The Genre of Medical Conference Posters

The chapter investigates on the genre of medical posters presentations and analyses their relationship between text and images, as well as the relevance of images in relation to text. Such a multimodal analysis indicates that visual elements play a key role in posters, where they often take up 40-50% of available space. Even though most posters contextualise visuals within a scientific narrative, the fact that some have no text at all underlines the vital importance of visuals; even methodological aspects and results are communicated visually. In the corpus, graphs are most common in the Results section, while tables are used both in Methods and Results. The predominance of tables over graphs and images seems to reflect practical reasons: the use of computer-designed visuals provides graphs with keys that require little interpretation.