Link roundup for September 2021

Look, we’re scientists, not artists, and rats are hard to draw so you might just have to settle for a rat made out of ovals.

This is the lead example in this great Twitter thread on scientists making figures as best they can. • • • • •

Goodsett and colleagues have suggestions for creating online conferences, based on their experiences in conference planning for Association of Academic and Research Libraries. Here’s how they handled posters:

Each presenters recorded a short 1 to 3 min introduction about their poster. The overall format of the poster was left open to presenter creativity. Feedback, comments, and questions were submitted and answered asynchronously using a discussion board.

A notable addition to their planning was creating contact personnel that they called “shepards.”

The CPC adopted a “shepherd” support system for presenters... Shepherds served as the (programming committee) contact for each presenter, shared important details, and answered questions, especially any related to media creation and file formats, since pre-recorded videos and online poster presentations had not been required of previous... presenters.

Some participants asked for the online component to be kept when conferences move back to face-to-face:

“The online posters (especially those with recorded descriptions) were very helpful for me (it's hard for me to see physical posters at times, so we might want to keep this option when we move back to a physical conference).”

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Marvel comics character or font? Take the quiz! See if you can beat my score of 17 out of 20. 😉 Hat tip to Melissa Vaught. 

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 That’s it for this month!