Conference posters

After submitting your paper to a conference, instead of being invited to make a ten-minute presentation, you may be invited to present a poster instead. This is a good opportunity to put your work in front of others, and it should involve different techniques to those involved in making a presentation.

The first thing about posters is that your message about the research you are doing is more important than any corporate or brand image of your institution. I would avoid the habit of cluttering up your valuable piece of paper with logos, names of research units, collaborators and so on. You may find that there are certain requirements of some funding agencies and some institutions to have a clear acknowledgement of their support. These should be adhered to. But don't add unnecessary logos and associated names unless they are really needed.

Next, it is good to use graphics and large fonts. A good poster will focus on one aspect of your work, rather than trying to put everything across. There is no need for bibliographical references, and it is good to avoid jargon and complex sentences; big fonts, nice graphics and short messages. Graphical communication works best when you avoid fussy and unnecessary embellishments such as 3D, shadows, gratuitous use of colour and so on (most of the default settings in Microsoft Power-point and the like need to be changed to remove many of these features; it was developed for business presentations, not research presentations). An overriding principle is that the density of data in a graphic should be greater than the equivalent text that might alternatively be used to represent the same data. So pie charts are a complete waste of paper, because the message in a pie chart can be put across in one sentence of text. Histograms are frequently better portrayed as a list of labels and numbers. Your audience is not innumerate, and they understand the relative sizes of numbers. (You don’t need to draw me a picture to explain that 75 is much bigger than 10.) Graphics work best when every line, colour, symbol and label perform a function that is more concise than writing things out. There is some really good advice and detailed exposition on the use of graphics for conveying information by Edward Tufte; get hold of it if you can.

It is interesting to type “scientific posters” into Google. That is how I stumbled upon some useful guidance from North Carolina State University where it is emphasized that there are basic principles of scientific poster design: Focus, Graphics, Order. I like the advice given there. Also, I recommend a good PhD Blog, called the Thesis Whisperer, where there is further good advice.

To summarize, this is a good opportunity to develop a skill-set that differs from making presentations. Posters should have minimal clutter. There should be a clear focus, good use of graphics and a clear sequence of ideas. This will make it easier for observers to ask questions and for you talk about your research. Finally, it is OK to be uncertain about research that is in progress.

Networking on the web

There is a growing number of tools for networking on the web. Facebook is great for social networking, but it can be very distracting and difficult to manage. There are so many facets to it that it is probably inappropriate for direct communication focused on scientific exchanges. Indeed, there is a group in Facebook for construction management researchers. But it may make you despair of the human condition, because it is filled with trivial requests from people who are not researchers asking questions of an entirely random nature and with no sense of who their questions are directed at. It is pretty hopeless and probably needs to be closed down, yet there are more than 500 members on it from all over the world. Most of them just seem desperate to find someone to talk to, or seek a forum for advertising their wares. It fails where other tools succeed.

In our field, probably the most successful tool to date is the Co-operative Network for Building Researchers (CNBR). This has been going for 21 years and has more than 2500 members globally. It is only an email network, but it is really successful and enables some very useful discussions. It also enables unavoidable chit-chat and distractions, but not too much.

There are plenty of other places where we can develop networks, if we wish to. Academia.edu, for example. I have a profile there at http://reading.academia.edu/WillHughes and this enables me to connect with people who share my research interests. There is not the opportunity for chit-chat like there is on CNBR, and it is less intrusive in the daily diet of emails (if you set it it up right). You can upload papers and books, presentations, CVs, all sorts of academic outputs, and by tagging them with keywords, you become visible to like-minded people around the globe. This is a good way of finding new research contacts.

A new service is Mendeley. This looks like an excellent tool. Primarily it is useful for managing bibliographies. But it also enables the setting up of groups, whether for your own research team, for a department, for a global group of people who share similar interests. One really useful thing about this service is that unlike academia.edu, you don’t need to type in your publications from scratch, because it connects to many bibliographical databases and imports the details of papers that you identify as yours. It is quite quick to set up a profile and although I have only been looking at it for a day, it appears to have some really useful functions.

If networking with a mixture of practitioners and academics, I would recommend LinkedIn, because it has quite a good reach and does not involve all the distracting “fun stuff” that you get in facebook. It is a good way to get connected to all sorts of people, but if you are only looking for academic contacts, it is probably not for you.

Finally, if all you want to do is let off steam every so often and have a rant about something, get yourself a BLOG! I have found this to be useful for more than just the occasional rant. I can use it to collect advice and guidance that I give to students and to authors of papers in the journal. Over the months and years, a collection of guidance notes is accumulating here, and it is very easy to point people to short things that I have already written, which saves me from writing them again. I can return to edit old posts, and also place here contributions that I may have developed for other reasons (this post, for example, started out life as a contribution to an email discussion).

There is a lot to be said for using the appropriate tool for the job. It is highly unlikely that we will find one service that fulfils all aspirations. We need different tools for different tasks. Join me in some of these services, and we can explore these things together and see what we can achieve!

Google Wave

I was invited into Google Wave today by a colleague. It loks neat, with some nice friendly videos to introduce the service (meaning I cannot really see the intros on the train or in the lounge at home, where others are sitting).

I am not sure I am ready for this. I am already maintaining profiles in Google Blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, Academia.edu and the University profile webpage, not to mention the Virtual Learning Environment (Blackboard) where every programme and course that I teach on gives me a space for my personal profile... Most importantly, I want to keep my academic CV up to date in order to respond promptly to requests for information about recent activities.

All of these profiles are completely exclusive and independent of each other. And I am successfully using blogs for research supervision and research collaboration, so I do not feel that there is a problem to which Google Wave offers a solution. I want to wait until there is a bit more cross-platform integration. Is there any sign of some intelligent interfaces between all of these different services so that each can take structured information from the other? Isn't that what meta-tags were supposed to enable?

Corporate Christmas Cards

I have always found corporate Christmas cards to be something of an irritation, especially when the signatures are printed into the card, and from a range of people some of whom are known to me, but most of whom are not. It seems a particularly meaningless gesture. What is happening this year, as firms cut back on their expenditure, is that all sorts of people are sending electronic greetings cards instead. Often to "Dear All". All sorts of twee images and animations, often with sickeningly trite Christmas music. What compels this kind of corporate behaviour? It would be much nicer not to get these things cluttering up the inbox and in-tray. Bah, humbug.