SSP 2016 Annual Meeting brought to life by graphic recorder murals

October 12, 2016 – Illustrator and visual practitioner Corrina Keeling successfully captured and visualized the new horizons of scholarly communication for attendees of the 38th Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting last June with a series of murals, prepared live throughout the event.  The attention-grabbing images captured the ideas presented by the keynote speakers and the key takeaways on meeting topics solicited from attendees outside the session rooms.

Keeling produced four murals while serving as the graphic recorder for the 2016 Annual Meeting, one for each keynote presentation and another for each full day of the conference.   The 2016 Annual Meeting was structured around the theme of Crossing Boundaries: New Horizons in Scholarly Communication and each of the images produced by Keeling portray the theme as it was explored and discussed at the meeting.

Each of Keeling’s murals is displayed below.  A video of the murals being created can be seen here.

Reacting to Dr. Margaret-Ann Armour’s keynote, Crossing Boundaries: Encouraging Diversity, Keeling’s first mural is focused on women in leadership roles. It highlighting the reasons why diversity matters and offering examples of how organizations can work to be inclusive.  This topic was revisited during the meeting’s concurrent sessions via the Mind the Gap 2 panel discussion.

Keeling’s second mural asked the question “What innovations or disruptions are driving your work in scholarly publishing?”  Comments poured in from attendees and the artist was able to incorporate discussions happening all around the meeting.  The mural acknowledges that the changing landscape of scholarly communications means having to adapt, take big ideas andturn them into practices that work and embrace new technologies.

The final day of the Annual Meeting featured a keynote from David S. Kidder, author of The Start Up Playbook, focused on entrepreneurship and disruption.   Once again, the mural provides a showcase for the topics discussed in the keynote, offering a taste of Kidder’s presentation with an emphasis on his view that how we think may be more important than what we know and offering strategies for success.

The last mural created by Keeling provides a recap of the meeting, featuring key lessons attendees provided as the meeting unfolded either by notes left with the recorder or shared via the #SSP20016 hashtag.   The most poignant and popular takeaways were incorporated and visualized within the mural bringing the contributions and perspectives of attendees to life.

For more information about SSP’s 2016 Annual Meeting please visit the SSP website.  Videos from this year’s sessions are available in the SSP Library.  The 2017 Annual Meeting will be held in Boston, MA, May 31 through June 2.