A Framework for Medical Poster Multimodal Analysis: a Pilot Study

Recent decades have been characterized by an incredible intensity of social change, eased by progress and technology, which, through digitization, have facilitated the processes of globalization and mobility (Fairclough 2006). In this context, speed has been positively seen as a manifestation of efficiency (Kress 2010). In academia, this is indirectly confirmed by ‘publish or perish’ pressure, that is the possibility academic members have to acquire professional recognition. Such speed is not only supported by the proliferation of specialised journals, the place where research can be printed and prestige can be acquired, but also by international conferences, the place where research can be ‘shown’. This is particularly true for the medical sciences. In conferences in particular, efficiency has often been identified with the organizing of poster sessions, because “[g]iven the limitations of time, the poster format does provide for the maximum number of presentations to be scheduled in a given period, space permitting” (Pearce 1992: 1680). Medical poster sessions seem to be preferred both by researchers and conference organizing committees. There is a large amount of literature available on medical posters by scientific authors. From the perspective of applied linguistics, the genre of posters has undergone little investigation. The first description of posters was offered by Dubois (1985a, 1985b). Swales and Feak (2000: 81) suggest that posters have for many years been “the poor country cousin of papers”. Apart from some scholars (Burgess/Fagan 2004; Swales, 2004; MacIntosh-Murray, 2007) who describe the genre of posters rather than analysing it, to the best of my knowledge, the only contribution in terms of multimodal analysis of academic posters is offered by D’Angelo (2010). Given the limited analysis of the genre of medical posters from an applied linguistics perspective and, at the same time, the enormous demands placed on posters as visual representations of scientific knowledge, though with a lack of any systematic and consistent analysis of visual elements, as different forms of discourse, contributing to the construction of the meaning making, it is the aim of this paper to create a framework for the multimodal analysis of medical posters. As posters are viewed in context, along with dozens of others, it is certainly essential to capture the audience’s attention. Drawing from Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), my assumption here is that such a requirement is commonly met thanks to appropriate interrelation between visuals and text for the sake of achieving effective efficacious communication.