Lesson for Week 14: Day 1
14.1
Continue to work on your major project. If you decide to create a speech, send me an email telling me of your change of plans. Read Day on poster sessions for today.
In this lesson, I will describe poster sessions generally, talk about one way of making a poster, discuss the oral communication associated with poster sessions, and make a few suggestions about support material.
What are Poster Sessions? A couple lessons back, we talked about "hybrid media," presentations in which the speaker attempts to combine more than one medium, such as speech and visual projection. One type of hybrid presentation that is gaining in poputlarity is the poster session.
As our reading for today, Day on poster sessions, explains, poster sessions were originally developed so that more researchers could present their findings at professional conferences.They were a substitute for paper sessions, which are panels usually consisting of three or four speakers, who read their papers to others in the audience. Poster sessions, conversely, are usually held in a large room where many posters can be set up for viewing. It's kind of like going to an elementary school science fair, except the posters must carry the most important part of original research being presented, and the researcher can't set up a display of materials in the same way elementary school students can. Usually these sessions are listed in professional conference catalogues, along with the paper panels. A place and time is specified. The audience, instead of sitting in chairs to listen to speeches being read, walk through the display room, looking at posters, sort of like people walking through an art museum. The research stands near her poster, ready to answer questions or to give more detail about the research. A well prepared researcher will not only have a good poster but will also provide handouts that summarize the research and list a URL where the readers can find more detailed information on the WWW. Hence, we see that a poster session can be quite a hybrid medium, consisting of visual communication in the poster, oral communication in the conversation, hardcopy communication in the handout, and electronic communication in the supporting website.
Although we often think about poster sessions in the context of professional research conferences, they are sometimes used in other forums, perhaps a special-interest conference. For instance, I attended the NPSAS (Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society) conference a few months ago. There were poster displays in the hall and in the largest meeting room that served as the dining room. These poster displays advertized subgroups that people could join, wholesalers of organic seeds, and grant opportunities.
How do you make a poster? Day's short chapter about posters is quite dated (1988) and his suggestions for making a poster consist of good advice about poster design qualities and antiquated methods for making posters. His comments about design qualities are still valid, but we now have considerably better ways to make professional looking posters.
Here at NDSU, several scientists are using PowerPoint (PPT), of all things, to make posters. When I found this out, I was quite surprised, but it turns out that this program allows you to scale your document so that you can print it off as a large, single page, big enough for a poster session. Here is a set of instructions for how to do it. I'm relying on a handout developed by the ITS people at NDSU.
1. Open Power Point and select "Blank Presentation."
2. Click on File > Page Setup > Custom (in the "Slides Sized for" window)
3. Enter width of 48 inches and height of 36 inches, and make sure the Landscape layout is selected. Then click on Okay. You now have a typical blank screen, but when it prints off, it will be 48X36 inches.
4. To add text, create a text box. To do that open Word as a second program and type the text you want. Highlight and copy (CTRL C) the text. Toggle (ALT Tab) to PPT, click on the blank page, and paste the text (CTRL V). You can rotate the text or move it around on the blank page or reshape the textbox.
5. To add an image, click on Insert ( in PPT) > Picture > from file. Your file system will open, and you can move around your folders to find the image you want to insert. Once you select it and insert it, you can move it and resize it. Remember that digital images will be sharp or blurred depending on the density of pixels or the resolution. The bigger the poster, the more blurred the image will be because it will be "stretched" to cover the space but there will not be enough data to fill the space unless your image has high resolution.
6. To change the background, click on Format > Background.You should think of the blank screen as a board to which you can paste objects, some will be text boxes, others images. In designing your poster, use the principles of proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast as discussed in one of our class texts, The Non-Designer's Design Book.
7. To print, you need access to the right kind of printer. In the IACC Service Center here on campus, you can open PPT and load your completed poster. It may be a good idea to ask for help before you actually print, because it costs about from $11 to $15 presently.
How do I engage people during the poster session? Good question. Poster sessions do not offer you the same kind of authority that you have when reading a paper or giving a speech. In speeches, your time is a time for you to hold the floor, and conventions associated with speaking tell everyone else to listen because it is your turn. In a poster session, conversely, people are browsing. You have to be available without being pushy. It can feel awkward to stand by your poster and wait while people walk by, some briskly, some distantly gazing at your work, some drawing near to look at it more closely.
When they come near to look at the poster, it is courteous to let them look for a moment or two before speaking to them. Then you can address them and introduce yourself. You probably shouldn't start out with, "Do you have any questions?" Rather, you might say something like, "May I tell you a little about this research?" If they say yes, they have granted you the floor for a short period of time. Keep it short and then ask if there are questions. In some ways the poster session has affinities with a speech because you at least hope to summarize your work orally, but because you are keeping it short and talking to only one or a few people at a time, the sessions is more like a conversation. It is, therefore, important to remember H. P. Grice's conversational maxims so that you take turns and invite responses from your interlocutor.
What kind of supporting material should I have? When your conversation is drawing to a close, you should have something for the person to carry away. Some people might offer the whole scientific report, but that is expensive and probably wasteful. A better option is a brochure or even a business card. If you create a brochure, make it small enough for the person to add easily to other materials she may be carrying. It should have the title of the poster, your name, a summary or abstract of the research, and contact information, especailly a website where the person can download the paper if she wishes. Obviously, if you have a URL, then you need a website and a paper, but usually, the URL can point directly to the web address for the paper itself rather than to your homepage. I would change my paper into a PDF rather than leaving it as a Word document. You can do that with Adobe Acrobat.
Finish a complete draft of your paper and decide finally if you want to remediate it in any way. By remediation, I mean changing or supplementing the paper with other media. You should contact someone to see if she or he will be willing to read your paper before you submit it. In the next lesson, we'll talk about how to solicit the king of information you want from a second reader.