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Why Humanists Read Their Papers:

Social scientist and scientists often ask me why humanists stand at the podium and read a written paper outloud. Admittedly, it is a perversion of everything we know about performance art since simply reading a written text, especially a text designed to be read, is the opposite of performative. Except for pacing and intonation, there is little about the form that interacts with the audience. When I make presentations to a general audience, I often just talk. Sometimes I have slides and I engage with those. But yesterday, keynoting the delightful Mardi Gras Conference of English Graduate students at LSU, I had the option of either talking along with my 30 or 40 slides on humanities and technology or reading a paper. I chose to read the paper. But because of my time as Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies--where I attended talks in every imaginable field--and my time with HASTAC (ditto), I read self-consciously. As I prepared, I thought a lot about WHY we humanists read our work outloud to one another and here are some ideas. I'd love to hear more. First, what the scientific method is to scientists, what such things as standard deviation are to statisticians and quantifying social scientists, rhetoric and logic are to humanists. Scientists and social scientists are rhetorical and logical too, but there aren't formal rules in those fields, there isn't training in the subtleties of each. Every humanist endures years of writing long papers and having them corrected not just for their content but for the micro-logics of each new twist and turn of the argument. ...

... One thing that typically is lost in presentations that follow bullet points are the logical connectors between those bullet points. It's not a Zen koan to ask "what is the information between the bullet points"? If you list four main points, how are those linked? How are they related? What are the connections, the causalities, the generalizations, and the modifications to those generalizations? Typically the bullet points evacuate that subtler differentiation and, more to the point, differentiating context--the relationship not just of bullet point A to bullet point B but of A and B to C but not D. Those subtler nuances of argumentation are what count as "smart" in the humanities. ...

This is something I think a lot about. When Melissa first started coming to my talks five years ago or so, she cringed at the sound of me reading. As a scientist, she was used to hearing and delivering disciplined presentations of data with clear summaries of conclusions. She asked me to give up the reading. I have, mostly.

Problem is, of course, much of what I have to offer has no data! Cathy Davidson is correct to note that it is the flow, order, and construction of sentences and paragraphs that do much of the work in our presentations. Still, no audience would prefer to be read to. After all, they could just as me to fax it to them.

I don't always read from text. But I often do. It really depends on my subject, my audience and how complete the text is.

Last week I gave a talk to the Science and Technology Studies department at Virginia Tech. It was one of my best audiences ever. Everyone there was well versed in the rhetoric of STS and the issues at stake with Google, the subject of my talk. So I started out the talk with about 10 minutes of extemporaneous background and context. I had a few jokes and quips. It was lively and I got a good vibe from the audience.

Then I started reading. Now, sometimes that just kills a room. But in this case I prepared them by explaining that this was the draft of the introduction to my next book. So it would explain a lot of the questions I was asking and map out where I was going. I did this with a clear plea for their help in revising my questions and investigations.

At key points, I lifted my head and riffed on the text, background, and even some of the slides I presented.

In this case, the prose I read was pretty rhythmic. I had gone over it many times. I had presented it in other places. So I think it worked. If I do my job right, I write like I speak. That does not always happen. But I think that is the only time one should read a prepared text to a general audience (as opposed to, say, a scholarly meeting session).

The other thing I do when I can is memorize the text. If I have given the same talk a number of times I can just use slides to cue me to passages that I have committed to memory. The audience thinks I am speaking from my heart. I am confident because I am speaking from my pages. But I maintain eye contact and project my voice while standing up straight (very important to a big man).