![]() Sometimes you can print once and use the poster at several different meetings, but not always. For a graduate student with limited funding, the cost of printing a poster is non-negligible. You’d be lucky to get a 3-foot by 6-foot poster printed for $70, and most of the time it’s closer to $90 and up to $150, depending on the paper you choose. I don’t know how the murky social norms of poster sessions affect people with social anxiety, but I can’t help wondering if they negate one of the only legitimate reasons I’ve heard so far to prefer poster sessions over lightning talks, which is that posters save people with anxiety from having to speak in front of a crowd.Įverything that comes before the poster session can also be an imposition.įirst, posters are expensive. No one’s quite sure what to do or how to react. The word “awkward” comes up a lot when I discuss poster sessions with colleagues. Do you try to make eye contact with passers-by so that they’ll ask you about your work? Will they be genuinely interested, or are they at your poster because you locked eyes and they felt obligated to talk to you?ĭo you dare leave your poster to check out others’ presentations? Do you backtrack or start over to give the new audience member context, or do you keep going? Someone else wanders by and joins the group. Let’s say you’re at your poster, explaining your research to a small huddle of people. Maybe instead of having scholars create and print posters, we could just ask them to give short lightning talks to the larger group? The awful logistics of academic posters The astute reader may notice that expecting researchers to stand by their poster, speak with people about their work, and answer questions is, well, asking them to give an oral presentation-sometimes over and over as one gaggle gives way to the next-only with static slides and a smaller, transient audience. As a standalone teaching tool, they’re ineffective. Their earlier survey study (2009) was more optimistic, finding that conference-goers do think poster sessions can be useful-but only if the researcher is there to chat and answer questions. This commentary by Rowe and Ilic (2015) suggests that at larger conferences, the sheer number of posters overwhelms the ability to take in new knowledge and disrupts the interaction among delegates that poster sessions are supposed to foster. Most studies I did find gathered opinions from scholars rather than testing for, say, information recall. Some scholars, like D’Angelo (2010), have tried to develop frameworks that may help us better understand the components of posters across disciplines-and their various rhetorical functions. I could find precious little research on academic posters. So I'm walking around, looking at them, wondering, "What the hell is this? Some kind of static Powerpoint?" When I first started medical editing, I had to start attending medical conferences and discovered poster sessions. padding and for providing a guise for socially awkward academics to talk to one another ![]() They're also way more trouble to present than conference talks & have less of a valuable record I guarantee that 75% of the people who look at posters are doing it to validate the feelings of the people presenting and not reading. Presenters die a little until someone asks a question. It's a punishing small talk avoidance machine. It's the awkward beauty pageant of academia except instead of a talent portion it's just hypotheses and graphs. Me to fellow conferencegoers: "So can we be the generation of scholars that stops perpetuating this poster nonsense?"įinally. I don’t think I’m alone, considering the antipathy toward academic posters I’ve noticed among colleagues and librarians. I’ve been to dozens of conference poster sessions, but I struggle to think of a single thing I’ve learned from them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |