Results tagged “science online”

Tommy Gibbons & Aleks Krotoski chatting during a coffee break at Science Online.

Note the shoes she bought to match her Second Life avatar. :-)

I dropped into one of the unconference sessions, looking at engaging with your readers (of obvious interest to me). The panel did a sterling job of giving a beginner's guide to managing comments and commenters, from different scales (personal blogs to Ars Technica). I thought Ed Yong's comments about building a commenter community around your personal blog were particularly good - and the delurking thread idea is one I intend to nick.

But the audience, once the questions started, took the conversation in an entirely different direction, about the reputation of scientists and (to a degree) to the on-going problem of poor scientific reporting. Now, as a journalist, a profession usually in the top three least trusted professions, I'm not entirely clear why scientists are so concerned, but there's clearly a strong feeling fo disconnect between the scientific community and the general public. There was some attempt in the conversation to shape blogs into the answer to that. However, I think there were two key misconceptions percolating through the discussion. The first was the idea that blogging is inherently publishing to the mainstream - a question was asked that pre-supposed that a science blog that wasn't reaching a non-specialist audience was, in some way, failing. And I disagree strongly with that sentiment. Some of the best blogs I know have small, but highly specialised audiences. A highly specialised science blog is just as valuable as a generalist science communicator  blog - they're just performing different functions.

The second that was a blog is something that "you have to go to" - Ed started to address that point, describing how people share links to interesting articles on Twitter and Facebook (feel free to use the buttons below, folks ;-)) and that creates an ecosystem of content that is pushed outside its traditional content.

To me, this suggests that many within the scientific community are somewhere between three and four years behind the "cutting edge" of social media - much of the focus is still on blogging, and the rise of the social networking systems has yet to have as much of an impact. But I could be wrong in that. It occurs that scientists are used to describing their work in written form - it's an inherent part of the current systems. And perhaps the barrier of entry to blogging is slightly lower here, which means that blogging hasn't been so supplanted by the Twitter/Facebook world. What do you think?

Today's been an interesting contrast with yesterday. dConstruct was very much a temple of the converted, discussing elements of web design theology. Science Online is much more of a culture clash, with the social media crowd meeting sceptical scientist, and coming away with a draw at best. (In that, it reminds me far more of news:rewired.) Nowhere has this clash been more clear than in the presentation by David McCandless, who spoke at both conferences.

I've blogged about McCandless before, and his presentation was much the same in all cases. He does fantastic story-telling through data visualisation, and his presentation was very warmly welcomed by the dConstruct crowd. The Science Online attendees also took to his infographics pretty quickly, at least while the topics was slightly outside the scientific mainstream. The closer the got to science, the more twitchy the audience became. The reason why became apparent pretty quickly. Challenges came to the labelling of one slide, to the data methodology on another. In the questions. he was challenged on the lack of axis labelling on his more graph-like visualisations.

And here was the culture clash - people who have been drilled by years of practice to present data in very clear, systematic and comprehensible ways meeting those who are, essentially, storytelling through data and graphics. I hope people from both sides learnt something from this: the scientists the value of making things comprehensible for a lay audience, the visualisers the fact that a greater degree of rigour can give your work more impact.

And, in a way, I find these sorts of encounters more satisfying than "preaching to the choir" conferences. Through these sorts of clashes, we can actually see learning happening, rather than beliefs being reinforced.