(edited 4/5/2022)

Powerpoints are great. I know we like to pretend we hate them, but in a conference setting where the alternative is to just stare at the presenter awkwardly, I prefer to alternate staring awkwardly and, hopefully, looking at some pretty pictures and graphs. This year, I thought I’d put my presentation for the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) Annual Meeting presentation online. It may not be the best presentation, but I want to try to be as open with my work as I can.

I found two ways to do this. First, when I stopped by the wonderful tDAR (tDAR.org) booth, I found out just how easy it is to upload my presentation to their database. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but have never gotten around to it. tDAR is a permanent digital repository. Essentially you can store anything digital in their repository and it will be both safe and accessible, if you want it to be. Second, I wanted to put up a copy on this blog. The hard, but potentially fun way would be to export and format the presentation into one of the great HTML-based slide presentations, but I decided to take the easy route and use the web version of powerpoint to embed my presentation, which you can enjoy (or not) below.

The tDAR upload is not ready yet, but you can view the GitHub repository here.

While I wait for tDAR to process this year’s abstracts, I have managed to upload all of my previous SAA presentations and organize them into a collection. Now if I want to find an old SAA presentation for whatever reason, I don’t have to dig through old files. I can go to the tDAR link where the files are stored permanently.