stevancw / academic_presentation_scaffold

An Academic Presentation Scaffold

Academic Project Scaffold

This is a suggestion for a way of organising the files and folders associated with making and using your presentations.

Why should I think about using this?

You may create and do many presentations and often you may present a similar topic to different audiences. You may need lots of files in order to build your presentation and things can get messy if you don't organise them all. By using this scaffold all of your presentations will have a common structure and no matter when you come back to review your presentation (you need to do a similar one, you need to look up something that you used during that presentation) you will know exactly where to find everything.

How many times have you seen the slightly computer illiterate and ill-prepared presenter try to play a video and for nothing to happen? If they had used this scaffold for their presentation then the video files would be in the assets/video directory and all they would need to do is open it up and try to play the file (n.b. this won't help you with PC media codec woes but why not include a version of VLC media player in your lib directory?

I've tried to use Convention over configuration and have setup everything the way I like for my presentations but please feel free to fork and adapt this to your needs (after all they're your presentations).

The Folders

1. Assets: for all of your images and video
2. Data: for any data you need to refer to or to show those pesky trolls
3. Lib: for related files e.g. timetable, map, presentation guidelines and perhaps even VLC media player to make sure you don't look like a fool!
4. Research: for the academic papers you may need to refer to.
5. Versions: Store your drafts and final versions here. It's strongly advisablethat you also export a .pdf version in case of softwre/formatting problems.

The Research Folder and .pdf files

The .pdf files within the research folder will not be stored by git or uploaded to GitHub (the .gitignore file is configured this way). They are usually large files and this is largely unecessary. Thre is one .pdf file (with linked BibTeX record - use BibDesk it's awesome) in the project as an example; You should delete this. Note: only .pdf files in this folder will be ignored so if you need to add graphics to the assets or lib folders you can do so and they will be tracked by git and uploaded to GitHub.