<\/p>\n
The slideshow itself is at least as old as the seventeenth century. The German polymath Athanasius Kircher (1601\u20131680) used an oil lamp to project engraved images against the wall.<\/p>\n
![\"Athanasius](\"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/Kircher.png\" "\\"Kircher.png\\"")
<\/p>\n
Early lantern slide show, from Athanasius Kircher’s Ars Magna<\/a> (1646)<\/em><\/p>\n In the following centuries, conjurors and impressarios used magic lantern technology to mount elaborate fantasmagories<\/em>, haunted houses of sorts in which the images of ghosts floated among audience members.<\/p>\n Fantasmagorie, from Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, <\/em>Memoires, Recreatifs, Scientifiques, and Anedotiques<\/a> <\/a>(1830)<\/em><\/p>\n Other more or less respectable showmen traveled the countryside presenting lantern-slide travelogues or educational narratives. Jacob Riis, for example, first showed his famous photographs as lantern slides. (See Stange below.)<\/p>\n In medicine (the profession with whose visual culture I’m most familiar), the earliest mention I’ve found of the lantern slide is in the 1870s, when the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot used the tool to illustrate his lectures. By 1906, a physician wrote, “Lantern slides are now considered as necessary educational material as maps and natural history specimens” (Holtz 1906).<\/p>\n During the entirety of the twentieth century, it was absolutely de rigueur<\/em> for the physician to present slides of patient photographs, microscopic enlargements, and \u2014 yes \u2014 bullet points at conferences and as part of medical education. (On bullet points and tables, see Hewitt below.) Later, physicians would use filmstrips, transparencies, and, now, PowerPoint.<\/p>\n Proceedings, American Medico-Psychological Association, 1915<\/em><\/p>\n I don’t know much about slideshows in other disciplines, but at least by the 1890s, art history students were using the darkness of the slide presentation as cover to sneak out of class. (See Nelson and Fawcett below.)<\/p>\n What does PowerPoint mean? Or, I guess, how<\/em> does it mean? Edward Tufte famously condemned<\/a> PowerPoint for what he identified as its tendency to limit analytical thought and debate. In 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation board cited Tufte’s work<\/a> when it implicated PowerPoint in the space shuttle disaster. Tufte’s problem is not so much with the medium itself, though, as with its practitioners’ fondness for bullet points and built-in templates.<\/p>\n Beyond bullet points<\/a>, though, PowerPoint has some other interesting characteristics. It requires a semi-darkened room and, by enlarging the slide beyond the scale of the speaker, asserts the primacy of the image over the spoken word. The art historian Robert S. Nelson suggests<\/a> that the dominance of the slide lecture may have something to do with the century’s faith in mechanical objectivity \u2014 versus, say, narrative or interpretation \u2014 as the most truthful depiction of knowledge.<\/p>\n At the same time as it elevates the image, says Nelson, it divorces it from context: “from neighboring images, attendant sights, sounds, or smells, and the community, traditions, and functions of the original” (433). It posits the existence of “facts”: units of transferrable knowledge that are always true, regardless of the way in which they’re used.<\/p>\n This seems accurate to me, especially when I think of my own experience dragging and dropping slides to rearrange a talk, or pulling a slide in from one presentation and dropping it into another.<\/p>\n Using PowerPoint never seemed so strange to me as when I used it in the course of teaching about French neorealism, with the genre’s insistence on long takes and its faithfulness to the contingencies of reality. Even amidst the hustle of class preparation, it seemed odd to slice up a shot from Jules et Jim<\/em>, drop it into a slide deck, and claim to be teaching my students about the beauty of long, slow deliberation.<\/p>\n Perhaps, though, PowerPoint is appropriate, if not to Jules et Jim,<\/em> than to the imperative to convey its essence to my students in fifty minutes. Which is to say: perhaps making Jules et Jim<\/em> portable, learnable, and transferrable requires its PowerPoint-ification.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think about PowerPoint a lot, and judging by the reams of blog posts, screeds, and instructional books on the topic, I’m not the only one. The interesting thing about PowerPoint is that it’s not that new. Well, PowerPoint is, relatively speaking (the software package emerged in 1980), but the basic idea \u2014 the slide […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,5],"tags":[136,123,131,139,140,133,138,135,141,134,132,137],"class_list":["post-792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","category-tools","tag-communication","tag-education","tag-edward-tufte","tag-jacob-riis","tag-jean-martin-charcot","tag-lecture","tag-magic-lantern-technology","tag-microsoft-powerpoint","tag-neurologist","tag-presentation-software","tag-slideshow","tag-software-package"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":834,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions\/834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Audience](\"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/fantasmagorie.png\" "\\"fantasmagorie.png\\"")
<\/p>\n![\"Program](\"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/medico-psychological.png\" "\\"medico-psychological.png\\"")
<\/p>\nMore on PowerPoint and Slideshows<\/strong><\/h3>\n
History and Criticism<\/strong><\/h4>\n
(A Few) Manuals, Articles, and Other Primary Sources<\/strong><\/h4>\n