Palm-sized poster

Handouts of posters at conferences are not new. But handouts that are hand-sized, well... I haven’t seen that before.

Jake Wintermute shared this image, and wrote:

(T)his image makes me want to go to a conference where people exchange tiny posters with QR codes on the back to the full poster

While this might not be a viable conference format, I do think this could be a great networking tool. Most people make handouts the size of standard letter page. That’s still not very portable. Something like this – a bit bigger than a business card – is far more easily stashed in a purse, wallet, or pocket.

If you give it out before your poster session, it might be better than a business card because you are providing the potential viewer with a visual cue that will make it easier to remember as they walk through the aisles of the session.

You are not “too good” to give a poster

Recently, Franck Marchis wrote:

Received an email from a senior scientist (over 65 years) suggesting he might skip a prominent international conference if given a poster presentation. The sense of entitlement was palpable.

Posters are not just for early career researchers. And if you ever think you don’t want to do a poster because you are just beyond that point now... please check your ego.

Case in point.

This is from the 2016 Nueroscience meeting, and the gentelman presenting the poster is John O’Keefe. For those of you not in the neurobiz, he won a Nobel prize in medicine or physiology a little less than two years before this picture was taken.

  Picture by Lucie Low.

And lest you think this was some weird, on off event... no! It was not! Here is O’Keefe again just last year:

Picture by Timothy Bredy.

I don’t know how I missed these.

External links

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 press release

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

Posters with plans get as much feedback as posters with results

“Prereg posters” was an idea floated a couple of years ago (and nobody told me about it!) (Tibon et al. 2018). The idea is to present planned work on a poster, before data are collected, to solicit feedback.

Recently, a new paper came out (Brouwers et al. 2020) showing that these prereg poster work pretty well. The prereg posters with no data (or maybe very preliminary) seemed to get as much feedback and as much foot traffic as posters with data.

The kind of feedback people got differed, though, with prereg posters getting more attention to the methods and stats discussed, as shown in the figure below (click to enlarge).

One question that wasn’t asked of poster presenters was, “How valuable did you find the feedback you received?” It would have been nice to try to asses whether the feedback was as valuable in addition to how much people got.

I think this is an important finding for people making posters in general. The abstract submission deadline is often so far in the future that people haven’t completed data collection and they don’t know what they will have when the conference rolls around. This can be reason for people to stress out. This paper suggests that that’s okay. People will still come and talk to you!

References

Brouwers K, Cooke A, Chambers CD, Henson R, Tibon R. 2020. Evidence for prereg posters as a platform for preregistration. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0868-z

Tibon R, Open Science Committee CBU, Henson R. 2018. Title TBA: Revising the abstract submission process. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 22(4): 271-274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.01.008

You’d miss serendipty if poster sessions went away

I miss the art of record flipping. When music was released on vinyl, flipping through albums in bins was part meditative in its rhythm combined with occasional rushes of pure joy when you found something you were looking for, or, better yet, didn’t even know existed. That new album by a favourite artist.

(Even shopping for CDs wasn’t as good as albums. The CDs were clunkier and noisier than albums.)

I was reminded of this almost lost art when I recently stumbled across an album released seven years ago that I would have bought seven years ago – if only I knew it existed.

I love the portability of digital media, but digital media is often kind of terrible at those lucky discoveries. The things you see and instantly want in your life.

We are in the middle of a year of most academic conferences being postponed or cancelled. This preprint argues that it’s probably a good thing: they advocate moving most conferences online because of the carbon costs of traveling. (See also here.).

A couple of weeks ago, I pondered whether the poster format was right for online meetings. This prompted the question of whether posters are right for regular meetings. After all, lots of people don’t like the poster format, so it’s a fair question of what we’d miss if you took the poster session away.

What poster sessions do better than multiple tracks of slide talks or other formats is create serendipitous opportunities to learn and meet new people.

In my experience, abstract books or online collections (like the one #TAGC20 has on Figshare) do not facilitate browsing. You tend to perform very targeted searches instead for specific people you know or topics that are relevant to you.

I wondered if this was just me, so I asked this question on Twitter.

Do you discover new people and projects at poster sessions in conferences that you probably wouldn’t have encountered otherwise (searching abstracts, etc.)?

Well over 80% of respondents (71 votes) said this happened to them.

Response	Percent
Often	53.50%
Sometimes	35.20%
Rarely	8.50%
Never	2.80%

So before we rush to get rid of poster sessions for live conferences, or as we develop alternatives for poster sessions in online settings, it’s worth asking: how can we facilitate the lucky accidents that happen in convention center hallways and hotel event rooms all the time?

Related posts

Are posters right for online meetings? Thoughts from The Allied Genetic Conference virtual poster session #TAGC20

External links

Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements
Comment on “Evaluating features of scientific conferences: A call for improvements”

Networking flair: Reasons to wear something ridiculous at a conference

Jessica “Rocky” Rohde presents a great networking tip from her Instagram account (lightly edited).

Three reasons you should wear a ridiculous hat like this at your next conference.⁣⁣⁣⁣

This is my cruising hat. Originally, it was for a Halloween costume (Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 😜).

But I wore it every single day of a conference on a cruise ship.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣ Wearing this “piece of flair” is actually a strategy for meeting people and networking.⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣
It makes you recognizable

After taking the stage to speak about my work helping scientists become better public speakers, I ended my talk with, “If anybody wants to nerd out about science, tech and engineering, just look for the green hat.” Then I flipped it Justin Timberlake style onto my noggin. ⁣⁣⁣Throughout the rest of the cruise, people would come up to me and say “Oh, you’re the green hat girl!”

⁣⁣It makes you approachable

At a conference when you meet a new person every few minutes, you become exhausted of explaining where you are from and what you do over and over. Wearing something unusual gives us something unexpected to talk about.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣
Them: “What’s with the hat?” ⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
Me: “This is part of the uniform. I’m a cruise marshal. Don’t tell anyone, though!”⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣
It tells people something about you

I’m a little bit silly (understatement of the year 🙃) and people know before I even open my mouth that I’m, well, a little different.⁣⁣⁣⁣
⁣⁣
Your “flair” doesn't have to be a hat. Space pants work great, too. 😁 If you want to be a little more subtle, it can be an interesting shirt, tie, jewelry, or a pin. A colleague of mine wears his conference badge on Mardi Gras bead necklaces!⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣

I have done similar things to Rocky. I’ve worn a kilt at conferences. I’ve had blue hair at conferences. And it works as a conversation starter. A distinctive piece of clothing, just like a poster, can act as a social object.

But Charles Cong Xu went next level when he presented a poster about spider web DNA at the recent joint meeting of The Canadian Society for Ecology & Evolution, the Entomological Society of Canada, and the Acadian Entomological Society (EcoEvoEnto2019) meeting.

This, my friends, is committing to your theme. And you better believe there were a lot of pictures of Charles if you were following the conference hashtag. I reached out to Charles and asked about the experience.

“Go big or go home” was why I decided to dress up and have some fun with it. The socks and compression shirt worked well, but the mask was stuffy. I ended up just putting it on every once in a while when people wanted to take photos.

I did not get any pushback about the costume, at least none that I’m aware of. On the contrary, the poster and costume drew a lot of positive attention at the conference as Twitter would testify. ... I think it’s a good sign when people want to take selfies with you and your poster.

(I will have another post focusing on Charles’s poster soon!)

This clearly worked for Charles, but not everyone will have the nerve for full blown cosplay.

Even if you want do something this full on, you have to know the conference and know the crowd to figure out if you can pull it off without damaging yourself professionally. Navigating a conference as a professional means blending in to some degree. And while many academics claim not to care what a poster presenter looks like, they can be judgey about it.

Do you wear something that people always comment on?

External links

Rocky Rohde

Related posts

Conversation piece

EcoEvoEnto photo by Canadian Society for Ecology & Evolution twitter account 

Poster sessions are not singles bars

Today in, “Things I should not have to say.”

A poster session is a place for exchange of scientific and technical information between professional adults. It is not a place for you to hit on people for a hook up or booty call.

Beth Ann McLaughlin asked:

Women of STEM,
Quick question
At any given science poster presentation, what percent of the time do you have a man at your poster who just won't go away and makes you uncomfortable?

Results? 16% of women said every conference, 14% said 50-99% of them, 19% said 25-49% of them, and 51% of respondents said less than 25% of them.

Now, sure I could niggle about the poll is structured might inflate perceptions of how common this is (there’s an option for 100%, but not 0%, so the most common situation could be women not getting bothered), but even if every one of that 51% was really never, that still means that half of women poster presenters had a bad experience. And that’s unacceptable.

And reading the replies to that poll is not fun. (Some tweets lightly edited.)

Bryony Hockin describes:

(A) PhD student who comes to my poster at every single local conference for 30+ minutes, putting off everyone else and freaking me out. Some of his highlights include, “I like your dress.” I now get male friends to look out for him and warn me.

Kimberly Harrison says:

My fav was the time the fella didn’t ask any questions about my work, but did let me know he saw me swimming at the hotel pool earlier.

kss wrote:

I have been hit on at my poster, asked on countless dates, and even followed after a session when I went to a bar to meet up with friend.

Sarah MacNamee wrote:

(A) guy spent 10+ min at poster, complimented work, asked if he could call me. My reply: “Uhh, email is the preferred method of contact.” Looked down and was alarmed to see my number going into his phone - he lifted it from my poster tube’s “If found call” info.

Meaghan Creed wrote:

First SfN had a significantly older guy spend half an hour at my poster, no background in my field (i.e., asked what the words in the title meant, and what the differences between flies and rodents are). Kept touching my back/shoulder and would not move on until he took a photo with me. Still... bleh.

Sarah Sheffield wrote:

Yeesh. Happened to me once, long time ago. Called me sweetheart, while trying to show me he knew more about stats than me. Leered for an excessive amount of time. Blegh.

The thread exposes other problems besides people trying to get a date, too. Tara Levin wrote:

More common poster-related sexism for me: I go to someone's poster and ask a question, but am 1) ignored or 2) the presenter directs the answer to my question to the man standing next to me

Angela Tringali was not alone in this sentiment:

I gave a poster presentation once as a new grad student 10 years ago and haven’t done one since. Never again.

Florentina Tofoleanu wrote:

It happened enough times that I chose what conferences to go to depending on whether I got a talk, presenting a poster was not an option.

This makes me sad and angry. I love poster sessions. As I’ve written before, I think they are the true beating heart of a scientific conference. It’s frustrating that something that has been so rewarding for me personally is an experience that has driven others away.

Finally:

Men in Science,

Over 1100 women in STEM reported that they have been made to feel uncomfortable by a man who won't leave their poster 25%-100% of the time they present.

16% of women say this happens to them at every conference.

What are you going to do about it?

Conference organizers: Make sure you have a code of conduct. I’ve seen the adoption and refinement process of this first hand in the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. I know it’s a lot for a small conference to do, but templates exist out there.

I am seriously wondering if conference organizers should have poster session bouncers.

I think I have only seen visible security at the biggest meetings I have been at. Maybe conference organizers need to put more thought into asking what venue security there is, and advertising that fact more widely to conference attendees.

Faculty supervisors: You are responsible for the well bring and professional experience of your students. Don’t send new students to a poster session without a plan. Make sure the poster presenter has a contact number of people they can text if they want someone to come support them. There might be posters you want to see or people you want to talk to or grants you want to write back in your room, but make sure that you are in the poster hall when your student is and check in on them occasionally.

Check in with your students and walk by their poster regularly if you are not co-presenting it with your students. Ask your students if they want you to take over presenting the poster. Beth Ann McLaughlin recommends having a code for trouble, like asking the poster presenter if they need a red Sharpie. If they say yes, they want help.

If you are not able to go to the conference, at least talk to your students who are going. Make sure they are aware before they head to the conference. You, as supervisor, might know someone else going to the conference who can act as a “conference buddy.”

Be willing to call this crappy behaviour out for what it is, as McLaughlin does:

Physically get between the woman and the man, get his name off his badge and say, “Hey . I see you’re at UW. You’ve been here awhile. What do you need?” Smile. If he says they are “just chatting,” I’ll next level it. “Let’s not creep on my student. She’s working.”

Fellow post session attendees: Two things. First, look out for other presenters. Suzy Styles wrote:

If you see a presenter looking blocked or trapped, join the conversation to give them an ‘out.’

Second.

Don’t be that guy.

Nobody likes that guy.

Additional, 24 August 2018: Perhaps because I chose the “singles bar” metaphor in the title, several people on Twitter suggested that having alcohol during poster sessions contributed to harassment. I’m not a drinker myself, and have commented to some of the societies I belong to about boasting about alcohol consumption, but I think it makes about as much sense to blame alcohol for harassment as as it does to blame Ambien for racism.

I suspect conferences are problematic partially because people are outside their normal social spheres. They can convince themselves that, “What happens at the conference, stays at the conference.” They are away from people who might normally see their bad behaviour, and think they can act without repercussions.

McLaughlin’s poll was directed at women who had bad experiences with men, which are undoubtedly the most common problem. But it’s important to talk about these issues with everyone. Men and women. Presenters and attendees. This shouldn’t be a situation where men and women get different advice (i.e., women are told how to protect themselves and men are told to keep their hands to themselves). Discomfort isn’t just caused by someone doing something sexual or creepy. It can be someone who just won’t shut up or go away. Presenters who are men can be made uncomfortable by people who are trying to intimidate or bully them. Every poster presenter should feel someone has their back if they need it.

Similarly, supervisors should talk to all their students about being a good audience member at poster and how to avoid making someone feel uncomfortable. For example, at international conferences, people from different cultures may well have different expectations and habits about professional interactions and personal space. Some cultures are more comfortable with a handshake or “air kiss” than others.

The shut out: when nobody visits your posters

A couple of weeks ago, I featured a poster that had no visitors. This, followed by having to defend poster sessions the next week got me wondering.

Just how many people put in the time and effort to give a poster and talk to nobody?

I ran a Twitter poll. I even ran it during the Neuroscience meeting, one of the biggest venues for poster presentations in the world. I was surprised.

Almost half of respondents have put in a good faith effort and got shut out, with no one talking to them.

This might explain why people have such differing reactions to poster sessions. I have given 38 posters at conferences. I have never lacked an audience. And I don’t think that’s because I’m particularly charming or do the hottest science or make the most visually interesting posters. (Of those 38, I’ve made maybe two or three posters I’ve been very happy with). I think I’m just another presenter in the session.

My experience has been consistently positive, but now I know I’m in the lucky half. I can see how the experience of having nobody talk to you could turn someone off poster sessions right quick. Many would probably never want to do a poster after even a single experience like that.

This points out how important it is for those who are not presenting posters – often the senior academics – to get out into the poster sessions and be the most active audience members, not hanging around in the “zone of intimidation” (which I dubbed the PIZI).

Madison Fletcher wrote:

During undergrad poster sessions especially, I actively seek out students who have people walk right by even if I don’t know anything about their topic. Invariably, I learn something!

Be like Madison!

The perils of PIZI: the “PI Zone of Intimidation”

Justin Kiggins wrote:

The zone of PIs chatting with each other between the posters was always super intimidating to me.

Science writer Bethany Brookshire agrees.

It was super intimidating to me. The only thing that gives me courage now is a press badge. ☺️

I know exactly what my colleagues are talking about: little knots of people with grey hair talking to each other, and not to the poster presenters. The age differences make it clear who are students and who are the senior scientists.

The “zone of intimidation” is probably more common and more obvious at big conferences, because there is ample space between posters for people to mingle. Big conferences are more likely to have attract people who go there every year, so there is greater chances for people to establish annual “conference cliques.”

While that hallway conversations are the best part of conferences, it can be poor form on the part of conference veterans to interact mostly with each other. Some say they plan on being in the “zone of intimidation”:

Visit posters from labs you like, introduce yourself. Many PIs will be lurking nearby (including myself) and would be happy to chat briefly then.

Why “lurk” in the PIZI? And why tweet that you can talk “briefly”? Why not talk extensively to students and earlier career colleagues? The organizers of the Keystone Antimicrobial resistance meeting sent this to their participants:

Please attend the poster sessions and interact with junior colleagues. You are the reason the rest of the attendees were attracted to the meeting. Please mingle and inspire the next generation of researchers, clinicians, and policy makers to remain engaged in this amazing important topic.

Yes, talk to your colleagues, but try to not have your full academic reunions (“It’s been so long! How’s your partner and kids? Are you still at...”) in the poster session. Get a phone number, send a text, and meet for dinner.

Another possible solution to that senior people should present a poster of their own. (This is a variation on my belief that senior scientists should have a project of their own.) Get in there in the trenches and remember what it is like to try to attract an audience and talk about the project for hours at a time. Posters should not be the sole domain of first time conference attendees.

Hat tip to Kat Holt and Michael Hoffman for the Keystone quote.

Handouts and other papers

The ESA Student Section tweeted:

Conference tip: Presenting a poster? Consider giving some sort of handout: a print out of the poster, or additional info. #ESA2017

It’s a common tip, but I got thinking about it. What’s the purpose of duplicating your poster in miniature?

I’ve always thought the point of having a poster handout was to remind people about your academic work. But I was cleaning off my desk recently, and found quite a few handouts of posters I’d collected from conferences. I’d hauled them back from the meeting, but I hadn’t looked at them for their scientific content or contact information since. The handout had failed in their purpose.

I’m particularly wondering about the trouble of making, carrying, and tacking up poster handouts in the days where these are ubiquitous:

If anyone wants to look at a poster later, why not just take a picture of it? If someone wants my email, why not take a picture of my contact info on my poster?

Granted, there are a few meetings where the conference organizers try to prohibit photographs of posters. It’s dumb and ineffectual, in my estimation, but a handout makes sense at such meetings.

There is value of creating handouts, but not to give them out when people are standing in front of your poster.

First, by making handouts, you force yourself to do the “arm’s length” test. If you can’t read the poster when it’s shrunk down to letter sized paper, your audience will struggle to read the full sized version on the poster board.

Second, you should have handouts so that you can give them to people who are not at your poster session. Most poster sessions are shorter than meetings, but you will be meeting people all through the conference. If you have small handouts of your poster, you can show someone your work at a coffee break, even if your poster session is already over and done with.

Making a poster handout is usually simple. I export my poster as a PDF, and PDFs can be readily printed to fit the size of your printer paper. As I noted above, if you have a good poster that passes the “arm’s length” test, you won’t have to redo or adjust anything.

There are maybe two other kinds of paper that are worth having ready to give.

• Business cards are compact, socially expected, and can be very beautiful. Even better if they act as invitations.
• Reprints can be useful if you have already published material that your poster builds upon. People might read those on the plane home.

Related posts

Don’t get mad, get playful
Invitation cards
Link roundup for December 2012

Posters at the front of Science

It’s a little unusual to see posters mentioned in one of the magazines that likes to position itself as a “journal of record,” namely Science. Here’s what editor in chief Marcia McNutt had to say on posters, which should be familiar advice to all readers of this blog.

I encourage students to request a poster presentation at a large meeting. This format can be less stressful than speaking in front of a large audience. Furthermore, the student personally converses with members of the scientific community who share an interest in his or her research. The back-and-forth is good training and a reminder to students that discussing their research with experts or nonexperts should be a two-way conversation. Another advantage of presenting a poster is that the student can tailor the narrative to the interests of whoever stops by, in a Q&A exchange. I recall years ago when a graduate student was disappointed that her research would be described “only” in this format, until one of the giants in her field spent considerable time at her poster to discuss the work. As he left, he said, “I wish I had thought of that.” She was later hired into his department.

To be effective, posters need to be eye-catching as well as informative. In a convention hall lined with poster boards, scientists will bypass those with large blocks of texts and tables of impenetrable numbers. A cartoon that summarizes the model or findings, attractive displays of data, and photos that illustrate the experiment are good ways to grab attention. Creative ways to display pertinent information are a definite plus. I personally like posters that begin with the motivation for the work and end with the findings, areas for follow up, and broader implications of the results.

McNutt goes on to say:

Training the next generation of scientists to communicate well should be a priority.

This statement causes me a little exasperation, because I hear, “We need to train young scientists to...” more often than the chorus of a top 40 pop song.

“We need to train young scientists two write better.”

“We need to train young scientists to talk to the media.”

“We need to train young scientists to do better statistics.”

“We need to train young scientists in ethics.”

“We need to train young scientists in grantsmanship.”

“We need to train young scientists about social media.”

And everyone is convinced that this training is an urgent priority. To borrow a phrase:

I do completely agree with McNutt that the more established faculty have an important role to play here: go the the darn poster sessions. And don’t just chat with your conference buddies!

And researchers attending meetings should take some time to judge a few student papers, visit student posters, or attend student talks.

Reference

McNutt M. 2015. It starts with a poster. Science 347(6226): 1047. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aab0014

Don’t get mad, get playful

Most people want to give talks at conferences instead of posters. David Schulz was denied the opportunity to give a talk, he was mad. His anger drove him to “go there” in poster design – and the result was a roaring success.

Let’s break it down and look at some of the elements that gave him such success.

First, he has balloons. Balloons! Not only does looking at them make you reflexively smile, they act like a highway sign for his poster. The balloons will be visible from almost anywhere in the poster hall, rising above the horizon. People will see them and wonder what they’re for, and might wander over to have a peek.

When they get there, the viewer is invited to play a little game:

You can get the answer by lifting the flaps. It’s very hard to resist interacting with the poster now, because it almost captures some of the feel of a pop-up book. I’ve shown a few examples of other “pop up” panels and flipbooks, and this falls into that category.

The answers are also written on the handouts that David has on the table. This encourages people to pick them up, and makes them more likely to take them away, which means more connections between David and the people who saw his poster.

Looking at David’s set-up, I would have liked his poster to be bigger and use more of the available space. I also might have gone for a more subdued colour scheme. But this poster is so good at saying, “Hey! You! Yes, you! Come over here and look at me!” that it clearly overcame some of the weaker elements of its design.

At the end, David said:

(I)t was one of the most engaging scientific activities I had ever done. Given that the average attendance at any given session was less than 100 people (and usually 30-50 people), I received more substantive feedback from people during the poster than the one or two polite questions I would have received had I given an oral presentation. I gave out nearly all my handouts, which meant that I directly interacted with at least as many as would have likely sat passively through an oral presentation.

Never lose sight of what a poster is for. It’s a conversation starter. And this poster did that job admirably.

David’s blog, Eloquent Science, has many other posts about conference posters that I’m just starting to dig into.

Related posts

How to show a dung beetle running
Critique: plague

External links

Rethinking Poster Sessions as Second-Class
Proof that a poster can be attractive to an audience

Link roundup, March 2012

Here are four lessons in networking from someone who was lucky enough to go to this year’s TED conference. But in truth, these apply to going to any conference.:

1. Perfect your introduction.
2. Have a purpose.
3. Listen.
4. Connect with people who aren’t aligned with your goals.

You should read the whole thing.

Jim Campbell advocates for simplicty in design. He’s talking about logos, but this is true for posters, too:

No amount of icing and sprinkles will disguise the fact that your cake isn't properly cooked; pretty much the same principle with logos.

You think you have pressure when you make a poster? Check out this article on Fergus Wessel, who makes stuff written in stone. Literally. I was amazed by this:

How do you achieve good letter spacing? Do you use a ruler?

By eye, I never use a ruler! With a ruler one is limited to set measurements and sometimes a letter needs to be moved “by a nothing.” I judge good letter-spacing by visualizing an equal volume between letters. This skill is achieved by having the patience to start drawing out an inscription all over again if it doesn’t look perfect. We call this “killing one’s darlings” and it takes a lot of self discipline.

The story behind a symposium

Last week, I announced a symposium that I am co-organizing for next year’s International Congress of Neuroethology at the University of Maryland over on my main blog, NeuroDojo. It’s titled “Nociceptors in the real world.”

My partners in this venture are Ashlee Rowe (at the University of Texas in Austin) and Ewan St. John Smith (you can listen to him on the Science podcast talking about why naked mole rats don’t feel pain from acids).

What I didn’t mention on my main blog is how the symposium came together. It started in a poster session.

In particular, this symposium for next year’s Neuroethology meeting started at the last meeting in 2010.

Before the conference, I had checked for other posters on the topic I was presenting on (nociception). Out of several hundred posters, there were four: myself and three others. The good news was that we had been placed together, so we were able to see each other’s work easily. But in the back of my mind, I was sort of chewing on the fact that this topic was not well represented at this meeting.

This poster session was... compact. You were elbow-to-elbow with the people next to you, and because the poster boards were zig-zagging across the floor, it was very difficult to have to facing posters being presented at the same time. This meant you sort of had to cooperate with people who had posters next to you to be able to show off your work at all. And we were so close, it was extraordinarily easy to strike up a conversation. I loved the work that Ashlee and Ewan had on their posters (you can see a bit of Ashlee’s poster behind me in the picture above).

At some point, all this coalesced in my head into an idea. I went over to them and said, “We should do a symposium on nociception at the next congress!”

They liked the idea. And that got the whole ball rolling.

A lot of emails and Google Doc sharing and invitations later, and we’re going to have a symposium at the next meeting, and I’m super excited about it. The meeting is 5-10 August 2012. Mark your calendars if you’re interested in nervous systems, animal behaviour, or evolution!

If we had got up and given three straight slide presentations in a row instead of standing next to each other for a few hours at that poster session, it would not have happened.

And that’s today’s reason why I love poster sessions.

Because stuff gets done there.

Links

Blogging from International Congress for Neuroethology in Salamanca, 2010

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4-5
Conferences and cathedrals

Poster conversations matter

In a longer post about the qualifications for a doctorate, DrugMonkey dropped in this little bit about the importance of posters:

I confess, when trainees are still pre-doc or recently annointed, I don’t get a general impression of them by toting up their (research papers). Yes, it contributes some but really, how could I possibly keep track? The things that contribute in a big way are my direct interactions and experiences at meetings. Poster conversations, their presentation of data from the platform, etc. This is what convinces me that the training program is a stellar one....the trainees appear to be good scientists with a head on their shoulders.

My emphasis.

Too futuristic? Or already too passé?

One of my most popular posts was a recent one about adding a bit of augmented reality to conference posters using QR codes.

Kristina Kilgrove, a.k.a. Bone Girl, who had written about QR codes almost simultaneously with my post, had a chance to put the idea to the test at a recent meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists:

poster’s been up for 3 hours and NO ONE has scanned the QR code (according to analytics). Wow.

By the end of the day, things had improved... but only very slightly.

have a total of *3* hits through my QR code. Didn’t expect that low a #.

That said, a couple of others had also taken up the notion of trying to enhance their posters through QR codes:

Saw QR codes on posters by @johnhawks and @DrYapyapi today! Way to represent... too bad the physanths aren't prepared for the 21st century.

I’m kind of hoping that it is just a new idea, and not the sort of quickly learned fatigue that Laura Bergalls noted:

The landing pages for most QR codes make you feel like you've been rickrolled. ... Marketers & advertisers have taught us not to scan QR codes. That ship has sailed.

If you try QR codes on your poster, I would love to know what kind of response you get!

Related posts

Smart posters

Picture from here.

Smart posters

If you want to create something special on your poster for smart phone users, you want to learn about QR codes. The good news is that they are dead simple and very versatile.

I created a QR code to one of my websites using one of several free QR code generators online. I ended up with something like the graphic at left.

I printed it out, and walked down the hall to one of my colleagues, Chris Vitek, and asked him to take a picture of it with his iPhone. He had never seen one of these before. I repeat: he had no idea of what it was. But he took a picture, used a bar code reader app, and had the phone asking if he wanted to open the link to the website in mere seconds. It was probably faster than if he had tried to type in the website URL.

And the genius thing is the sheer number of different things you can embed in a QR code. A website link. An email address. A YouTube clip. A location in Google Maps. And so on... and so on.

• If your poster is for a paper in press, you can put a link to the journal or the PDF.
• If you have something that is well documented by video (fairly common in biology!), create and upload the video to YouTube in advance. Much easier than mounting a television on your poster.
• You could record a video “tour” of your poster that people could run through if they came by when you weren’t next to your poster.
• If you are a grad student or post-doc on the job market, you can put up your email address and contact information so that people can get in touch with you more easily. Presumably, this gets stored into people’s smart phones on the spot, as opposed to business cards that can get lost.

And that is just the beginning. There are many more things you can potentially do with QR codes, including playing around with texting people, using Twitter, Facebook, and much more.

I see two dangers with this.

One is that there are so many things that you could do with a QR code that the temptation would be strong to do all of them. Your poster should not look like some mysterious stamp collection. Pick one, maybe two, things you want to do with a QR code and do them well.

The second danger is to include some critical information that is only available using the QR code. This would violate the general principle that a poster should be self-sufficient as possible. the poster should be like the feature presentation on a DVA. The material made through QR code should be like the DVD bonus materials: pleasant for those who are interested, but not essential to understanding the main show.

The mind boggles at the possibilities. Even I, who do not have a smart phone, can see the potential for using this to make something memorable for those who do.

Credit where it’s due: I was thinking about ways posters, and poster sessions, could take advantage of the ever increasing ubiquity of smart phones when I found that the Poster Session blog beat me to the punch! Curses! I thank them and give them all due credit for giving me the key information that allowed me to write this post.

Additional: Bone Girl had similar ideas!

Related posts

Containment
More power! The poster with a plug

P.S.—If you end up using ideas in this blog, I certainly wouldn’t object if you added the QR code pictured here somewhere in the corner of your poster.

Tubers

Posters are social objects. Their job is to start conversations. But it’s not just the poster itself that can start conversations.

A while ago, Jennifer Rohn wrote:

When you carry a poster tube at the airport, you find yourself bonding with other tubers, exchanging the acronyms of meeting you’re attending

And this is yet another advantage of giving a poster at a conference rather than a talk. Many people agree that the actual presentations at conferences, scientific or otherwise, are not the most valuable parts of the conference.

When you’re on your way to a bigger conference, carrying that poster tube in the airport increases the chances of striking up one of those conversations that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

But if you’re looking at PowerPoint slides on a laptop in an airport waiting lounge, you send almost no signals to any other conference goers that you, like them, are on your way to do science.

When you see someone with a poster tube in the airport, use that opportunity. Ask them, “Are you going to this conference, too?”

Related post

Conversation piece
From printer to posterboard

Photo by IITA Image Library on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Overcoming your fears in poster sessions

Over at the Women in Wetlands blog, Dr. Doyenne has been doing a wonderful series of posts looking at self-promotion. In a recent post, Socially Inept Scientists, she talks about how poster sessions are invaluable for those who are uncertain or shy. And let’s face it... that describes a lot of academics, and particularly scientists. I’ve added a little emphasis to her quote.

One very easy and less painful way to meet people is during the poster sessions. There are lots of people standing by their posters expecting (hoping) others will approach them. It’s very awkward for poster presenters to stand there waiting for someone to approach. So they will often be relieved when someone comes along and starts up a conversation. You also have lots of opportunities to meet many people – especially people doing work in your field. However, I’ve found it’s sometimes easier to talk to people who work on topics I know little about. By confiding to the poster presenter that you don’t know anything about their field puts them at ease. Students and young scientists are especially afraid some expert is going to come along and ask them a question they can’t answer or will disparage their work. So, they will be especially open to someone who knows little about their topic. Ask them to explain their work to you (you can say you’ve always been fascinated with the topic, but that it is outside your field). By doing so, you put them into the role of expert and you in the role of interested listener. Few people can resist an opportunity to be looked upon as the more knowledgeable in a conversation.

The rest of her series on self-promotion is wonderful, useful stuff. Check it out. Start with To Brag or Not to Brag, and carry through the rest of the September posts, and continuing through October.



Photo by TeodoraS on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Digital disasters

Michele Sullivan is a poster evangelist. She has a brilliant discussion of the joys of poster sessions:

Here are scientists just being themselves – taking pictures of friends proudly displaying their “babies,” unconcerned about microphones or accents, uninhibited by the formality of speaking before a crowd, congratulating the sharp conclusion, questioning the flawed method, pushing for the truth.

...and a much needed check on an experimental format: the digital poster session.

In almost 10 years of medical reporting, this is the first 100% digital poster session I’ve attended, and I have to say it was a sad sight.

This is the second time I’ve heard about a digital poster session. The first was from two colleagues in my department, who went to a small regional meeting (that shall remain nameless) earlier this year.

It was a disaster.

The were too many organizational problems in the set-up of the digital poster session to list, so I’ll just name one. The projector they used to show the posters was apparently not very good, and they projected on a wall rather than a screen, rendering almost everything unreadable. Nobody showed up for either the viewing or to answer questions.

Both my colleagues said it wasn’t worth their time.

I’m all in favour of innovation, but digital poster sessions need much more thought and tweaking before they can replace the traditional poster sessions. The essence of a poster session is the face to face, the personal. You have to corral the presenters and the viewers in the same room for the thing to work.

And you really need to read the rest of Michele’s post if you haven’t done so already.

Related links

Empty room

Photo by Brian Hathcock on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.