Yesterday, Matt and I showed our posters in a two-hour session at SVPCA, as two of about thirty. It was actually a hugely positive experience, and it’s left me wondering whether to prefer posters to talks at future conferences — one of us will write about it separately

My poster (left) and Matt’s (right), in their natural environment. Phil Mannion (Mammalia: Primates: Homoninae) for scale.

But it was eye-opening to road-test what I’d thought was a pretty good poster with real visitors. I quickly realised that the “Biconcavoposeidon” poster was missing two important things.

First, there’s an insert that shows schematic views of amphiplatyan, opisthocoelous, procoelous and amphicoelous vertebra. But it should show two or three of each kind of vertebra, in articulation, so that the insert shows not only the isolated shapes, but how they fit together (or how, in the case of biconcave centra, they do not fit together.)

The second problem: another insert shows — again in schematic form — how vertebrae articulate in amphibians and mammals. But I really needed a third part of that figure showing how the articulation works in birds. I kept needing to point to such an illustration, and I didn’t have one.

But all is not lost: I am not bound to an imperfect poster for all time. The poster is published as part of a PeerJ Preprint, and I can revise that preprint as often as I like. Which means I can revise the poster.

And that is what I plan to do. I’ll make both of the changes described above, and update the published version. The question then becomes: in my publications list, where the poster is explicitly tied to the presentation at SVPCA 2017, should I continue to point to the version that I actually used at the meeting? I am inclined to think so.

But wait: there’s more.

It turned out at the conference that Matt was right when he advised me that I should have made the anaglyph bigger, and placed it at the top of the poster, at eye-level. Instead, I had a sequence of visitors who had to painfully kneel down and peer myopically at the small, low-down version that I used. (Or, more often, they didn’t bother looking at the anaglyph at all — which is a shame, because it’s really informative.)

(Seriously, folks: buy yourself some dirt-cheap red/cyan glasses, and start making use of these incredibly useful, and very simple-to-make, visuals. Everyone who looked at the anaglyph, without exception, was startled at how much more informative it was than the regular image.)

But I am not going to re-organise the poster along those lines in the forthcoming revision. Why not? Because I don’t expect to present the new version at a conference, where eye-level is an issue. Instead, I expect it to stand as a research artefact in its own right, to be viewed on screens or printouts — and for those purposes, the present composition is better. That’s true especially because most people downloading the poster won’t have the red/cyan glasses necessary to view what would be centrepiece of the putative revision; but when presenting the poster at a conference, I can provide the glasses (and I did).

So I think I have now landed on the notion that a poster as a research artefact is a fundamentally different thing from a poster for presentation at a conference. I didn’t see that coming.