HOWTO Present a poster session at a science meeting

Cory Doctorow 10:35 pm Mon Aug 3, 2009

Here's some comprehensive and entertaining advice for people contemplating giving a poster session at a scientific meeting; much of this applies to any situation in which you hope to catch and hold the attention of passers-by:

The best general advice I can give a first-time poster constructor is to describe the circumstances in which a poster will eventually be viewed: a hot, congested room filled with people who are there primarily to socialize, not to look at posters. Because poster sessions are often concurrent with the "wine and beer" mixer, chaos is further increased by hundreds of uninhibited graduate students staggering around hitting on each other. It's not a pretty sight.

And it gets worse: meeting organizers will invariably sandwich your poster between two posters that are infinitely more entertaining, such as "Teaching house cats to perform cold fusion" and "Mating preferences in extraordinarily adorable red pandas." In such a situation, your poster must be interesting and visually slick if you hope to attract viewers.

Advice on designing scientific posters

(via Hack the Planet)

(Image: Poster Session, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Nucho's Flickr stream)

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