By Mike Morris
The presentation of papers at the divisional meetings of the APA has been fundamental to the association since its inception, and the paper submission and review process has been in place since the middle of last century. When I started working at the APA national office, the three divisions all accepted paper submissions in the form of a colloquium, a symposium, or both. Since then, there have been some significant changes. The Pacific Division began accepting posters in 2011. As of 2018, all three divisions now accept posters (though the allowable combination of symposium, colloquium, and poster vary among the divisions).
For all three divisions, colloquium is the most popular submission type, since more colloquium papers are accepted than either symposium papers or posters, and most authors would rather present a paper than a poster. There are, however, a number of reasons to submit a poster, such as:
- An idea that has not been developed to the extent of a paper, but is more than an abstract.
- A paper with concepts that are easily or best communicated with visual cues.
- To get feedback on an idea in a setting that is more relaxed and interactive than a lecture.
- To advertise an idea—the medium and setting for poster sessions provide an opportunity to catch the eye of more philosophers than a typical session does.
The Pacific and Central divisions require authors to specifically choose to submit a poster. However, the Eastern Division also allows authors to submit a colloquium or symposium paper that could secondarily be considered for a poster session. This means that an author who has written a full paper could find themselves in the position of needing to simplify the contents of their paper for a poster.
My part in the paper submission process is to facilitate paper submissions, and I receive a lot of questions. Some are easy to answer through experience or because the answers are in the paper submission guidelines. Others are not so easy. When an author asked me about converting a dense paper into a poster, I did not have any specific guidance. There is a thread from a few years ago on the Philosophers’ Cocoon blog with some discussion. Googling “poster presentation” returns a lot of information—mostly for the sciences and engineering. My impression is that philosophy is different from these in that it often does not lend itself well to visual summary and/or short-form presentation. Without the use of visual aids or being able to present a brief summary of one’s findings, making a philosophy poster is therefore likely more difficult than doing so within other disciplines.
My goal in this post is to start some discussion about philosophy poster presentations. Do you have advice on creating poster presentations? What about tips for converting a paper into a poster? What has worked for you (or have you seen that has worked), and what has not? Do you have these or other questions yourself? Please use the comment space in this post to share and discuss.
Mike Morris is Deputy Director of the American Philosophical Association.
I’ve only really done a poster for math, so I’m a bit in the dark on how to do philosophy posters. I do tend to use the board quite a bit in the classroom, so I would probably start off by pretending I’m explaining the paper to a class, using the board as I would. Drawings would be top candidates for inclusion. Diagrams, too.
Besides that, boiling down the main ideas of the paper into some big, bold sentences, preferably in the form of numbered premises or a flow chart seems like the important thing.
I’ve also noticed my intuitions and preferences about posters are probably a bit unusual. I usually avoid posters with lots of text because I don’t want to awkwardly stand there reading as the presenter is explaining things. While wordy explanations are nice if the poster has to stand on its own, it seems as bad as wordy presentation slides when there’s a presenter.
Thank you for your thoughts, Nichole.
For some earlier discussion of poster sessions at philosophy conferences, see http://dailynous.com/2015/08/28/poster-sessions-at-philosophy-conferences/
Thank you, Justin.
Hi Mike,
I will be attending the Pacific APA in April 2019 at which a symposium will be held on my recent book; so I could probably wait until then to find out the answer to this question myself. However, I’d like to get your response to it.
How are poster sessions at APA conferences made accessible to blind philosophers and other philosophers who may be text/reading disabled? Are you and others at the national office and on the executives of the divisions working to find ways to increase the accessibility of these sessions? If so, please tell us what mechanisms are employed or will be employed to do so.
Thank you for your question, Shelley. Accessibility and the visual component of poster sessions is a concern that’s been on my mind lately as well. A good amount of both visual and audio accessibility is built into the poster session. At a poster session, authors present their posters and discuss it with attendees, so being at the presentation provides significant access to the content of the poster. We are working on instructions for authors that address both the readability of posters (e.g., the best fonts, sizes, and spacing) and presentation style (e.g., not relying on visual cues) to improve the experience for those who are blind and/or text/reading disabled. Additionally, we intend to ask each author to provide a description of their poster, which we will make available via the meeting app and APA website. Whether they attend poster session or not, attendees can then use their devices’ adaptive features to access the poster description.
If anyone has ideas or suggestions, please add them to this discussion thread.
Mike, before you dive in to the details of what happens at conferences, how about an examination of whether philosophy conferences which require travel (and thus the expense of many thousands of dollars) are rational?
What is the reasoning which supports unnecessarily spending all this money on a conference instead of spending that same money on say, each member’s favorite charity, or a group charity project organized by the APA?
What are the unique benefits of that form of communication which justifies such a large expense?
Yes, I know people like conferences. Yes, I know conferences do have some benefits. That’s not the issue.
The question is more precisely, what is it about conferences that is so uniquely important and valuable that it should be prioritized over say, putting a kid through college with the same money?
Why not apply philosophy to philosophy conferences too? Why not challenge and test the group consensus and see if it can hold up? Why even have a philosophy conference at all if there is little to no interest in challenging the conference itself?
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Phil. There are opportunities to research and talk about the value of academic conferences. A Google search turns up a number of articles, blog posts, and a good bit of discussion on that topic, which is quite far afield of what we are discussing here.
If you have any comments that fall within the topic of the post, please feel free to share.
Hi Mike,
thanks for your response to my questions. It seems as if you have given this issue some good attention. You don’t mention this explicitly, but I want to note that for posters and poster session rich image descriptions will be vital. Making such image descriptions can take some practice and some people are reluctant to do them or too impatient to do them. But this document provides great explanation of the purposes of image descriptions, how to do them effectively, and what is lost is they are absent: https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/vsa/resources/VSAKleegeBlindImagination.pdf
Shelley Tremain
Thank you for sharing that resource, Shelley. I’ll include the link in our instructions to authors.
Sorry for the typos in my previous comment!
Mike,
here is another article that poster session contributors could consider: http://lighthouse-sf.org/2018/06/29/tactile-graphics/
Best regards,
Shelley Tremain