I have had a look through this year’s Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference programme to pick out my recommendations for those with interests in GIS and Spatial Analysis. I have included the session titles (in no particular order), their days and locations and also links to who is presenting and what they are talking about.
Embedded below is my presentation to the British Cartographic Society’s Annual Conference 2010, held in Nottingham. You will find high resolution versions of many of the maps featured in the presentation available for download on this blog.
For those who couldn’t make it, GIS Professional have published their WhereCampEU report (written by Steve Feldman). You can read my own thoughts on the unconference here.
I was invited to give a brief talk to a UCL Graduate School Training course on good academic poster design. I have only designed a couple of posters myself but found the process very rewarding. I prepared a few slides (although wasn’t asked to present them) so I have uploaded them here.
In the presentation I included 5 tips based from my own experiences. They are listed below with a few ‘bonus’ tips arising from the questions/ comments I received at the end of the session:
1. Know your audience and the likely environment the poster will be displayed in. My first poster was designed to be displayed all day in a spacious, non-crowded, environment. There is a lot (probably too much) of text as I hoped those interested would take the time to read it. The text and images were designed to ensure that people could get what the poster was about by just reading the first lines. The intended audience were non-specialists. My second poster is designed for a conference setting. The display environment was likely to be crowded with less time for people to read the poster. With this in mind I have reduced the amount of text and simplified the design.
2. Know when to stop! Perhaps I should have headed my own advice in the first poster. Cramming the poster with everything you have ever done does not impress. You run the risk of making things look cluttered. It is surprisingly hard to distil your research into a few key sentences but well worth the effort. People have short concentration spans so it is better to get a few simple points across well than no complex points at all. You will find that getting this right takes most of the time.
3. Include something eye catching. Your poster will be alongside many similar-looking posters so break the mould and include something with a high-visual impact to stop people on their way past.
4. Before the poster is printed show it to some critical friends, especially non-specialists. It is amazing how things that appear obvious to you are ambiguous or misunderstood by others- it is your responsibility to present things better, rather than accuse them of missing the point!
5. Use a good graphics package. It is frustrating to walk round a poster session to see fuzzy or pixelated images that have been compressed multiple times as they have been imported into Powerpoint then exported to PDF. The other key advantage of this is that if you work in vector format you can rescale the poster as much as you like without a loss of quality. There are free software available: Inkscape (vector-based) or GIMP (image based).
6. Apply well-known aesthetic rules such as the rule of thirds. Use these to your advantage and people will naturally see order in your poster. Get it wrong and people will become confused or miss key aspects of the poster.
7. Include “take away” information. This can be in the form of business cards alongside the poster or a print out of resources. This is useful if you are not beside the poster for the duration of its display.
8. Choose a short and snappy title!
Hopefully these tips are useful. An additional point was made about accounting for colour blindness, I have already written a post on this.
I am not a poster design expert, nor do I think my posters are exemplary examples- I think they can both be improved in many ways. I am sure others will have their own tips/ comments so please feel free to post them. I end on a graphic by Megan Jaegerman from an interesting article by Edward Tufte on good news graphics as I think many of the points are valid for academic poster design.
Last Friday and Saturday I was part of WhereCampEU “the geo unconference for Europe”. Being an unconference there was no formal agenda instead attendees could propose sessions on the day and stick them to “the wall“. This sort of system would bring many academics out into a cold sweat as there is no formal way of ensuring quality presentations and sessions. I didn’t attend a single bad session though and found that in the sessions where the speaker was faltering a little, or talking for too long, audience members would pipe up and generate discussion to make the session far better. I found this aspect particularly rewarding. The system could fall down if speakers were egotistical or simply interested self-promotion- I found the contrary though at WhereCampEU. Many represented a company or product but all were willing to subject it to objective discussion or simply leave their allegiances at the door before a session.
I think there is a lot to be learnt within the academic community from this approach- especially the surrounding the sharing of information and comments. Highlights for me were the ito! visualisations , learning why metadata are shit (and how to improve them) (Charles Kennelly, ESRI (UK)), the conversations surrounding pedestrian routing, being told that you lose more time cycling uphill than you gain going downhill (Cyclestreets), being reassured that the BBC are working hard to improve their maps, learning how to create “old-fashioned” looking terrain maps with srtm data (Simon Lewis from Map Juice), and exploring the Guardian offices whilst eating one of Moolis’ great wraps.
Thanks again to the WhereCampEU organisers. The WhereCampEU wiki isbeing used to document the outcomes from the unconference.
I have run the WhereCampEU 2010 attendee list (without duplicate names) through the Onomap Classification tool developed here at UCL Geography/ CASA. It gives a fair guess as to the sorts of places this year’s WhereCampEU attendees are from. It isn’t perfect but we get it right most of the time. See how your name is classified here. It looks like the Brits, Germans, Italians and French will dominate this year.
Yesterday I presented the paper “Combining Historic Interpretations of the Great Britain Popualtion with Contemporary Spatial Analysis: the Case of Surnames” during the Geospatial Computing Workshop at the 5th IEEE International Conference on e-Science . You can download the extended abstract here and I have uploaded the complete presentation below. In later posts I will provide a summary of the other papers presented in what I thought was a very interesting session.
The Royal Geographical Society is hosting its annual Explore Conference next weekend (13-15th November). It is an expedition and fieldwork planning weekend that attracts a range of people from well-known adventurers to academics and students. I have been a delegate and panellist for a number of years now and found it a really enjoyable conference. It is invaluable for people (especially undergraduates) wishing to access the many fieldwork funding opportunities that the RGS has to offer. I have always come away inspired and with plenty of ideas for fieldwork and travel. This year I am a panellist on one of the Sunday morning sessions and I would be more than happy to meet up with anyone interested in GIS and conducting fieldwork in cold environments. Full details can be found here.
I am convening a session at next year’s RGS-IBG Annual Conference (2-4th September, London). It is the GIScience Research Group’s Postgraduate session and I have chosen the topic “Analysing and Visualising Social Change”. I hope this offers sufficient breadth to attract a wide range of papers from current postgraduates interested in a diverse set of topics. The breadth of the session should, I hope, attract a larger audience than some of the GIS/ Quantitative sessions did at this year’s RGS-IBG Annual Conference. I have pasted the session details below, please visit the GIScRG’s website for full details of the other GIS sessions and how to submit an abstract. If you are interested in presenting and have any questions I would be happy to answer them.
The data and tools that are used for analysing, visualising and understanding social change have become increasingly accessible and sophisticated in recent years. GIScience has been at the forefront of these advances, developing tools, providing new visualisations and communicating the results to wider audiences. This session seeks to attract postgraduate researchers from all areas of GIScience, Geovisualisation and wider geography who are concerned with monitoring and visualising social change. Submissions are especially welcome from those researching geovisualisation, modeling, geodemographics, migration and other aspects of social change.
