Academic Posters Across Disciplines: a Preliminary Study

Cross-disciplinary studies of academic genres are a rich source of information on the social practices of researchers. The concept of ‘community’ is particularly useful to account for how genres are produced, received and responded to by individuals acting as members of social groups. The present paper reports on a preliminary analysis of the main textual and visual elements of conference posters in different disciplines. In particular, it describes which communicative strategies are favoured, which are allowed and, finally, which should be known to aspiring authors seeking admission to the academic community. For this purpose, a corpus of 60 posters belonging to the disciplines of Psychology, Law and Physics was assembled and investigated both textually and visually, applying an analytical framework (D’Angelo 2010b) based on Hyland’s (2000) approach to metadiscourse and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1998, 2001) analysis of visual content in the media.