Tag: itf post

ITF notes from class: science posters and presentations

Revising and editing is just as much work as researching and writing! While your education to this point may have emphasized creating (a research topic, a body of research), this stage in your educationIt’s hard to continually revisit a research project/paper/presentation especially when you’ve been working on it for so long. Once you reach the stages of preparing your research for a third party (whether it’s an audience of strangers or your class), the emphasis of your research shifts from gathering to organizing information. Organizing info includes the layout of text and images on your poster; refining your conclusions down to a few key ideas to emphasize to your audience; choosing the MOST essential images or graphics to include on your poster.

With that said, here are some of the main points of feedback given to the class on Wednesday, Nov. 22:

  • Incorporate your conclusion into the title. In class, Prof. Cherrier suggested to incorporate your conclusion into your title to create a specific title for your poster; an additional benefit of doing this serves as a kind of conceptual exercise that helps refine the direction and thrust of your research.
  • Use the new title as a springboard for revisions and prep for your presentation. For example, if your poster’s title reads “Green Stormwater Management Solutions in Brooklyn,” what would you say to someone who read your poster title and asked, “Why does New York need green solutions for stormwater management in Brooklyn?” Once you’ve created a poster title incorporating the solution into the title, then you can start refining the information on the poster as well as the information presented to the audience. If your title is “Implementing Green Infrastructure to Address Flooding and Storm Threats in Newtown Creek Sewershed Lower Manhattan,” then create some “what/how/why” questions from the title to help keep you on topic as you revise your poster.
  • Create a “pitch” to introduce your project to an audience. Even if different people worked on different sections, everyone in the group should be able to briefly explain the project’s main points to a general audience. Develop a few sentences summarizing your project’s main parts in a few sentences: problem(s), process, findings, relevance, conclusion. Keep your pitch short and conversational (yet professional) by limiting yourself to 1-2 sentences per section.
  • Talk through your research in order to refine your ideas and information. If you’re totally stuck (and even if you’re not), I strongly suggest asking a friend or family member to listen to your explain your poster for 8-10 minutes then solicit feedback with the listener’s questions guiding your explanation. The benefits of this exercise include receiving extra practice verbally communicating your research and a fresh set of eyes and ears often catch which elements of your poster, or parts of your pitch, might benefit from more or less information.
  • Your poster (probably) has too much text. That’s valuable poster real estate! Most posters and PowerPoint presentations have too much text! Generally, including too much text stems from a desire to include ALL the info from your research and nervousness about forgetting info. A lot of info on the poster will be communicated verbally to the audience and you will probably add additional details to your audience. You can identify the areas where you can remove text by looking at the sub-bullet points. Example: the “Problem” section on the poster has three bullet points and each bullet point has 2 sub-bullet points.
  • Orient your audience by including a map of the area on your poster. To all groups, Prof. Cherrier asked for a map that showed the location of the neighborhood in relation to the rest of New York City. She suggested using a Google Earth image to orient the audience to the location of the neighborhood (Coney Island, Red Hook, Newtown, etc.) as well as the location of the sewersheds within each neighborhood. Using a map helps ground the audience in specific, familiar information (what and where) as they learn new information from your presentation and your poster.
  • Keep formatting consistent. Section titles should all have the same formatting; don’t randomly bold or italicize words; text should be left-aligned or left-right justified, etc.
  • “So what?” is a question. Include the question mark in the section’s title!

“Houston’s Flood Is a Design Problem” by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic (August 28, 2017)

Given the destruction of Hurricane Harvey – as well as Prof. Cherrier’s research interest in the human impact on aquatic environments – I tweeted a link to the article “Houston’s Flood Is a Design Problem” by Ian Bogost at The Atlantic. about Houston’s stormwater management and continued development (sprawl) offers both a basic introduction to Houston’s topography as a broad overview of factors facing city officials as the city starts to recover and eventually rebuild. I learned the definition of a bayou, a slow-moving river; moreover, the author explains if Houston had been left undeveloped, the natural bayous would have slowly absorbed the excess water from the Harvey’s storm. Houston, the nation’s fourth most-populous city, drained these bayous to develop the land and therefore had to design a system of stormwater management. What Harvey exposed was Houston’s chronic issues with flooding, the lack of historical models for the kind of rainfall sustained by Houston during Harvey, and the flaws in the city’s stormwater management system put into place when the bayous were drained. Bogost writes,

Houston poses both a typical and an unusual situation for stormwater management. The city is enormous, stretching out over 600 square miles. It’s an epitome of the urban sprawl characterized by American exurbanism, where available land made development easy at the edges. Unlike New Orleans, Houston is well above sea level, so flooding risk from storm surge inundation is low. Instead, it’s rainfall that poses the biggest threat.

….

Many planners contend that impervious surface itself is the problem. The more of it there is, the less absorption takes place and the more runoff has to be managed. Reducing development, then, is one of the best ways to manage urban flooding. The problem is, urban development hasn’t slowed in the last half-century. Cities have only become more desirable, spreading outward over the plentiful land available in the United States.

The above excerpt showcases an effective aspect of the article, framing Houston’s flooding as a general conflict between Man and Nature and also specifically rooting that conflict between Texas development of land (often without zoning or land regulations) vs. nature’s stormwater management system, in this case, the bayous.

Outside Resource: the art of Gordon Matta-Clark and New York in the 1970s

In the 1970s the artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) entered condemned buildings in the Bronx and, using a chainsaw, cut out parts of the architectural support. Matta-Clark considered the transitory, fugitive acts of (illegally) entering and cutting as the work of art so he documented his process with photographs that were then exhibited in galleries:

Gordon Matta-Clark, Threshole, 1972-73. Image Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/07/towards-anarchitecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-le-corbusier
Gordon Matta Clark, Bronx Floors (1972-73). MOMA. Image source: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81396

His work doesn’t aim to create “beautiful” art but explore the politics of place and space. In her book about Matta-Clark, Object to be Destroyed , Pamela M. Lee describes the relationship between artist, artistic practice, and space:

Matta-Clark reflected critically on the temporality of the build environment, a materialist recoding of an “architecture of time.” For the presence of his work within both the urban and suburban sphere emanded that it be encountered as a socialized thing; and its imminent demolition ensured that it not be elevated to the rank of transcendent art objects.

Source: Lee, Object to be Destroyed, 11.

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Outside Resource: podcast episode “How Urban Planning Works” (30:18 min)

Website description: “In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the origins, philosophies and practices of urban planning.”

Part of the podcast series “Stuff You Should Know” hosts Josh and Chuck explain in this episode how urban planning “works.” I chose this episode because this past week’s discussion focused on Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, planner and anti-planner, and the history of urban planning provided in this podcast puts both figures into a broader historical context.

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