Changing the very nature of time… what horrifying entity could have this power? Why, CUNY of course! Thanks to the archaic time power of our strange institution, this week no longer has a Tuesday, and instead has two Thursdays! This has the effect that after a long break with no class, we have three classes over the course of eight days. Talk about hitting the ground running.

My main task in this chaotic collection of class time was to put together a presentation walking the class through my group’s Pretty Terrifying Project and then present it on Tuesday. …Did I say Tuesday? I mean “Thursday”, obviously.  This is fully my own fault – I volunteered to present, because honestly, I like giving presentations. Having a bunch of people watch you talk about something in a structured way feels a lot easier to me than talking to strangers one on one. Conversations can go any strange direction – a presentation has its core flow. Even if things stray, you always have that flow to return to.

So how did this presentation go? There’s definitely room for improvement, but this wasn’t meant to be perfect, and thanks to you all, Team Pretty Terrifying has plenty of feedback to work with to improve it further. That’s why I think it’s really important that we had a chance to do a first pass like this. It’s a great way to get accustomed to this particular format of presentation and work out all the mistakes now so when the big day comes, the presentation is clean and ready. That being said, I did kind of jump into presenting this week and I absolutely want to keep the door open if anyone else from my group wants to take the lead for the final presentation. I do think any other presenter can learn from my experience and step in if they’d like.

The main thing the feedback has got me thinking about is the structure of our project’s story and how to position it in time while presenting. While our process involved a lot of thinking before actually resulting in any website or data visualization, people clearly wanted to see the website and visualizations earlier on in the presentation. So just like CUNY, maybe we can mess with time a bit. As our professor suggested, it might be worth showing what we did first and then backtracking to how we got there. And there are some other options too – maybe we show the simple bar chart first thing and discuss the early process alongside it – still telling the project’s story mostly in order, but weaving the visualizations in as visual aids rather than as indicators of what work was done when. Another thing to consider is what presentation structure facilitates addressing everything we want to address while still staying within the time limit. So many options, so much to present on, and so little time, both to finish up what we need for this project, and to actually present. But we know what we’re doing, and we now have a firmer idea of our approach thanks to this practice round. As much as we’re getting into crunch time, it’s also exciting, knowing how close we’re getting to the final presentation.

See you all on Thursday! Weird… it feels like we just had a Thursday.