Virtual poster presentations at CUNY UMass

Unfortunately, on Sunday March 8th we made the decision to cancel the physical portion of the CUNY conference and transition to a virtual conference. If you were scheduled to present a poster at CUNY, then we hope that you will participate in the virtualized version of our conference, and share your work with the community. This page contains instructions for how to post virtual poster presentations at our conference. See here for information on how to attend our virtual poster sessions.

Virtual poster set-up and participation

The virtual poster sessions will be held on the CUNY 2020 OSF repository. There are two things we would like you to upload for your virtual poster session:

  • A .pdf copy of your poster. Your poster may be either portrait or landscape orientation. Please try to stick to the original physical dimensions for posters in setting up your PDF document: 34 inches high x 44 inches wide (or 44 inches high and 34 inches wide).
  • A short .mp4 video of you discussing your poster. Please upload a short video that includes a brief discussion of your poster. Think of this as your poster spiel that you’d give passerby who asked ‘what’s the poster all about?’ They can be as short as you’d like (the 30 second drive-by version!) or up to five minutes if you’d like to give a short presentation. We will leave the details of how the video looks to you, but we give guidance and suggestions for how to produce a poster video below. These videos should be 5 minutes maximum. 

Please do not feel obligated to make the video component if you are uncomfortable with this option or simply prefer not to for any reason; we suggest this as one way to recapture the face-to-face aspect of the poster session. But minimally uploading the poster PDF counts as ‘having presented the poster at CUNY.’

In addition, please consider uploading:

  • A text transcript of your video. To maximize accessibility of your presentation, consider including a text transcript of your video. We are unable to offer automatic transcription services at present, however. You may also look into automatic generation of closed captions.
  • Video chat or other media. If you are interested in hosting a live video chat during your poster session (e.g. over Zoom, Skype, YouTube streaming, or Google Hangouts), or have other types of media you would like to share with poster visitors during the poster session, please include details in the abstract of your OSF project. While we are minimally asking all attendees to use OSF comments, if you have ideas for additional ways of interacting, we would love to see you offer these to our attendees! We would especially like to encourage you to consider options that allow for open conversations that anyone passing through can participate in as in a real poster session. For example, email isn’t ideal, because a virtual passerby can’t just ‘listen in on’ that conversation.

Step 1: Send OSF a pdf of your poster

To get started, please head to the CUNY 2020 OSF repository. On our page you will find instructions on how to add a .pdf copy of your poster to the CUNY 2020 repository. Follow the instructions on this page. By emailing your .pdf copy of the poster to this account, your poster will automatically be given an OSF project identifier and be added to CUNY.

Points to note: 

  • Make sure that the email subject line is the poster title as you have it in the CUNY conference booklet; this is how the project will be named on OSF, and it’s how attendees will find your poster. So it’s important to keep this name so interested folks can find it!
  • Please make sure that the email address you send your poster with is the one that you wish to register with (or already have an account on) OSF with! Otherwise, you will not be able to add video and transcript to your poster’s OSF site without creating a new OSF account.
  • Please delete your e-mail signature before sending. All of the text in the email will be uploaded as the abstract of your repository, including any signatures that are there.
  • Emailing OSF your poster will automatically create an account for you on the OSF. You may then log in any time and edit your poster’s project page, including deleting files, uploading new files, and so on.

Step 2: Make your video!

Please create a short video to accompany your poster. Treat this as if a conference attendee approaches your poster and asks you what your poster is all about. You may do this any way you would like: show your face, don’t show your face, show a nice background, have a view of your poster, give slides, or any combination of these! We anticipate our attendees have lots of different ways of making videos. We are happy for you all to get creative and have fun with this, and use whatever software you like. But we have one request: Please make (or convert) your video to .mp4 format, and upload a copy of this .mp4 on the OSF for archival purposes.

Beyond this, we would like to encourage presenters to use their imagination and use any tools they have at their disposal to connect with viewers during their virtual poster sessions. Information about how to contact or interact with you beyond OSF comments during your virtual poster session should be posted in the abstract of your OSF project.

Videos in Quicktime/iMovie

Mac users can make movies using Movie, QuickTime Player, and even just the camera functionality on your phone. Here’s how to use Quicktime to make a video of screen + webcam:

  • Open Quicktime.
  • Go to file > new movie recording. Go to view > float on top.  Position the image where you want it on the screen.
  • Go to file > new screen recording. Click the down arrow next to the record button.  Select internal microphone as sound source. Press the record button.
  • Make your slide(s) full screen. Now give your talk.
  • When you’re done, minimize your slides. You’ll see a little record button on the upper right app bar; click it.  This will stop the recording.
  • Save the file somewhere.

Here’s how you can convert the Quicktime movie to an .mp4:

  • Open iMovie.
  • Go to Projects, then Create New, then Import Media.
  • Import the file you just made.
  • Go to file > share > file
  • Select Quality:High and Compress:Faster.
  • Save it. It will now save as an mp4

Videos in OBS

Here are instructions for making videos with OBS, a platform-independent, open source, free piece of software for making .mp4 videos:

  1. Download OBS, a free app that enables you to record your screen while using your webcam for video. See here for a tutorial on the basics of OBS.
  2. Create your OBS scene by adding a Window Capture source to mirror your poster and Video Capture Device source to record you (see images below)

First, create new sources:

Then select Window Capture:

Choose the opened window that has your poster:

Right-click to resize the scene by selecting “resize output (source size)”:

Create a video device capture source:

Resize your video source as needed:

3. Now change the recording settings so that you are recording an .mp4 file (see images below). Select settings:

In the Output settings change the recording format to mp4:

Now you can record your video!

4. Access the video in you OBS Files (see image):

Step 3: Upload the video to OSF

Once you have emailed your poster, made your .mp4 video, and (hopefully!) provided a transcript for accessibility, log into your OSF account. This will be the account you sent the poster to CUNY with. Once you log in, you will see a list of your projects. You should see your poster in this list, and its title will be your poster title (which you put in the email subject line!).

For our ‘Test’ poster, here’s what it looks like when we log in:

Click on your poster’s project title. You will be taken to the project page, which is a summary of all of the project components. We’re going to give you only the basics here to get your poster online, but here is a video tutorial that will cover this interface in more depth.

To upload your video and transcript, look at the ‘Files’ panel in the lower left. This is a representation of the file hierarchy for your poster project. Click on ‘OSF storage’, which should be one level in the hierarchy above your poster PDF. When you click on this, a button that says ‘upload’ will appear in the bar at the top of this panel. Click on this button, and a file selection menu will open. Find your .mp4 file and upload it; repeat for the transcript. Here’s what that will look like: 

Once you’ve uploaded the video, you should see it listed alongside your poster:

And that’s it: your poster, your presentation, and your transcript are now archived in perpetuity in the CUNY2020 OSF repository. Try adding some keyword tags to the poster to help your colleagues find your work. And be ready to start interacting with virtual attendees about your work! To learn about that, surf on over to the attending the virtual poster session page.

Step 4: Monitor OSF comments (Present your poster)

Once you’ve uploaded your materials, you will have added your work to the CUNY2020 conference. It is now ready to be shared with the conference!

Conference attendees will be directed to interact with you and your poster through OSF comments. During your scheduled poster session, try to be available (on your computer, connected to the Internet), and monitor these comments so you can interact with attendees in real-time. Please note that Poster Session A (Thursday 3/19) has been rescheduled to 12 – 2PM EDT to accommodate time zones. Still, we know that the time slots we have won’t work for everyone in all time zones. If the scheduled poster sessions do not work for your local time zone, please write in the abstract the times that you would like to be make yourself available to interact with attendees.

Important notes:

  • You must be logged in to your OSF account to interact with folks during your poster session. Double check this!
  • The default is that comments and responses will be archived with your project. As the project owner, you may choose to delete your own comments, but you will not be able to delete other folks’ comments.

The comment functionality in OSF appears as a speech bubble icon in the upper right hand corner of your project page. This is the view that both you and attendees will have:

If they are reading along on our page on attending the virtual poster sessions, then they will be commenting on your poster. When you have an unread comment, it will be indicated by a number overload on the speech bubble icon. Here’s what it looks like when you’ve got one unread comment:

Click on the speech bubble, and you’ll see the comment:

Click on the return arrow to respond to the comment: