A conference talk in the genre "Look At All This Cool Shit I Found"—one that tells a little history, shows pictures of archival documents, offers some funny anecdotes—is a) delightful; b) a waste of your time as an audience member, you didn't come all this way for Show & Tell; c) something else?
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One of my favorite conference talks is when Solveig Robinson recounted how she came across the correspondence between Robert Black and his editor George Bentley. Key is that she found the letters in those last few frantic days of an archive visit. The article the talk grew into is a good too.