Link roundup for July 2025

It’s been a month. What has happened around conference poster sessions?

• • • • •

The quest to perfect the online poster session continues!

Macarthur and Drude posted a slide deck with a brief explanation of how they created a small online poster session using ThingLink. This allows you to create an online space that people can navigate through, click buttons to bring up specific posters, and listen to a short recorded video presentation.

The slide deck doesn’t do justice to the experience, so I encourage you to visit their poster session. 

I tried this on my phone and laptop. Both worked well. I like the navigation for this session. I found it very intuitive and smooth.

I don’t like that the recorded presentations that I saw have small heads that often cover part of the poster, with no option to move them. I am not sure if there is any possibility for interaction between either the presenter and the audience or other audience members. 

Even on a larger screen, some poster titles are hard to read. This is a problem with the poster design, not a failure of the format. But this makes me worry slightly about whether this successful approach would scale to larger poster sessions. Browsing is an important aspect of poster sessions, and this set-up seems to make that difficult. If I want to get in close to a poster, I have to click that specific poster, maybe zoom to read the title, and possibly pause the recorded presentation.

Macarthur V, Drude F. 2025. Bringing research to life: an immersive virtual poster gallery. In: University of Cumbria Learning & Teaching Conference, 18 June 2025, University of Cumbria, Lancaster, UK (unpublished). https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/8957

• • • • •

A very robust finding about conferences is that oral presentations are more likely to become journal articles than poster presentations. But how much do conference organizers have their thumb on the scale?

A recent paper looking at the reporting of randomized clinical trials at conferences found, not a difference in publication, but a difference in the quality of project reported.

Poster abstracts had lower overall reporting quality scores compared to oral abstracts. This could be partly attributed to the more rigorous evaluation process of oral presentations by scientific committee. Given the limited number of podium slots and the high volume of submissions, it may be that higher-quality studies are selected for oral presentations.

Paheerathan S, Flitti D, Cobourne MT, Hua F, Pandis N, Seehra J. 2025. Reporting quality of randomized controlled trial abstracts presented at the European Orthodontic Society Congress between 2015–2024: has there been an improvement over time? European Journal of Orthodontics 47(4): cjaf039. https://doi.org/10.1093/ejo/cjaf039 

• • • • • 

S. Kamoun wrote a couple of blog posts one reasons to publish posters. I agree with most things, but warn against this:

Having a DOI for your poster allows you to include it in your CV under publications.

There is nothing special about a DOI that turns a conference poster into a publication. Many CVs I have seen have a separate section for publications and conference presentations. Trying to pass off the latter as the former will be seen as obvious puffery.

But maybe that was advice that ChatGPT dreamed up. Both of the posts below are written with “assistance” from ChatGPT. I appreciate the disclosure.

Kamoun S. 2023. Why you should publish your posters. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8154941 

Kamoun S. 2025 Why I’m skipping the Congress this year (And why you should still publish your posters). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15863849 

• • • • •

Almost as old as the blog but new to me post on confusing comic page layouts.

 Always make it easy for a reader to know which way to look next.

• • • • •

If you have ever wanted a Norman Romanesque look for your posters, may I direct you to the Historic Tale Construction Kit Bayeux.

Hat tip to Ian Coomber.

• • • • •

I don’t have access to this article by Amy Pepper, but some of you might.

Pepper A. 2025. How to develop and present a conference poster. Nursing Older People. https://doi.org/10.7748/nop.2025.e1516 

I couldn’t help but notice while looking for this article that another article by Davina Calbraith came out in 2020 with the exact same title:

Calbraith D. 2020. How to develop and present a conference poster. Nursing Standard 35(9): 46-50. https://doi.org/10.7748/ns.2020.e11468

And it’s not just the title that causes déja vu. The “Reflective activity” for both articles is very similar. 

2020:

‘How to’ articles can help to update your practice and ensure it remains evidence based. Apply this
article to your practice. Reflect on and write a short account of:
1. How reading this article will improve your poster development or presentation skills.
2. How you could use this information to educate nursing students or colleagues wanting to develop
a conference poster.

2025:

‘How to’ articles can help to update your practice and ensure it remains evidence based. Apply this article to your practice. Reflect on and write a short account of:
• How this article might improve your practice when designing and presenting a conference poster.
• How you could use this information to educate nursing students or your colleagues on the appropriate technique and evidence base when designing and presenting a conference poster.

Maybe this is standard boilerplate in nursing journals? I don’t know.

• • • • •

How to use peer review to improve student posters.

Emery KL, Shepard MD, Matthew SJ. 2025. The effectiveness of online peer-feedback
for group interaction and assessment quality in a high-enrolment and culturally diverse undergraduate
topic. in: 11th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’25). Valencia, 17-20 June 2025. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd25.2025.20129 and https://researchnow.flinders.edu.au/files/162584869/Emery_Effectiveness_P2025.pdf 

• • • • •

And finally, in “Cool things I haven’t seen done before”.

Biologist Chris Eckert is retiring. (Good luck and enjoy, fine sir!) So for his last professional poster at the 2025 meeting of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, what did he do?

He held a garage sale. 

 Brilliant! Hat tip to Andrea Wishart and credit to Janice Freedman for the photo.

• • • • • 

Thank you! Your next link roundup will be here on the last Thursday of August! 

In search of an online and hybrid poster session that works

Over the last few years, I’ve had a lot of discussions about conference accessibility and online conferences. The advantages of online conferences became almost immediately apparent in 2020, when the pandemic quickly forced the issue. Since then, many conferences have stepped back from the online experience, which I think is a shame.

I think there is still room to innovate! A recent paper by Moss and colleagues (2024) steps up to the challenge of how to make a large hybrid conference. And by large, we’re talking about over 2,600 participants, with 600 online.

Poster session has seemed to be the one part of a conference that has proved hardest to translate into a positive online experience.

Here’s how this team did their poster session:

An example of (freedom to experiment) was the hybrid poster set-up where online and in-person presenters and participants could interact freely in real time via Zoom. When it became clear that existing commercial providers could not realize this vision in a cost-effective way, a custom approach was devised that involved purchasing 100 sets of equipment, managed by the (organizing committee) and a dedicated set of volunteers. The physical set-up was fairly straightforward, incorporating digital screens, Raspberry Pis, mice, keyboards, webcams and ethernet connections. While this experimental approach was not without challenges, it successfully enabled hybrid posters in an unprecedented and innovative way.

I would have liked to hear from conference attendees about their poster experience. Did they feel it was close to a face-to-face session? Was it easy to navigate? Were there genuine interactions from both the in person and online attendees?

Regardless, I commend the organizers for their generosity:

This approach also led to a sustained and lasting impact on the community: because the equipment sets were purchased outright rather than rented, they are being donated to schools across South Africa, bringing benefits to people well beyond the (conference) and facilitating educational opportunities that would have otherwise been inaccessible.

Now, you might read that and think, “Wait, they bought all this equipment for the poster sessions for use at one conference? Surely that was a money loser for this conference!” The authors don’t think so:

(N)o more than 18% of the total conference costs can be in any way attributable to online attendees (but) this is a substantial overestimate, as (audio-visual) equipment is necessary for all participants, not just those online. When removing (audio-visual) costs from the calculation, hybrid costs were only 3% of the budget — considering that online registration covered 6% of the total budget, it is likely that IAU more than broke even with its online registrations. ...

Far from adding excessively to conference costs, the experience of the IAU GA demonstrates that hybrid can greatly increase reach (for instance, more than 10,000 unique viewers on YouTube) for a small fraction of the conference budget.

It can be done, and it can be done better. I would very much like to see more organizations pushing harder to develop a great online poster session.

Reference

Moss VA, Venugopal R, Govender K, Hotan AW, Kobayashi R, Rees GA, Tasker EJ, Vertue DG, Le Jeune A, Kerrison EF, Roux J, Blumenthal K, Ekers RD, Peel MW, Takalana CM, Barocci-Faul S, Benkhaldoun Z, Binneman A, Breytenbach H, Chibueze JO, Cunnama DC, Kubheka DV, Mdhluli JE, Macfarlane SA, Zamxaka M, van Zyl L. 2024. Accessible hybrid conferences are possible and affordable at large scale. Nature Astronomy: in press. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02448-9
 

Link roundup for June 2023

Hello! Welcome to our monthly collection of poster-ish stuff!

• • • • •

Secpholand is yet another contender for “Second Life clone elevated to use for online conferences.”

de la Heras and colleagues write of this platform:

This... environment has been selected mainly for the possibilities of interactivity with other attendees, since networking options are significantly increased compared to the standard video conference format at online meetings. What is especially attractive is how posters are presented, which for us was very important given the high number of poster contributions and considering that many of the presenters were early-career researchers, sometimes at their first conference participation. ... Moving your avatar around, you can see the posters, zoom on them to check them out and especially, when entering in the dedicated area next to the poster, a voice call with the other people in the area is started, giving the possibility to talk with the authors and other attendees in front of the poster. Thus, the platform is able to reproduce a traditional poster session in an online platform reaching more than 2600 poster visualizations.

I have questions about how smooth the navigation experience is. The post-conference survey notes people were generally satisfied, but they don’t drill down to specifically how the poster session went. But this comment seems important:

(N)ot everybody had the same approach to the online platform and virtual environment, whose interface was not immediately user-friendly for everyone.

Read more:

de las Heras A, Gómez-Varela AI, Tomás M-B, Perez-Herrera RA, Sánchez LA, Gallazzi F, Fernández BS, Garcia-Lechuga M, Vinas-Pena M, Delgado-Pinar M, González-Fernández V. 2023. Innovative approaches for organizing an inclusive optics and photonics conference in virtual format. Optics 4(1): 156-170. https://doi.org/10.3390/opt4010012

• • • • •

A new preprint looks at how biologists make posters. 

Jambor HK. Insights on poster preparation practices in life sciences. bioRxiv 2023:2020.10.08.331413. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.08.331413.

Most make a poster in two days and get no feedback.

There’s your problem. That’s nowhere near enough time. And what do you expect if you don’t get input from other people?

Another little result of the poll that baffles me is that less than a third of people polled used PowerPoint, which is not consistent with what I have found surveying people online about what they used to make their poster (42% used PowerPoint) and asking people at conferences what they used to make their poster (61% used PowerPoint).

But those surveys of mine were years ago (downside to having a long running project), so maybe it’s time for a new poll on Twitter.

• • • • •

Speaking of polls, here’s a Twitter poll asking about whether people prefer paper or screen posters.

• • • • •

Speaking of e-posters, this is what is passing as a “digital poster” now:

According to the presenter, this is a video recording of a PowerPoint presentation. The same recording is used for people browsing online as in attendance.

I am baffled as two why anyone would call this a “poster.”

• • • • •

It’s always something to read outside your own field.

I explore the science poster medium’s performativities, its potential for producing greater discourse about the institutional structures that hold up academic conferences.

That “hegemonies,” “deconstruction,” and “post-war fetish” all appear on the first page alone tell yous this is not a typical scientific article.

This book chapter by Alen Agaranove describes two performance art pieces which were presented as hoax poster presentations (Agaranov calls them “lecture-performances”). One occurred during an actual conference.

Why do this, beside, you know, for art’s sake?

The goal behind the lecture-performance, no matter how nonsensical or illogical, is to prevent a conversation about science communication from immediately degenerating into inquiry or research.

Read more:

Agaronov A. 2023. Conference of the oppressed: Lecture-performing the science poster presentation, In: Haste H, Bempechat J, New Civics, New Citizens: Critical, Competent, and Responsible Agents, pp. 131-143. Brill.

• • • • •

Maybe Ben Wolfe’s poster could be considered “lecture-performance.”

 Ben snuck this fake poster into a conference.

• • • • •

If you share your poster online at any point, make sure to provide alt text for accessibility.

Here’s a guide for writing alt text for data visualizations, with a tip of the hat to Jon Schwabish.

• • • • •

For you who like to teach using posters, here’s a new paper.

Ariyani A, Muhayyang M, Munir M, & Sakkir G. 2023. Students’ voices: Poster session as an alternative way of teaching writing. ARRUS Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 3(2): 97-103. https://doi.org/10.35877/soshum1749 

This paper talks about teaching written English to university students, for whom English is an additional language.

Most students like writing for poster sessions.

• • • • •

Annmarie Guzy used posters instead of a midterm. This is not perhaps super unusual, except that it was from the humanities. Specifically, horror.

But “poster” is broadly defined. Here is what one student made for The Haunting of Hill House:

Guzy A. 2023. A creative midterm alternative: The horror author poster session. Honors in Practice 19: 138–41. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nchchip/389

• • • • •

Making things consistent is a central design challenge. This paper in press tells you how to build a guide to make graphic designs consistent.

Graze M, Schwabish J. 2023. Building color palettes in your data visualization style guides. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. https://10.1093/jamia/ocad084

The paper identifies eight things you need in a style guide:

1. Colour
2. Type
3. Sizes
4. Content
5. Chart parts
6. Visualization types
7. Accessibility
8. Resources
   

There is a website of sample guides and resources: www.datavizstyleguide.com.

Colour is first on the list, and most of the paper describes what you should think about when picking colours to use. What kind of purpose is the colour being used for? Categories, sequences, or differences? Do some colours unintentionally look “better” than others? What are the cultural connotations of the colours?

This article could be useful for people who run labs that produce multiple posters every year, each made by multiple students. Make a guide so that the output from you lab looks somewhat consistent. It will save supervisor and students time in the long run because they don’t have to keep making design decisions from scratch.

• • • • •

That’s it for this month! Thanks for joining us!

One class of pharmacy students preferred online poster sessions

We spent two years mostly having conferences online. Many people see advantages to that format and want conferences to keep online options. But would online conferences be just a better-than-nothing kludge for people who would normally be left out? A roughly equal experience to traditional conferences? Or could it be that the online experience is actually superior to face-to-face presentations?

These questions matter more for poster sessions than oral presentations. Oral presentations online are a reasonably solved problems. TED talks have shown for years that a good recorded presentation can have impact.

A new paper compared students’ preference for online and face-to-face poster sessions. Axon and Whaley (2022) found people liked online poster sessions more.

If the graph below, the blue on the left shows people who preferred online, the tan in the middle shows people who preferred face-to face, and the purple on the right is no difference. Click to enlarge!

More people preferred online over face-to-face in every category except one. People thought they had more ability to acquire presentation skills in a face-to-face setting (second bar from top). But even there, the advantage is not huge.

But there are many issues that need to be pointed out here!

This paper is the result of surveying one class of pharmacy graduate students. And I don’t mean, “a single course that has been taught multiple times,” I mean one group of students in one semester. The sample size is 63.

Critically, those students did not have experience with both formats in their class. They had to give their posters for their class in an online format. This is a “How would you know you liked it if you never tried it?” situation. Maybe some students had experience with face-to-face poster sessions before they took this class, but the survey didn’t ask.

It’s unclear what the online poster session for these students was like. This is the whole description:

The virtual format required students to record a presentation of their poster and provide a link for their peers to review and comment on during the research poster session.

Online poster presentation platforms vary wildly. Some are good, some are not so good. Maybe the team teaching this course managed their online poster session extremely well, and that was reflected in students’ responses. Opinions don’t exist in a vacuum.

It’s great that people are open to the possibilities of online poster sessions. But this paper tells us little about whether people who have experience with both formats prefer. And that seems like an important question to ask.

References

Axon DR, Whaley M. 2022. Student pharmacists' perspectives of in-person versus virtual research poster presentations. Pharmacy 10(5): 104. https://www.mdpi.com/2226-4787/10/5/104

Online conferences offer many benefits, but online poster sessions still suck

Since 2020, most academic conferences have been online. A recent paper on conferences found many positive effects from online conferences. In short:

• More people overall.
• People from more places.
  
• More women.

The paper argues that online conferences also reduced carbon footprint, but do this by calculating carbon emissions of air travel only. They do not calculate the carbon emissions from hosted server space, energy use of uploads and downloads, and so on. As blockchain technology has proved, “digital” does not mean “carbon neutral.”

The paper highlights the problems with online poster sessions in the abstract: “(F)urther development of virtual networking features and poster sessions is necessary to achieve widespread adoption and acceptance of this new format.”

A dive into the main text shows a more complex picture.

Skiles and company go into more details in this excerpt, lightly edited (acronyms removed):

Analysed virtual conferencess had poster authors publish their posters via Twitter, using a web-based iPoster sharing platform, or by uploading a 5-minute prerecorded presentation to the conference website. The poster presentations had high view counts (NAMS iPosters had on average 142 views) but presenters could not tell how many attendees were viewing their posters and features for communicating with poster viewers were not effective. In contrast, Twitter-based poster sessions are increasing in frequency and allow asynchronous communication. However, Twitter is not available in every country, limiting access. Consequently, virtual posters were less popular, with 85% of North American Membrane Society survey respondents and 43% of Photonics Online Meetups 2 survey respondents indicating that they preferred in-person poster sessions to virtual poster sessions.

So they present a sample size of two, with an even split on preference. One crowd preferred face-to-face poster sessions, the other preferred online poster sessions. The “preferred” margin for online poster sessions is smaller in one meeting than the other, but still. I’m amazed that one conference had more than half of respondents favouring online poster sessions.

References

Skiles M, Yang E, Reshef O, Muñoz DR, Cintron D, Lind ML, Rush A, Calleja PP, Nerenberg R, Armani A, M. Faust K, Kumar M. 2021. Conference demographics and footprint changed by virtual platforms. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00823-2

What is the carbon footprint of a conference poster?

The COVID-19 crisis delivered a shock to the academic conference scene from which it may never recover. We have seen conferences completely retooled and reformatted in a very short span of time, with varying degrees of success.

But we are also in a climate crisis. If the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t arrived, the climate emergency would probably have forced a similar re-examination of how we hold academic conferences – although it probably would have happened over decades instead of years.

A forthcoming paper by Leochico and colleagues looks at how we should change conferences in light of the climate crisis. They have multiple recommendations, but this is the one that includes posters.

Avoid single-use items: Require electronic instead of physical posters; re-evaluate use of booklets, lanyards, plastic water bottles, coffee cups, and other conference items.

As a basis for this recommendation, they cite another very recent article by Milford and colleagues (2021). They make the same general statement about reducing single-use items at conferences.

These are good recommendations, but it’s worth digging deeper.

First, most of the time posters have at least one additional use. They can go on display at their institution, where they can have a role in showing work to students and colleagues.

Second, posters are not in the same category as coffee cups or lanyards. Posters are one of the reasons you hold a conference. Lanyards are not. So if you do not want to use paper posters, you must have some sort of substitute.

The substitute both articles recommend is to move from paper posters to electronic posters. But neither of them provide any attempt to show that the carbon footprint of an electronic poster is lower than that of a paper poster. They simply assert it.

Trying to come up with an estimate of carbon costs for these kinds of alternatives is mind-numbingly hard. I have noticed, however, is that people often tend to underestimate the carbon costs of electronics. 

For example, in a class I taught once on global change, students suggested that all students get tablets so that the university wouldn’t have to use so much paper. On the surface, it sounds great: less waste! 

But I started asking them if they considered factors like what it took to create a tablet. Consumer electronics like smart phones use almost every chemical element in the periodic table, and many are rare and hard to extract. But paper is from trees, so by definition, if you want paper, you are drawing down atmospheric carbon to grow trees.

There’s also an end-of-life question. Recycling components of electronics is a challenging engineering problem that people are actively trying to solve. One the other hand, recycling paper is so simple that kids in grade school can do it. (Though it gets more complicated if you have glossy photo paper.)

Then there is the power use involved in storing and displaying an electronic poster. Unless the power is sourced from renewable energy, there is going to be an ongoing carbon cost of storing an electronic poster so it can be viewed on demand during the conference and afterwards. Yes, paper costs energy, but the energy cost ends after it’s printed and transported.

I am not saying that paper posters are obviously more climate friendly than electronic ones. I don’t know, but I don’t think anyone else does, either. I would like to know.

Update, 1 September 2021: To be explicit, I am assuming a situation where people are traveling to the conference, regardless of poster format. Given the high carbon cost of flying, an entirely online conference probably has a lower carbon footprint than any in person conference, regardless of poster format.

References

Leochico CFD, Di Giusto ML, Mitre R. 2021. Impact of scientific conferences on climate change and how to make them eco-friendly and inclusive: A scoping review. The Journal of Climate Change and Health: in press. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100042

Milford K, Rickard M, Chua M, Tomczyk K, Gatley-Dewing A, Lorenzo AJ. 2021. Medical conferences in the era of environmental conscientiousness and a global health crisis: The carbon footprint of presenter flights to pre-COVID pediatric urology conferences and a consideration of future options. Practice Management/Training 56(8): P1312-1316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpedsurg.2020.07.013

The 2021 #BlackInX poster winners

One of the good things that emerged in 2020 was a series of grassroots Twitter events highlighting the achievements of Black scientists. Recently, these combined forces for a #BlackInXConference online. And there was a poster competition on Twitter!

Here are the winners. Click any to enlarge! Click the Twitter handle for the thread describing the poster.

Cellas Hayes (@c3llas):

 

Caprice Phillips (@CapricePhillips) 

Lashanda Williams (@DrCoolSci):

 Congratulations to all!

Poster sessions in street view: Review of Artsteps

TL;DR: Artsteps provides some nice features for virtual poster sessions, but it is hampered by clunky navigation and limited resolution to view posters.

• • • • •

When many conferences flipped to online events starting in 2020, I have been trying to track how academic conferences have tried to handle poster sessions. Not only is this an issue for large national and international conferences, but individual institutions are trying to deal with how to hold their own poster sessions.

Artsteps provides a service to host “virtual reality exhibitions.” It was used by the student research office at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley to host showcases of undergraduate student research.

Click any of the images below to enlarge!

The session takes place in a three-dimensional virtual environment.

You click and drag the window to look left, right, up, or down.

The navigation experience using the mouse reminds me most of the “Street view” in Google Maps. It’s not smooth scrolling through an environment, as with you might get with a first person video game like Doom or Metroid Prime (yep, going old school for those references).

Instead, if you look down at the floor, you can click to place “footprints” to indicate where your want to got next.

This is a somewhat frustrating way to navigate. It’s incredibly difficult to judge the placement of the feet so that you are a reasonable distance from a poster. It’s easy to come in way to close, and there isn’t (as far as I can see) an easy command to take a step back. You have to turn the room around, walk away, turn the room around again, and look at the poster.

(Edit: I discovered you can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate, which is a significant improvement. It provides smoother movement through the environment. It’s just not immediately obvious that you can do that.)

I think this ability to see something from many angles would be awesome for something like a virtual sculpture. But for posters, you mostly want to see them dead on, not from an angle.

The photographs of the presenters are a nice touch.

The posters are clickable. Clicking a poster brings it to the foreground and “flattens” it so it’s facing the screen dead on. Clicking the poster also open a pop-up window that allows you to click to play narration recorded by the presenter.

This media window initially overlaps the full screen poster. A little frustrating, because you probably want to see all of the poster while you’re hearing the presenter’s tour.

 You can enlarge the media window / narration window to “full screen”, but somewhat unexpectedly, the “full screen” view of the poster in the media window is smaller than the “full screen” in the virtual room.

Once you have made the poster full screen, there is no option to zoom into a particular section. This was frustrating, because I found a lot of posters had detail that was difficult to see. I am viewing this session on a laptop, which may have a lower screen resolution than many people are using for desktops now. Even so, it’s not like I am viewing these through my phone. 

Not being able to resolve detail could be solved by good design for this specific platform, but a “zoom” or “magnify” tool would be super helpful.

Some presenters worked around this by presenting what appeared to be a slide deck of rotating images rather than a single static poster.

There are chat boxes and other features that you can presumably use during scheduled presentation times. Unfortunately, I did not see this during the scheduled presentation time. It suspect that it would work okay for small groups, but I don’t know if this experience would scale to, say, the hundreds or thousands of posters needed for a medium or large conference.

As the name implies, Artsteps seems geared to reproducing the small, intimate feeling of walking through a little art gallery with paintings, photographs, and scultures. I’m not sure that experience is quite what is needed for online poster sessions.

External links

Artsteps

UTRGV Engaged Scholar showcase November 2020

UTRGV Engaged Scholar showcase May 2021

Related posts

Link round-up for October, 2020