PowerPoint’s Impact on Conference Ratings and Social Media Likes
Abstract: How can we best use PowerPoint? Three streams of research provide answers: (1) surveys provide student and faculty perceptions, (2) expert presenters give their opinion, and (3) cognitive scientists conduct focused perceptual experiments. I expand on this research by testing existing research findings against actual conference presentations. My C# software automatically analyzes 166 slide presentations to generate numeric slide characteristics. A regression analysis then correlates these characteristics with audience ratings and social media impact. The results generally support existing research, but have two surprising outcomes: (1) only certain types of images generate positive session ratings, (2) high words counts lead to improved social media impact.
Presider: Ken Larsson, Dept of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University