Critweets: Neuroscience 2013

Here is another reason that all conferences should all have:

When your conference has a Twitter hashtag, it makes it easy for people to tweet pictures of themselves standing next to their poster. And when people do this, it provides a whole new way to give feedback. I did a bit of this for the Neuroscience meeting last fall, as I was following the #SfN13 hashtag.

For instance, here’s one from Dustin Green (click to enlarge):

I wouldn’t have stopped at this poster unless the subject matter was very relevant to my research interests. Too much text, set too small!

This one is from Teo Resstel:

Even when I enlarged this picture, I could not read the title. This is terrible at a big meeting like Neuroscience: the bigger the meeting, the bigger the title, because people are more likely to be walking by farther away. (Neuroscience, to its credit, has wide walkways between posters, something many conferences should emulate.) This turned out to be a printing problem.

This one is from Yes! Outreach.

The jumping figure and exclamation point are dark. So is the text. The presenter said, “It’s actually not too bad close up,” but in a poster session, you have to be able to convince people to stop first before they can see it close up. I wouldn’t have stopped at this one, either.

If you want a superfast reaction to your conference poster, you can always tweet me at @DoctorZen!