When I told friends that I would be presenting a poster at the 1996 PAA meetings, most of them stared at me blankly. In their minds, posters are used for displaying athletes or rock bands, not research. Even after I explained the use of a poster at PAA, I know that it evoked images of sixthgrade science fairs, complete with papiermache volcanos overflowing with dry ice smoke. Alas, there were no such animated presentations at this year's PAA, although several of us joked about adding neon lights to bring more drama to our pvalues. Despite the lack of neon, I was fortunate to receive one of this year's poster awards.
Although many of my friends congratulated me on the award, they still do not have much sense of what happens at a poster session. A few observations about the process of making and presenting a poster might inspire future presenters to participate and dispel some commonlyheld myths.
First, making a poster is at least as difficult as preparing a paper for presentation. Because text is a minimal part of the poster, much of the effort must go into presenting data clearly and creatively, that is, in easily interpretable tables, graphs, and illustrations. Now, I am a perfectionist and may be at the tail of the distribution, but after doing the analysis, I spent another 4050 hours on the graphical presentation. I found myself cutting poster board at Kinko's in the middle of the night, harassing the personnel at the campus computing center with special printout jobs, and recruiting my spouse to help me glue large computer plots to my poster board. Hence, while poster sessions offer many advantages, they can be laborintensive as well.
Second, presenting a poster provides more discussion with more people than oral presentations typically do. The many "small" questions of clarification and comments by passersby revealed to me weaknesses in my work and made clear things I want to do differently when I prepare this research in manuscript form. And several of these discussions were with people who otherwise might not have come to hear me present a paper. I was able to meet facetoface with a few wellknown researchers whom I had cited in my dissertation.
Third, posters are not just papers that are less advanced in their progress, smaller in scope, or equivocal in their findings. Many of this year's posters presented substantively impressive, completed projects. Meanwhile many oral presentations I attended ended with disclaimers such as "of course, this is work in progress and the findings are unclear." A poster forces you to say what you mean and mean what you say.
Fourth, and last, I offer some practical advice. When prepared to take advantage of the full presentation space (4 x 8 feet), posters can be large and difficult to transport on a plane. Your graphs, charts, tables, and explanatory text do, however, need to be large enough for a rapidly aging membership to read while standing two or three feet away from the board.