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Designing a Research Poster for the Humanities: Designing Your Poster

This guide will help students design and create a research poster suitable for showcasing their work and research in the humanities disciplines.

Ways to Organize Your Research

While research posters have long been used in the hard sciences to convey the results of experiments in undergraduate and graduate research, posters can be adapted to display research done in the humanities as well. While they might look quite different from scientific posters, there a few styles that lend themselves well to humanities research. 

Formats that have been utilized for humanities posters:

• Modified IMRaD

• Thematic

• Narrative

• Questions and Answers

• Chronological

IMRaD

Modified IMRaD: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusions

  • This approach mimics more scientific designs of posters
  • Provides very clear layout in distinct, separate steps
  • Not all humanities topics and research will lend themselves to this type of design

Thematic

Thematic: Group sections of your poster according to different themes that emerge from your research

  • Sub-themes may pop out at you as your research progresses
  • Can group similar sub-themes together
  • Differences in themes in your research will emerge (separating into sub-themes will easily highlight these differences for your audience)

Narrative

Narrative: Tell a story about your topic or research question

  • This approach can be particularly useful for research about a specific historical event
  • What story do you want to share with people?
  • What impacted you about your research that you want to share with others?
  • A very straightforward but effective way to share research while telling a story

Chronological

Chronological: starting with the earliest and following the order in which they occurred

  • While it sounds simple, this might be the most practical approach to highlighting your research
  • A useful approach for research that delves into a particular property, person or event
  • Easy to arrange your information based on dates or the chronology of events

Questions & Answers

Questions and Answers: Summarize your main research questions and how you answered them.

  • This approach is slightly more scientific in nature
  • Provides and easy way to organize your information
  • What question(s) were you trying to answer?
  • What answers were you able to uncover?