Conference Etiquette
Published on Jan 12, 2008 at 8:11 pm.
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Filed under conference blogging.
I am home now from the AAS Meeting. I have a backlog of interesting things to blog about that I’ll be getting through over the next week. But, I thought that I’d mention something about some conference etiquette.
First of all, though, I need to explain about these meetings. There are basically three kinds of presentations. First, we have invited talks. These are talks about 45 minutes long from a handful of people who have been specifically asked to give talks to the entire conference. Everyone meets in a giant room, and we listen to the invited speaker. Second, there are contributed oral papers. These are short (usually 10 minute) presentations that individual conference attendees present. Finally, there are poster papers. Anyone submitting a poster is alloted a specified space (so many by so many inches). They then put their presentation in their specified spot. The posters are up for the entire day. Typically, the poster author is expected to hang around their poster from time to time to answer questions.
Now, years ago, oral sessions used to be quite popular. Lecture has been a common way to transmit information in academia for years. However, oral sessions have problems. For one thing, as more and more people attend meetings and present their research, the limitations of the oral sessions became apparent. At this meeting, for example, it was not uncommon for there to be ten or more concurrent oral sessions going. There is no way to be in ten places at once. People would run back and forth between sessions trying to hear particular talks. But, you always miss out. There will always be multiple talks going on at the same time that you want to hear. But an even bigger limitation is that the talks are limited to ten minutes. If you really have something to say, that is not much time. Now, here is where conference etiquette is very important. When people run over, they take time away from someone else. If the speaker ends on time, then there will be time for a couple of questions. But, it takes a moment to get the next speaker’s presentation ready, so you don’t take the entire time between presentations for questions. All too often, the speaker runs over. There is a session moderator who introduces speakers and is responsible for keeping people on time. Frequently they don’t do a good job and they let people run over. Then they compound the matter by still permitting questions. And, there is always somebody in the audience who has no clue what an appropriate question might be. Don’t ask very involved questions. Ask questions that clarify a point. Don’t bring up an entirely new discussion. If the moderator lets someone run over, then people who are running back and forth between sessions to hear speakers miss the ones that they want to hear. The speaker should be available for discussion after the entire session is over.
In recent years, though, poster presentations have become far more popular. I like the poster sessions much better. You can stop and read the poster, study the graphs, etc. In an oral session, the speaker often tries to cover too much too quickly and the graphs and other slides are not displayed long enough to really study them. With the poster, you can stand there as long as you need to in order to grasp what the poster is about. And, if the poster author is there, then you can talk to them and get a much better explanation than in an oral session. But, there are things that can go wrong with posters, too. First of all, if the poster is presented by multiple authors, they do not ALL need to be standing directly in front of the poster chatting with one another. That blocks others who may be interested from studying the poster! Also, the poster should not be someone’s entire publication. Several posters at the meeting were simply someone posting the pages of preprints of their upcoming publication. Just as with oral sessions, don’t present too much information. Remember that people want to have time to see other posters. Also, if the conference does not have a set time for authors to be at their poster, then when you are not at your poster, leave a note saying when you’ll be back. Often the posters are printed documents and images. These documents and images are available in electronic format. Other posters are printed out as single large images. The same thing can be printed on smaller pieces of paper. I really like the posters that have the poster printed out on a piece of paper. If a small stack of those printouts is placed beneath the poster, then anyone interested can pick up a copy. If you don’t want to print out a stack of paper, though, you can also put the entire poster online. Give the URL on the poster. A number of people did that, and I find that nearly as good as having a piece of paper. Even if the poster is a set of pieces of paper and images, then you can place them online, too. Done right, I like poster sessions much more than oral sessions. At times during this past conference, I passed up some of the oral sessions in order to just continue circulating amongst the posters. A lot of other people were doing that, too.
Oh, and it does help if you look at your poster before printing it to see if there are typos. Remember, this is a professional meeting, and presenting at a meeting is next to publishing as the way that you make your research public. And, as my graduate adviser said to his graduate students, “Science only becomes science when you publish your research.”
So, tomorrow, I’ll get back to blogging science topics.
-Astroprof
