Pecha Kucha, WTF! Well that’s what I thought when hearing we would have to present in this session at Web Science 2013. Turns out PechaKucha 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images.

Is this good for an academic conference format? Well I think that it isn’t suitable for all presentations, but because you have to ‘cut to the chase’ it is good for conferences with a pretty homogenise audience and where backgrounds, methodological explanations, or the like, are not required. I also think it works in 1 hour / 1:15 hour rapid slots with 2 minutes for questions – so you can move through 7 presentations – more than this I think means people start to loose cognition of the complex topics and results being presented, simply, things get mixed up or forgotten.

But you don’t need to take my work for it – take a look at @markelvigo presenting our paper on Disabled Users as Uber Users, on youTube.

You can see the full programme online, but to give you an idea the Pecha Kucha session of short sharp talks ran like this:

• Ricardo Kawase, Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Eelco Herder, Wolfgang Nejdl and Marco Antonio Casanova: Who Wants To Get Fired?
• Catherine C. Marshall and Frank M. Shipman: Experiences Surveying the Crowd: Reflections on methods, participation, and reliability
• Jisun An, Daniele Quercia and Jon Crowcroft: Why Individuals Seek Diverse Opinions (or Why They Don’t)
• Markel Vigo and Simon Harper: Considering People with Disabilities as Überusers for Eliciting Generalisable Coping Strategies on the Web
• Nana Baah Gyan, Victor de Boer, Anna Bon, Chris van Aart, Stephane Boyera, Hans Akkermans, Mary Allen, Aman Grewal and Max Froumentin: Voice-Based Web Access in Rural Africa
• Christopher Phethean, Thanassis Tiropanis and Lisa Harris: Rethinking Measurements Of Social Media Use By Charities: A Mixed Methods Approach
• Fabian Eikelboom, Paul Groth and Laura Hollink: A comparison between online and offline prayer
• Marie Joan Kristine Gloria, Dominic Difranzo, Marco Fernando Navarro and Jim Hendler: The Performativity of Data: Re-conceptualizing the Web of data
• Richard Rogers: Debanalizing Twitter: the transformation of an object of study
• Michael Yip, Nigel Shadbolt and Craig Webber: Why Forums? An empirical analysis into the facilitating factors of carding forums
• Antoine Mazières and Samuel Huron: Toward Google Borders