[forapurpose]

Would someone in the world of science explain the role of posters and why that format is so popular? It's seems like there are so many other options - a video, a talk, a demonstration, an interactive computer screen, an interactive exhibit, a diorama, a play, etc ...

[jofer]

Having given quite a few talks and even more posters, my experience is that you get to communicate on a _much_ deeper level with a poster. (Note: I'm not in CS. I'd imagine this varies a lot by field.)

You get absolutely zero feedback and discussion generated from a talk. Maybe a few questions, but no actual discussion. If you're really, really, really lucky, someone might track you down or e-mail you later. For the most part, though, you don't interact with people during a talk.

In contrast, during a poster session, you talk yourself hoarse over three to twelve hours. You wind up in intense arguments and deep discussions. I've never seen that happen during talks.

Personally, I find a 12.5 minute talk is a lot more limiting than a poster, where you'll be talking to people about your work for several hours. Figures are the main focus of any scientific presentation, and a poster gives a great format to walk people through the concepts using figures.

That having been said, at the tech conferences I've been to, posters have always been an afterthought. It's a real shame.

[iak8god]

> you get to communicate on a _much_ deeper level with a poster

I used to hate poster sessions until I realized this. Something poster sessions provide, that other formats like podium talks really fail at, is pretty fine-grained control over the level of engagement. You can spend five seconds glancing at a poster, or a minute or two skimming the whole thing; you can spend a few minutes listening in while the presenter talks a bit about the work to someone else; you can skim and then ask one or two clarifying questions; or you can engage the presenter for as long as you're both interested in discussing.

[throwawayjava]

Posters are popular because they are cheap and compact, both for the presenters and (more importantly) for the conference.

Posters are usually used in high-volume settings with very light review. "Everybody" attending the conference gets to present a poster if they want to.

> a video... an interactive computer screen

Now you need 500 monitors at the conference venue, power cables, etc. The costs add up big time; hotels make a killing on this type of thing.

> a talk

You want to limit the number of talks so that the accepted talks are actually well-attended! So, not everyone gets to give a talk. Also, most people who give talks also present a poster because maybe there was a parallel session that stole some of your audience (who are interested enough to find you at the poster session).

At least in CS, no one is choosing a poster over a talk! talks are reserved for the work that passed the highest bar of peer review this year. (That said, I always recommend people present posters for some of the reasons described below. Even though talks are "higher status", IMO posters are often more effective once people are engaged.)

> a demonstration

These are sometimes rolled into poster sessions, but require more space and planning on the part of the organizers. Space at conferences is often hard to find.

> an interactive exhibit, a diorama, a play

This is kinda funny coming from a CS/math background. I guess in some fields this could make sense but would have the same drawbacks as videos or talks, respectively.

[forapurpose]

Thanks for a thorough, clear answer. The last two ideas were only to illustrate that one can imagine many more possibilities; personally, my last diorama was in 4th grade.

[b_emery]

The main reason to go to conferences is to meet people who are working similar things, to exchange ideas, make friends and build potential collaborations. Maybe even impress some program managers.

A very efficient way to do this is the poster session, where you have enough of your work on a poster that you can get the general ideas across in a few min (or even less). Some people do bring laptops with videos and things. My experience though is that spoken words and a few graphs are sufficient to get the story across and spark deeper conversations.

[jamessb]

Many (most?) conferences have both posters and talks. Posters have a few advantages:

- they parallelise well: you can fit a lot of posters in a room, and have a person standing beside each one talking concurrently

- it's easy to quickly glance at each poster in a room and move on if they're not of interest to you; it is harder to leave a talk that turns out to be uninteresting, and you can't be physically present for more than one talk at once

- they allow the presentation of a contribution that is currently too small to form the basis of a complete talk, which lets people get early feedback and advice (and gives students at an early stage in their PhD a chance to present something)

In some venues people have interactive demos beside their poster, running on a laptop/iPad/monitor.

At some conferences there is a session where a short (e.g. 30s) video for each poster is played as an advertisement.

Posters can give rise to deeper conversations, but they can also be more or less completely ignored (whereas a talk would have at least a few people in the audience).

[vinchuco]

My guess is logistics. What portion of your conference attendees is there to present and what portion is there to listen to talks (general, or specific?)? N>h where N is people and h is hours.

[NikolaeVarius]

Posters. The original landing page.