How to Watch a Technical Research Talk (or Workshop, or Tutorial) Recording (and Make the Most of It)
When I’m trying to approach a highly specialized topic for the first time, one of my tactics is to find a recording of a research-geared workshop about it and watch it as my introductory crash course. The benefits of this are as follows:
- I am learning about the subject from (hopefully) a credible expert in the field.
- Workshops and talks usually try to be self-contained, which means basic background info will likely be given and I won’t have to pore through 10 different research papers, searching for an obscure definition, in vain.
- Talks typically have the benefit of including visuals and informal intuition conveyed by the speaker, which generally won’t make it into academic papers, because they’re not rigorous. However, the visuals and informal statements and intuition are invaluable for gaining a better understanding of the information.
- The speaker will generally include a bibliography and mention related works, which is a great jumping off point for further investigation and saves me from having to figure out what the seminal sources are myself. ‘
However, there are also some drawbacks:
- The intended audience for a talk is usually experts in the same (or at the very least, an adjacent) field. I am not an expert, so the speed at which the information is conveyed is usually way too much for me.
- Attempting to fully understand the contents of a talk will likely take at least 5X longer than just watching it straight through (for me, anyway), due to the amount of writing and pausing. Talks are not structured like lectures, and therefore move much faster than a typical lecture does.
- I have no idea whether the talk will actually clarify my specific issue or now before I watch it; also, I don’t know whether any of the adjacent material could be relevant to me later or not, and I won’t know where to find it later; also, it’s often hard (or even impossible) to figure out which parts of the talk to watch in advance.
- Sometimes, a talk recording may be an obscure video with no timestamps or slides available, and so transcribing the entire contents in hopes that it will be useful is a temptation I often have. I recently spent over 20 hours transcribing slides from a 2 hour workshop talk; while some of it was extremely useful, I suspect at least 70% of it will turn out to be tangentially relevant at best (and thus not worth transcribing).
The rest of this article lists some tips I’ve discovered for trying to capitalize on the benefits of watching research talks while mitigating the inconvenient problems one may run into. Here are five things I learned the hard way, from being really inefficient when it comes to watching talks:
- Watch the entire thing once through at regular speed. Yes, it may seem like the whole thing is going over your head, but that’s okay. (It may also feel like watching the entire video is a waste of time, but that’s okay too. There are no shortcuts to learning, after all.) The goal is to get a general idea of what was said in the talk, passively absorb some background/contextual/additional information, and most of all, identify which parts of the talk are going to be key to you.
- A good idea might be to keep track of the various slide headings or “sections” of the presentation as it goes on and make note of time stamps where it seems like the information is going to be particularly useful to you. That way you have a “skeleton” outline of the talk with timestamps that you can save for future reference.
- You can also keep some jot notes as you watch the presentation, at about the same pace as you would in a live presentation - just making notes of interesting things or even tangents you’ll relegate future you to exploring.
- If you’re identified that you’ve gotten enough out of the video, or even that the video was not as useful as you were hoping, you’re done!
- If you’ve identified key sections you would like to elaborate on, from here there are two choices:
- watch the video again, speeding up the less important sections and slowing down as much as possible during the key sections to get down all of the information you can. I particularly find it helpful to slow down enough that I can write down what the speaker is saying, as well as whatever is on the slide/blackboard. (If you can find slides online already, that is gold; then, you can just annotate the slides instead of painstakingly writing things out.)
- Only rewatch the parts of the video you think are useful, taking your time with them to get out as much information as possible. This is probably a good idea if you’re short on time; the trade-off is potentially being confused when some contextually information you might have forgotten between the first and the second watch is used in the section of the video you’re watching.
- Take note of any references or related works the speaker may have mentioned and take note of them as possible jumping off points for further investigations.
- If there are still some unclear terms in the relevant sections of your notes from the talk, now is the time to look them up, find lecture notes/videos about them, or even try to track down the original papers that they came from.