 |
| Checking out the posters at the 17th International Symposium on Graph Drawing, Chicago, 2009 Image by David Eppstein under CC-BY-SA-3.0 |
A few weeks ago I heard a disheartened geographer bemoan his poster experience at the AAG annual meeting in Chicago. It sounds like it was a pain to get the poster up on time, be available during the many hours it was to be shown, then take it down. I got the sense the presenter was disappointed there was so little interaction between the poster presenters and attendees.
Two weeks ago I attended the Tufts Ninth Annual GIS Poster Exposition in Medford, Massachusetts. About 150 student and faculty posters were crammed into a space on campus for two hours. Most were traditional foam core poster boards, but a handful were "apps," including at least one story map. The venue was loud and packed with people talking to one another and eating the snacks. The authors did not present, nor stand with, their posters. I overheard a woman, who I identified as a student, note that her poster probably had too much text. You could pick out the student posters; they had the misspellings and cartographic "room for improvement" you'd expect of first time and less experienced mappers. Toward the end of the event, organizers recognized several posters for recognition.