted, and equipment sometimes fails. Have a back-up plan-printed handouts, posters, extra batteries, extra CDs, your data on a flash drive-whatever you need to finish your presentation.
Finally, standing is almost always better than sitting. Remember to practice (and time) your presentation beforehand. If you video- or audio tape yourself, you may be able to identify strengths and weaknesses before you reach the conference. While at the conference, attend as many sessions as you can. Learn from experienced presenters. And relax. Usually, those who attend your presentation are giving presentations themselves and have had their own first experiences with an audience. For the most part, attendees are sympathetic and supportive, which makes MAPACA not just a place to begin as a scholar but a place to mature as well.