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tags: ll-cluster-illustrating-ideas
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###### tags: -cluster-illustrating-ideas / *author: Brenda Ceja*
`Friday, November 5, 2021`

# Illustrating Ideas: An Interview with Claire Adams

## **Claire Adams** is a Media & Design Fellow (MDF) based in the History Department. This past Thursday, **Brenda Ceja**, a Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellow (LLUF), interviewed Claire about her work with **History 1056 "The New Science of the Human Past: Case Studies at the Cutting Edge."**
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*Interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.*

### *What is your name and title?*
"I'm Claire Adams, MDF for the History dept."

### *What are you here for today?*
So I'm here today to hold open Office Hours for the course Hist 1056, "The New Science of the Human Past." Because the course is teaching how to read scientific papers and make historical arguments, they chose instead of a final paper to have the students create a poster similar to those you would present at a conference.

### *What is the value of doing a final poster over a final paper?*
I would say that a poster allows you to put more graphs in there and different kinds of images, more generally, and have those speak for the text. They also are more true to how this type of research would be presented at academic conferences, and are also, a valuable skill for students to learn in general. It is focusing on the presentation in combination with the written communication.

### *What are some tools students will use to create these posters?*
I'm going to start out with a pencil and paper when they came into the workshop, to get them to think about how you actually design and carry out the use of space with creating an argument. That's the basic level to start out, but for the actual poster we give them a number of options.

**Marcus Knoke (LLUF)** recreated a bunch of posters from previous years in Canva. Then we show them Adobe Illustrator and **Marlon** teaches them InDesign traditionally.

I mean people literally used to do posters PowerPoint and, believe it or not, some academic conferences and journals still recommend it! You would have to put in teeny tiny lettering and hope the DPI was really good enough, and then print that thing off. It was not really good because you can't like zoom in, so you never really know where your stuff is.

I thought , "You know there's way better ways of doing it and it's not that hard to learn! Let's lower the barrier and choose [the LL strategy outlined above], so hopefully students can take away new skills."

### *What are your goals that students get out of this project?*
A number of them! I hope that it encourages them to understand that there's both like tactical elements and arguments that go into things, and there's also the design elements. I don't even mean thinking about how to make a poster "pretty," though obviously that's something that we want them to do. But to think that those visual elements actually are an argument.

The most important part of presenting anything in life, from the content to how you present it, whether it's like you go out and work in a company and you have to present to your boss, is that **just because you came up with some really exciting information, you now actually have to think about how you're going to present that *in a way that makes sense***. I hope that these students are encouraged to do that and become a little bit more familiar with some of these tools. We want to take them out of their comfort zone and create something they've never done before. I hope they get something new out of it and remember this for future assignments.
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