Tuesday, January 18, 2011

How to Avoid Boring Your Audience with Dry Data

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Can we as text-critics (and teachers), often working with dry data, learn something from this Swedish professor Hans Rosling? If nothing else, we could get some inspiration for our conference presentations.



That was the best presentation of stats I have ever seen. Want to see more? Here is a more conventional talk, using the same software (and entusiasm):

7 comments

  1. That was great. Imagine how awesome it would have been if a Norwegian had put it together.

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  2. Have any of you been to one of Dan Wallace's "Snoopy Seminars?" The one I attended had over 100 lay people in attendance, and they were very much engaged in the discussion and presentation, along with the 'hands-on' project they did...a textual critical analysis of a verse from extra-biblical Christian literature. At the end, the whole crowd erupted in cheers as each group of 50 people had perfectly re-constructed the text of the verse.

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  3. Did you see how many techies were in the background doing all the techie-stuff? And can you imagine how many number-crunchers must have helped to gather the data?

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  4. Some of those countries bounced around like rubber balls.

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  5. Peter,
    are you implying that this is not the sort of thing to be done on the plane to the conference? (Though the flight to San Francisco for the SBL meeting will offer an extra hour or two of prep time.)

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  6. Given the long flight I was wondering about proposing - and preparing - two papers.

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  7. Peter, only 2 papers? You can do one on the train from Cambridge to London alone! In the 10 hours from London to SF, you could get 5 more done;).

    bob

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