SCA: items, research, ideas
1 square yard; show what you know.
Research posters are common in the academic world, but not in the SCA, at least, not yet. What is a research poster? It is a compact way of sharing some research, or an idea.
Ideally:
- Your main point would be made in the first few seconds of someone seeing the poster
- There will be enough information on the poster to back up your point
- There will be a way for people to find more information later
- From 5-10 feet away
1 square yard is not much space, and if you make the font size too small, you will have many people just walking by and not reading it. You will need to be creative to convey all that you want and to still be concise.
Three panel boards can work, depending on the space that an event is providing. But being able to mount the poster on a wall can work even better for some spaces. Be creative, it does not need to be a single piece of paper, but it can be, office supply places often have large format printers. But, also, handwriting can be effective (and cheap).
- Have a central idea, keep it in mind, design to it
- Bullet points
- Large text
- Pictures
- Graphs
- Don’t forget a legend
- Split into columns
- Natural flow to read
- Natural is not always linear
- White space is good
- Variety is good
- But not too much
- Creativity wins
- Choose your title carefully
If you have questions or want to chat with me before submitting a proposal, e-mail me at karstyl@gmail.com or find me on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karstyl
You can write about many things. Three main threads:
Items: This is a good space to share information about something you made, or a historical object you found out about. Give some the who/what/when/where/why/how information, both for how you did it and how it was done in history. Share the fun and interesting parts. Share what you learned. Pictures are good.
Research: Similar to items, but no thing is needed. Maybe you have found some interesting tidbit when doing research, but you don’t think it would work for a full class. Or you have noticed a pattern, synthesized research from different regions or over time.
Ideas: The most freeform. Ideas need to be SCA or history related, but that relation can be cousins. What have you done, what have you learned, what insights do you have because of this? What ideas do you have to bring the SCA into the future? What has surprised you the most in your SCA life?
The three threads are braided together, you don’t need a poster that fits neatly into a single one. Or that fits into any specifically. Get the reader to think, spark their mind.
Use the categories as a jumping off point for your ideas.
Some resources to help you when preparing your poster:
(remember that you are making an SCA poster, not a scientific poster, so you can be a little more creative)
Some basics, start here:
https://guides.nyu.edu/posters
More detail, good ideas:
https://www.animateyour.science/post/how-to-design-an-award-winning-conference-poster
Better Poster? A new way that is moving into the scientific field, and would work well for the SCA
(the first 8 or so minutes are not as relevant to this)
#betterposter