Link roundup for November 2012

Bluegrass Blue Crab has a nice post on essential features of a good map.

There is a lot of good advice in this collection of posters by annoyed designers. If you can use a little reverse psychology. Hat tip to Duarte.

Lessons from Tumblr

If you look around social media, particularly Tumblr and Facebook, you’ll see a lot of things like this:

This example is from We are the 99 percent Tumblr, which was created as part of the Occupy movement. And it was powerful.

Spotted at I Fucking Love Science group on Facebook. Which reminds me of this memorable rant about the popular group:

What you actually “love” is photography, not science.

I could make the case that there is no reason for these to be pictures. The point is all in the text. If all that mattered was pure efficiency, maximizing signal to noise ratio, people would paste plain ASCII text into their websites instead of these pictures.

But the success of these shows how much we love pictures of actual things.

Following a lot of fake pictures purporting to be Hurricane Sandy, Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic wrote:

The algorithms at Facebook privilege photographs because they are what people are most likely to interact with. And users love a picture that’s worth a thousand words, four thousand Facebook likes, 900 retweets, a bunch of hearts, and some reblogs: everyone likes being an important node. The whole system tilts towards the consumption of visual content, of pictures and infographics and image macros.

This is a reminder of the power of images. They have more drawing power than text. If you want people to look at your poster, use pictures. Even a picture of text (like the 99 percent Tumblr) is more interesting than text alove.

External links

Image macro

Hang time

This is a guest post from reader Mark Gurwell, used with his permission.

Are there some general guidelines that one should consider depending on the length of time a poster will be hung?

I ask this question from my experiences of the differences between the conference I most recently attended, the Division for Planetary Science (DPS) annual meeting, and something like an American Geophysical Union (AGU), or American Astronomical Society (AAS) meetings. At smaller meetings (DPS was around 800 attendees this year) you might have longer poster hang times, compared to larger meetings of a few to 10,000 or more, where the sheer volume of presentations necessitates frequent turnover.

For example, at the DPS meeting, posters were given ample time. They could be hung for the entire week, and each poster was in a topical group. Each topical group had a specific afternoon where they were “showcased,” which included a walk-through by all interested attendees where you could present your poster to a semi-captive audience (though the official limit on this presentation was 2 minutes).

At AGU and AAS, posters can be limited to as short as half a day before they must be removed for the next round of posters.

I think most conference attendees prefer the former model, since it means they can see all the posters of interest, even if they can't attend every day of a meeting. But both versions exist (and probably every shade in between), and each presents different challenges and advantages.

For the “all the time” extreme, you might expect more walk-ups and general interest, but it can be spread out over the week. You can’t possibly be by your poster all week, so your poster should to be standalone. It needs to be fully self-contained and must anticipate questions that might be asked if you were there. Some (I’ll probably count myself in this category) tend to compensate by making wordier posters. This may or may not be a winning strategy, and clearly still needs to be coupled with thought into title, colours, graphics, illustrations, and overall getting to the point in the clearest cleanest way.

For the other extreme, say a three hour block when your poster is put up, seen, and then taken back down, you probably need to be by your poster the full time. This allows your poster to become less self-contained and maybe more enticing. The goal here may be more to grab attention and (maybe not even necessarily!) drive home the conclusion, and then you the presenter can fill in the details conversationally. Thus, possibly less words, more graphics.

The downside here is that, with so short a time, it may well be that the only people you get to your poster are those you’ve already primed to physically seek your poster out, by your title and abstract published in the abstract book or online prior to the meeting. The chance of running across a really interested person is lowered, because everyone is frantically trying to get to the ten to twenty posters that they really want to see (or think they want to see).

I’d be interested in hearing about other considerations/techniques for posters that have either long or short hang times.

Related posts

Containment

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

Care to sit down?

At big conferences, you can be on your feet all day. There’s a lot of walking from room to room, and poster sessions are generally several hours long. Even the healthiest and heartiest can start to flag a little under those conditions.

Not everyone is in the best of health when a conference happens. (Some time, I’ll tell you about the experience of the student who started to suffer from food poisoning while we were on the plane to a conference.)

Organizers, you might consider having a few light, easily moved chairs for people at your poster sessions. NeuroPolarBear twigged to this at Neuroscience, with one of his recommendations:

More chairs throughout the convention center, including the poster floor, but also the hallways. When you see people sitting on the ground all over the place, it's a sign that there's something missing. That thing is chairs.

But at least don’t do this:

ESA wouldn't give her a chair for her poster session this year (really, wtf)

Yes, having chairs in the poster hall does require enough space and a little planning. But some of your attendees will thank you for it.

Link roundup for October 2012

Neuroscience

It’s the month of Neuroscience, the biggest collection of conference posters maybe anywhere. Lots of people offered advice for presenting posters at that conference, which has the advantage of applying to almost any other conference you might attend.

Neuropolarbear gives advice on presenting a poster: be able to do it in less than 5 minutes.

Don’t even practice a longer version. If people want more detail, they will ask about the parts they care about. That’s the brilliance of a poster, as opposed to a talk.

Drugmonkey has a follow-up.

Ask the person to tell you why they are there! Really, this is a several second exchange that can save a lot of time.

The Cellular Scale has more suggestions:

They say you only need to be there during the one hour that you are scheduled, but it's a good idea to be there basically the whole time.

And when you’re at your poster, In Baby Attach Mode reminds us to introduce people we know to each other.

(I)t’s a small gesture to introduce people to each other, but that it makes a huge difference in how you make people feel.

Scicurious covers a poster presentation experiment (that I’ve featured here on this blog, but worth revisiting). Next,  In Baby Attach Mode ponders dress sense at posters. Virginia Hughes also picks up the cause on Twitter. Finally, to round out the trilogy, here's a full-length post on conference clothing.

The Cellular Scale finds another candidate for worst poster ever at Neuroscience.

No graphs only words, well one picture of a whole brain, and TABLES! oh the tables that should have been graphs! But it wasn't just the layout, the presentation was rambly and confusing.

Katie wondered how many figures should be on a poster, and provided some field data from the Neuroscience conference floor:

(I) saw everywhere from 6-40+ in my row of posters.

My response: As many as you need to tell the story. Just remember that posters are good for short stories, not epic novels.

Drugmonkey on how to turn people away from your poster:

Title items that cause me to skip your poster “mechanism of”.

Similarly, Dr. Leigh asks:

Why do people title their poster/talks “evidence for [phenomenon]”? Why not just say what the phenom is, we assume you’re presenting evidence.

Bradley Voytek wanted this:

Someone should start a DejectedPosterFace tumblr for that look students have when they're standing at their poster all alone. So sad!

Your wish is my command, sahib.

Jason Snyder finds people who seem to be all postered out.

And I love this picture from Shelly Fan on a plane going out from New Orleans after Neuroscience.

And do not make jokes about their resemblance to any sort of weapon!

Shelly Fan made her own poster tube strap.

Even after it was all over, some people just couldn’t stop presenting! This was spotted in the New Orleans airport at 7 am the day after Neuroscience closed:

If someone does this next year, it will become tradition.

NeuroPolarBear has a round up with great tips for organizers.

One of the things I most wanted to see was the debut of “dynamic posters” at Neuroscience. So far, I’ve only found one comment about them:

But what really caught my attention at SfN 2012 is that Voytek and Warp were presenting “The Adventures of Ned the Neuron” and its development via a “dynamic” poster. That means they presented their story and concept on a large digital flat-screen rather than on the traditional posterboard in the conference center. No thumbtacks needed.

Warp tells me that SfN contacted her and Voytek to tell them they’d been selected as part of a pilot program prior to the meeting. Apparently, there was one dynamic poster presented during each poster session over the course of the conference. Presumably, if the feedback is good, we’ll see more neuroscientists presenting their colorful, three-dimensional data on flat-screens in the future. Say goodbye to those poster tubes and trying to cram them into the overhead bin on the airplane, kids.

Society for Vertebrate Paleontology

Neuroscience was not the only conference this month. We also had the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology. And I have to say that it’s a paleontologist, Tony Martin, who gave me the biggest smile this month in poster-related news with... Paleontologist Barbie.

This is one of my favourite things about posters: you can do things that you cannot get away with in a paper.

Meanwhile, Bora Zivcovic offers a great approach to reading posters, and a reminder about why you want to make a good one (my emphasis):

I think, in any field, the most interesting work is done by junior researchers and students, and what they say (and the enthusiasm by which they say it) may be more revealing about the future of a field. Which is why I focused on the posters. ...

I went to see the posters every day during lunch break when the posters are already up, but people are not there yet. I checked out every single poster, in order to get a feel for the field as a whole. Then I would focus on, and completely read, 4-5 posters each day. In the afternoon, when the poster sessions starts, I homed in on those 4-5 posters and talked to the authors, asked more questions. A number of those posters will end up here on our site, written by authors on the Guest Blog, over the next several weeks and months.

General

Finally, a bit of a “how to” article about making inforgraphics look good without compromising the integrity of the information.

The Better Posters workshop

Although I’ve been doing this blog for a few years now, I had never given a presentation or workshop trying to distill some of the best tips and ideas until this week. I gave two workshops at my institution in preparation for an undergraduate research conference to be held next month. Thanks to Danika Brown for livetweeting.

I’m hoping these will not be the last time I give this presentation. Have slides, will travel!

American Physiological Society poster course

The American Physiological Society has decided to provide a course on poster-making. I’m pleased to see at least one scientific society taking a more active interest in poster presentations! The text below is pulled from this PDF. I’m tempted to take it myself to see what there is to learn, and how other people do things.


2012 Professional Skills Training Course: Creating a Poster for a Scientific Meeting Online Course

Does Your Poster Have All of the Necessary Pieces?

How is the course structured?

• 7‐day online course (November 15‐21)
• All exercises and course materials are accessible 24/7
• Discussion boards will allow you to interact with top faculty and peers
• Course will be taught in written English

What is my commitment?

• Dedicate approximately 1 hour a day to the online course
• Complete all lessons on time and participate in all aspects of the course
• Thoughtfully complete all the evaluations before, during, and after the course

What is the cost?

• APS Member Price ‐$90 (you must be a member at the time of registration to qualify for this price)
• Non‐Member Price ‐$180

What hardware or software do I need to have?

• Computer with internet access (preferably high‐speed internet)
• Software:
• Browser: Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox ‐recent version
• Microsoft Word
• Adobe PDF reader (free download)
• Macromedia Flash Player 6.079 or later (free download)

Register Online 1‐31 October2012.
Go to http://bit.ly/SJ8gNT, select the “Creating a Poster for a Scientific Meeting” link and register.

Hat tip to Janet Stemwedel.