How to make and present a poster for your first Poster Day
I recently had my first Poster Day! I am very experienced and comfortable with public speaking and presenting work in the industry context, and yet this was a novel and frankly intimidating event. This article collects what I learned during the process and can serve as a starting point.
Poster
First, here is the design I came up with. It is far from perfect, and it has two constraints. I presented an unfinished project (only preliminary data collection), and my time budget was low. My first approach was to pick up any template from Canva and fill it up. Thankfully I asked my friend Dr. Marielle Dado for help, and after our conversation, I had to redesign it from scratch 😁. I now know better for the future.
If you are making a poster for a finished paper, the parts to feature are: an abstract/introduction, methodology, analysis/discussion, results and conclusion. The resulting arrangement should have the flow of a scientific paper. Here is a good example. You will find many good guides online too. The most important thing is to be brief, not crowd the space, but feature everything crucial.
Flash talk
Before the event moves to more distributed conversations in front of each poster, everyone gets a very short chance to present in front of the whole audience. In one short minute, you must introduce your research and convince the participants that your poster is worth visiting.
There are many ways to approach a speech with strict time constraints, but my favourite is to get the estimated words per minute (about 150) and try to say everything in less. Everyone has a slightly different speed, so it is best to try immediately to read the speech out loud, time it, and cut/expand accordingly. For me, my 140 words equated to 50 seconds. That means I will have 10 seconds to deal with nervousness if it comes, having to say something twice if I messed it up etc. After that - practice and practice and practice until it just comes automatically (so your mouth will still speak if your mind is struggling to keep calm).
Here is what I wrote for my 1-minute-flash-talk:
How would you model the mental hops that lead from one word to the next? And how about when instead of a word, the starting point are concepts grounded explicitly or implicitly in an image? I ventured to answer these questions, and more, during my Individual Research Module project. Working to automatically generate image-term pairs for an image-grounded, collaborative Wordle game, I looked for combinations that spark the desired type of dialogue, illuminating the participants’ decision-making. The project fits the broader efforts towards natural language explainability that Prof. Schlangen’s research group is undertaking. I have developed a method that will generate image-term pairs according to your difficulty preferences for any image dataset. Find me by my poster for more details. My name is Tamara Atanasoska, and the supervisors for this project are Dr Jana Götze and Prof. Dr David Schlangen.
A pitch for the poster visitors
The pitch you gave to lure the visitors to your little corner worked, and now you have people enthusiastically stopping by. I thought being ready for questions and comments would be enough, but many visitors asked for a slightly more detailed introduction than the flash talk before they could ask questions. During these extended introductions, I realised how important the flow of the poster is - I could guide people through my visual aids like the screenshot of the game and its various parts at the top, the pipeline/architecture drawing in my middle methodology section, and pointing out that desired dialogue and findings in my preliminary results/conclusion section.
Good luck with your first Poster Day, dear reader! You will do just great ✨.
