Chapter 79 How to Present to a Technical Audience

In the last lesson we covered what to consider when presenting to a general audience and walked through an example of an actual general-audience presentation. Here, we’ll approach presenting to a technical audience using a similar approach!

79.0.1 The Audience

When presenting to a technical audience, you’re presenting to an audience of your peers. These are individuals who regularly analyze data and/or are familiar with your work and the way you approach data analysis. This could be other members of your team or other individuals at a conference in your specific field of expertise. As a result, you can often limit the amount of information you provide as introductory material in this type of presentation and really focus on the details of your analysis.

79.0.2 The Goal

Unlike a general audience presentation where the goal is to teach at a high level what you did, the goal of this type of presentation is to really explain details of what you did. The details and caveats of your approach should be the focus here.

79.0.3 The Presentation

For a technical audience presentation, you’re still telling a story, but the organization of your talk and the material you emphasize will be different. It should still be cohesive with a beginning, middle, and end, but you’ll really focus a lot of attention on the middle, where you explain the details of your analysis.

79.0.4 Emphasize

While you will certainly still provide your audience with the question you’re asking and important background information, the emphasis of your technical talk will be on the middle portion, where you’ll describe in detail what you did and what your findings are.

Thus, you’ll want to provide your audience with:

a detailed summary of the data (descriptive + exploratory analysis)
what you did (with concrete details)
what you found (with multiple figures discussing results)
discussion of the analysis
conclusion

In a presentation to a technical audience, you’ll want to be sure the audience knows exactly what data you’re working with. In a general audience presentation, you will likely inform the audience of how many observations were included in your analysis; however, here, you’ll likely discuss that in addition to presenting some exploratory plots that provide your audience insight into the data included in your dataset.

In addition to providing your audience with details about the data you used, you’ll want to provide details about what you did. This includes what software and packages you used (including what versions were used!) as well as details of how you approached and carried out your analysis.

Finally, while in a general audience presentation you’ll want to limit the results you present to one or two figures, here it is ok to include more results, as long as they’re important to your story.

In addition to presenting detailed results, it’s also appropriate to discuss where you ran into trouble during this analysis, what you thought about the tools you chose to use, and a discussion about the tools themselves. A technical audience will likely consider whether or not your approach will be helpful in their own work, so it’s helpful to include this type of discussion.

Finally, you’ll again want to wrap up your presentation with a conclusion slide. In a technical talk, this can include conclusions about both your analytical approach and the results from your analysis.

79.0.5 De-emphasize

In a technical talk, it’s ok to de-emphasize discussing background information that is shared by everyone in the room. For example, if you’re meeting with other team members who are all working on a similar project, you can likely just refer to the project you’ll be discussing to get everyone on the same page and can leave out the rest of the background information about the project, since everyone in the room is already familiar with that information.

All that said, while it’s still certainly important to provide your audience with some Introduction and Background information, in a presentation to a technical audience, the bulk of your time and focus should be spent discussing the details of the analysis and its results.

Technical Talk Breakdown

79.0.6 Technical Presentation Example

Like in the last lesson, we’re going to walk through a technical talk. The title of the technical talk we’ll be discussing is “Improving the value of public data with recount2 and phenotype prediction” and the slides are viewable here. Go to these slides now and scroll through them. Note the mathematical notation on slides 70 through 87 – this level of detail was not included for the general audience (slides 96-110 [here for the general audience comparison(bit.ly/general_audience)]. There will again be a quiz question about these slides, so it’s best to open it up and take a peak now. While the title and presentation details differ from the general audience presentation, the outline of the talk remains the same:

Introduction
Part 1: recount
Part 2: phenopredict
Part 3: application
Conclusion

We’ll break down this talk in the same way that we did the general audience talk in the last lesson.

Visual representation of technical presentation

As a reminder, each slide was assigned one of 7 categories: question, outline, background, approach, results, teaching, or conclusion. Each category was assigned a different color. (The colors are the same as in the previous lesson). All the way to the left represents the first slide in the presentation. All the way to the right represents the last slide.

You’ll first note that this presentation (like the general audience presentation) is motivated by a question, helping tie the story together. The presentation again begins with background.

Presentation still begins with a motivating question and background information

However, what you’ll notice is that this technical presentation is results and approach heavy. A fair amount of the presentation is dedicated to results.

Much of the presentation is results or approach

Further, unlike the general presentation slides, the approach here includes a greater amount of technical detail. Thus, while the analytical approach is discussed in a general presentation, it’s done at a high level. Here, in a technical presentation, equations and specific details of the analysis are included.

To summarize this presentation, we can see that the bulk of the presentation is spent on background, results, and approach. There is not much teaching in this technical presentation.

Bar plot summary of technical talk

79.0.7 General vs Technical

In the last lesson in this course we visualized a general talk and here we’ve done the same for a technical talk. Each presentation was on the same topic. Thus, it would be beneficial to compare the two directly here.

Here we see the general presentation visualized at the top and technical beneath it. The focus on teaching and approach in a general talk and the focus on approach and results in a technical talk becomes evident when compared on the same image.

General vs. Technical

To summarize this graphically, using the same bar plots, here we have the same categories we’ve looked at previously, but we see the results for each type of presentation. General talk is in green. Technical talk is in orange. When we focus on the results and teaching bars, we can see this general talk did a lot more teaching, while the technical talk focused more time presenting results.

Technical focused on results; General did more teaching

As discussed previously, both have a similar amount of background and approach; however, the approach slides for a technical talk are much more specific than they were for the general talk.

Background and approach similar in both; more detail in technical

Finally, we’ve also broken down the presentation by percent of slides dedicated to each part of the presentation. We can see that there aren’t huge differences between the two types of presentations. In both cases, the bulk of the time was dedicated to discussing part two, as this was the focus of the presentation. Thus, while the way the information was presented and the level of detail differed between the two presentations, the breakdown of the topics discussed in each presentation were pretty similar.

Time spent on each part of the presentation was similar

79.0.8 Summary

In this lesson we discussed the approach to and specifics of presenting to a technical audience. We walked through an example of a presentation used to present to a technical audience and broke down what parts of that example presentation were spent on what aspect of presentation. We highlighted the need to present the details of your analysis and to discuss your thoughts about the analysis and tools used in your presentation. Additionally, we’ve compared the general and technical presentations visually to really drive home the shift in focus from a high-level general audience presentation to a detailed, include the nitty-gritty technical audience presentation.