The good people at ePosters asked if I would write something for their blog, They asked nicely, so I said, “I’ve been meaning to write about flash talks where people pitch their posters. How about that?” They said, “Okay.” đ And now it’s done and up.
Please visit ePosters for “How to pitch your poster in a flashy lightning talk.”
I hope you enjoy!
Over a year ago, I saved a few tweets about controversies that erupted over a couple of posters at a Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. At the time, I was aware that there was a lot of discussion on social media but didn’t have the bandwidth to follow it closely.
Today I went looking for summaries of the controversy, and found a couple, which I have linked below. I don’t pretend that these summaries are complete or perfect, but I think they give at least a hint of what happened.
Most conferences do minimal screening of conference posters. They also do not necessarily do great monitoring of what goes up on unused poster boards, or whether people post the work they originally submitted. Normally, these are harmless.
But I do think it is worth asking under what conditions posters should be removed by conference organizers. If an organization doesn’t have policies for that, they should make them, and make them public, rather than trying to react on the fly.
The censorious Society for Personality and Social Psychology (13 February 2024)
SPSP censorship 2.0: “We are above the rules” (21 February 2024)
SPSP addresses convention poster concerns and outlines next steps (29 February 2024)
Some time ago, Greg Fell shared an interesting poster. (You may not be able to see it due to user settings.) I reached out to the creator, Anton PottegÄrd. He sent a slightly earlier version of this poster. Click to enlarge!
This poster does a couple of things. First, it draws inspiration from an existing design that people already understand. Second, it is memorable because it breaks from the conventional “journal article on a page” format. Others have used the text message style to create concert posters.
I don’t know exactly how this particular poster was created, but it is not hard to find websites that can emulate a chat.
What is not clear to me from this version is how someone is supposed to get the abstract mentioned at the bottom of the poster. I appreciate that the PDF icon looks like what you would see in a text message, but a short, easy to remember URL might have done the job, too.
Is this format appropriate to all posters? I don’t think so. This study has a simple result: “There’s no effect.” Many other projects are nowhere near as easy to summarize.
I am sure that some people will argue that this format is never appropriate for an academic poster, for two reasons.
First, it refers to data but does not show those data. While I understand the reasoning behind the “I must be able to personally inspect every data point before I can be convinced,” I don’t think that level of intense scrutiny is at all necessary for a conference poster. Save it for journal articles.
Second, there are no references. I am neutral on the subject, but forthcoming research shows that people think less of posters without at least one reference.
Anton wrote, “Overall, doing strong posters is very important to me!” He shared more that he created.
Here we have one that is very different in style from the one above:
While the first poster imitates the glossy interface that almost everyone has become familiar with, this second poster uses a hand drawn style. I like the style, but I worry that the summary in the top half is a little hard to read.
(The QR code at the bottom still works!)
And this is one of Anton’s favourites:
Same style as above, but the summary is shorter, larger, and more readable.
While this poster may have been on on Anton’s favoruites, I suspect it would not be everyone’s cup of tea. I personally wouldn’t make a poster that included someone on a toilet, but different strokes for different folks.
Pros: Memorable.
Cons: I don’t see that it as relevant to the content. If this was a paper about gastrointestinal function, I wouldn’t question it is much.
Critique: Protein biosynthesis
Out now from Pelagic Publishing and fine bookstores.
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