Call for Posters

All conference participants are welcome to contribute posters.

What is a poster?

A poster is between one and three large pieces of paper (or a flight of smaller sheets pieced together). A poster is an opportunity to publish a very short article and discuss it with your peers. It may be an overview of a technical topic, problem, question, product, or case study. It may include drawings, text, code fragments, or whatever you need to make your point.

The typical poster is not just a shortened version of a conference talk (although those are acceptable!); posters are less formal, more interactive, and may provoke argument. Your poster will be on view throughout the conference, so the main ideas should be clear without explanation.

Posters will be displayed where the conference’s coffee breaks are held, which will give all conference attendees the opportunity to read your posters, and for you to discuss your posters with your colleagues.

Why posters?

• Increase the variety of points of view aired at the conference
• Encourage two-way communication
• Allow detailed and esoteric presentations
• Provide a forum for “small” presentations (ideas shorter than a conference paper, of interest to only a few people, or which are best communicated graphically)

Balisage Glossary Posters

In reading the Balisage papers, we on the conference committee all found ourselves reaching for our dictionaries (or worse, Wikipedia) to look up terms we didn't know. While we were not all puzzled by the same words, we all found that there was challenging vocabulary in several of the papers.

In order to give those of us who don't have the expertise, or vocabulary, needed to understand some Balisage papers, we are instituting the "Balisage Glossary" as a form of conference poster.

If there are terms in your paper that are:

• key to understanding your paper, and
• not in common use in the XML/markup community, and that
• can be defined or explained in a page or less

please provide a definition and put it up as a poster.

Similarly, if you as a Balisage attendee think you can help other Balisagers by defining terms that are, or should be, used in presentations or discussion, please feel free to contribute to the glossary.*

Technical specifications

From one to three poster-pages, with text large enough to read easily from 2 to 4 feet away. No need to be fancy; hand-written with markers is fine! Use paper (or card stock) not Foam-Core (it is very difficult to thumb-tack thick material to the bulletin board).

No more than the equivalent of 3 poster-pages per presentation, with each poster-page 22" x 28" maximum (56 by 71 cm).

The conference will supply the following:

• Bulletin-board style display boards
• Push pins, for mounting plain paper posters
• Blank flip-chart pages, for ad hoc posters
• Colored markers, for ad hoc posters

Poster presenters must print their own posters and bring the posters to the conference, or create hand-written posters on-site using paper and markers. Presenters who need any additional supplies or equipment (such as special pins for posters on foam-core) to display your poster must provide these supplies for themselves.

To reserve space for a poster presentation, or with any questions on posters, send email to Debbie Lapeyre or call +1 301/315-9633. (Poster presenters should send Debbie your title and a few words describing the topic.)

* Facetious and satirical definitions should be so identified with an appropriate emoticon in the corner to warn the literal-minded among us ;-)