Poster

General information

Instead of student presentations on a given topic, you have the opportunity to investigate a phenomenon of your choice during one of two project days. Your topic serves as a first attempt at picking a linguistic phenomenon and developing a research question about it. It can but does not have to serve as a starting point for your term paper. Visit the section about the term papers for more information.

Your poster presentation is essentially a progress report of the project you are working on. Its structure is mostly identical to that of an academic paper. There should be an introduction (usually at the top), and a conclusion (usually at the bottom). You should also reference research literature and include a bibliography.

The main difference is that, if possible, there should be less text and more examples, figures, and tables. Ideally, you have already explored some corpus data and have some preliminary results. Here is a list of elements that could be at the heart of your poster.

Linguistic data:

• Numbered examples that illustrate your phenomenon (ideally from your data set)
• Concordances
• Frequency list
• Tables with counts for individual categories

Visualizations

• Bar charts
• Stacked bar charts
• Pie charts
• Scatter plot …

Conceptual Figures

• Flow charts
• Venn diagrams
• Models

Layout

When it comes to the design of your poster, it is mostly up to your creativity. Posters are usually A0, so quite large. For layouts, just google academic posters or linguistics posters. In academia, your institute or university usually has a corporate design and might even provide templates. Corporate designs include logos, colors, fonts and other instructions of varying specificity (e.g. FU corporate design).

More common layouts include headers and footers. The header includes the title, logo, names of the authors, their affiliations, and contact information. The footer includes references, acknowledgements, footnotes. This provides a frame for the main body, that has numbered sections, just like a paper. Sometimes people include an abstracts at the beginning that is a summary of the project.

Here is a template. Feel free to use it.

Programs

Most commonly, people create their posters in presentation software like Powerpoint / Impress. If you are already familiar with image editing programs like Photoshop or programs for graphical design, these might be an option for you. The most powerful, and extensible options are Latex or Markdown, which offer great functionality when it comes to references, bibliographies, cross-references, numberings and captions. For a beginner, it might be extremely difficult to work with those tools without mouse drag-and-drop, but you can just download example files from places like Overleaf (e.g. here) and just throw in your contents ⁹.

Starting from scratch might be daunting. However, there are countless templates online. Just search for one created with your tool of choice, pick one you like, and modify it if necessary.

Poster session

Project day format:

• Posters and Video contribution will be available in a repository and subsequently uploaded to Blackboard
• Presentations will be split up into concurrent sessions based on topics
• Every group has 5 minutes for a poster pitch with 5–10 more minutes for discussion
• In the main lobby there will be a schedule with all presentations
• Viewers (and also presenters when it’s not their turn) can switch between sessions freely

For presenters:

• submit your contribution at least 24h before the presentations
• submit a .pdf file or in an image format (.bmp, .jpg, .svg,…), not .pptx or similar