Biomedicine on Display

If you write or read blogs that include history of science and medicine, you may be interested in filling in this short online survey posted by Jaipreet Virdi, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto — it only takes a minute or two. Jaipreet explains the background for the survey here.

(Thanks, Rebekah, for the tip. Rebekah also recommends this link to a good list of blogs and twitter accounts with history of science content).

Writing on a blog about the benefits of blogging might seem a bit superfluous, but here is a nice reminder of the possibilities that the social web can open.

The philosopher Levi Bryant, one of the central figures in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), recently wrote this blogpost on chance encounters and why blogging can be a vital tool in generating new spaces for new philosophical movements.

Speculative realism (SR), the new philosophical umbrella which Bryant’s work falls under, is an almost entirely internet-born phenomenon. In the post, Bryant wonders about the randomness of new connections and raises a central issue about why blogging and participating in discussions on the internet can generate new energy:

The internet, and blogosphere in particular, created a common place that allowed these strange entities of SR and OOO to become a little more real, a little more substantial, a little more existent. Through these discussions and the medium that’s allowed these discussions to take place, new lines of thought, new problematics, new questions, and new positions have emerged.

Bryant raises the very real issue that most of the time, the articles we spend most of our time writing generates almost no response at all. Only a handful of people read them and more often than not, they sink to the bottom like stones, serving little purpose aside from filling up ones CV and as statistical evidence to the administrators that something is actually being done. But blogs can help build contacts and networks in a much more immediate way. And open for new opportunities as well.

These [relationships with other researchers on the web] lead to collaborative projects, intellectual growth and enrichment, further articles, opportunities for conference presentations, and so on. Participation in electronic media increases your likelihood of being read and allows you to meet other researchers that you would never otherwise meet. All of this is a way of encouraging readers to participate, to explore ideas even when they end up going nowhere, and to avoid seeing participation here as something secondary to your academic work.

What exactly will come of these new forms of life being generated by the new media is still blurry. But taking ones ideas and research into the public domain and seeing what new connections it sparks is surely worthwhile.

I’m often thinking about how my presence on social web media platforms — mainly blogging and some occasional twittering — enhances or weakens my other scholarly activities, like writing books and papers for traditional history of science journals.

Personally, I believe writing on social web media is a significant source of inspiration for more traditional scholarly writing. Or rather: It’s not a question of either-or, but both-and.

But I have many colleagues who believe the opposite (mainly those who’ve never tried it seriously :-) So it’s good that someone tries to dig up some empirical evidence for and against spending one’s precious scholarly time on the social web.

Carolyn Hank, a phd candidate in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill, is currently making a survey in support of her research study, ‘Scholars and their Blogs: Characteristics, Preferences and Perceptions Impacting Digital Preservation’.

Inspired by notions like ‘bloggership’ and ‘blogademia’, she’s asking questions about the publishing behaviour of blogging scholars, our perceptions of the blog vs. our scholarly activities, and our thoughts on how our writings can be preserved, i.e., questions like: 

Are blogs scholarship? Where do they fit in relation to one’s cumulative scholarly record? [...] Will the scholar blogs of today be available into the future?

I’ll be happy to answer Carolyn’s thoughtful questions (received by email yesterday). If somebody else wants to participate, you can perhaps pursuade her to send you the questionnaire.

The social web is almost by definition centered around the hyperlink. One of the attractions with blogging is the possibility to sprinkle hyperlinks all over the text. Is there a drawback? Oh yes, says Nicholas Carr:

Sometimes, they’re big distractions — we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

I don’t know which studies Carr is referring to, because he doesn’t hyperlink — but intuitively I think he’s right.

He adds that one of the remedies may be to put the links at the end of the text (like end notes in an article).

Bioephemera is (temporarily?) closing down. As Jessica says, “everything is ephemeral – including bioephemera”. She has met “many wonderful fellow bloggers and faithful readers through the blog”, but keeping it going has become “a significant investment of time that I just don’t have … I need to refocus on work, life, and art”. Hopefully Jessica will return. Online life will be poorer without her thoughtful comments. Good luck with your work, life and art!

Missed this, because there’s an Atlantic Ocean between me and the event:

But Jessica Palmer (Bioephemera) attended and has a thoughtful comment about the science blogosphere. I will be back with a comment on her comment.

When I opened my mailbox this morning I found the following enticing message:

Hello Thomas
I’m writing this to let you know about a brand new featured post we just made over here at Medicareer entitled, “Top 50 Biotech Blogs.” I thought that you and your readers over at Biomedicine on Display might find it to be an interesting read. Please do let me know if you have any feedback — http://phlebotomytechnicianprograms.org/2010/top-50-biotech-blogs/
Warm Regards,
Emily Johnston
Medicareer

Tired as I always am seven o’clock in the morning when I’m preparing breakfast for Johanna I clicked on the link and found a site with a nice long list of blogs — with ours at the top, fairly decently described. But, of course, the site has no contact address, no link to a main site, and no “Emily Johnston” at a company called Medicareer exists on the web. So what do these guys actually get out of bringing all this blog information together? Have I installed malicious code now by clicking on their site? Anyone who knows?

Speaking about Jim Edmonson and the Dittrick Museum (i.e., the medical museum at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland), I’ve forgotten to tell you that they have just launched an institutional blog called — ‘Dittrick Museum’. Follow it here. Welcome to the medical museum blog sector!

A “team of pretty cool people” in Chicago are twittering and blogging under the name ‘Museumist’. “Putting the Museum World on Display” is their motto. We’ll twue them for infringing our precious trade marks (Museionist on Twitter and Biomedicine on Display) :-)

A couple of weeks ago, I noted with some innocent pleasure that this humble blog was listed among the 100 Best Blogs and Websites for Innovative Academics. Pretty nice, I thought!

Then it turned out we’re also selected for the 100 Best Curator and Museum Blogs. Pretty nice too, I thought!

A couple of days ago, a service called The Daily Reviewer told us we’ve been selected for their Top Museum Blogs list. But now I’m not so innocent any more. Here’s their message:

Congratulations! Your readers have submitted and voted for your blog at The Daily Reviewer. We compiled an exclusive list of the Top 100 museums Blogs, and we are glad to let you know that your blog was included!

It’s the same kind of rhetoric you recognise from spam mails. The introductory “Congratulations!” tells it all. You can also acquire an ugly little yellowish badge to put on your site. Classical vanity fair methodology.

I mean, they probably don’t list blogs with Technorati authority below a certain point; they probably take advantage of blogs with a certain readership and utilise our vanity to sell advertisements. Parasites on our egos.

Three months ago, Nature Biotechnology (27: 514-18, 2009) published a commentary titled ‘Science Communication reconsidered’, a topic we are of course very interested in here at MedMus.

I believe the commentary is still worth a comment, because it was written by 24 (sic!) more or less well known ‘experts’ in science communication, including Matt (”framing science”) Nisbett.

The co-authored commentary — which is based on a workshop on the changing nature of science communication “focusing specifically on biotech, biomedicine and genetics” held in Washington D.C. earlier this year — describes the state of science communication in general and in the printed news media in particular, and then ends with some recommendations for how to make the situation better.

The recommendations are peculiar for at least two reasons:

First, I’m surprised that none of the 24 authors seem to have noticed the importance of science, technology and medical museums for today’s science communication arena. True, many STM museums still have their focus on science, technology and medicine of the past, but more and more museums both in Europa and North America are increasingly identifying themselves as venues for science communication.

This total lack of mention of museums is all the more surprising because the 24 authors have a pronounced trust in government-sponsored science communication. In fact, they are wedded to a mixture of old mass media, newspaper journalism and a mid-20th century understanding of government-induced democracy.

The authors believe that the alleged threat to science journalism posed by corporate science media is thus best met by increasing funding of university- and government-supported science journalism.

Accordingly they don’t have much trust in science blogging. It’s mentioned in passing, but otherwise they believe blogging is “unlikely to become an effective solution” to what they perceive as a crisis in science communication.

Well, apparently the 24 authors are not entirely up-to-date with today’s media situation. Not only has grassroot blogging (both blogs by scientists and blogs by non-scientists about science) proved to be enormously vigorous. It is also much more likely to provide a democratic balance to corporate science newsrooms.

Why this nostalgic cry for an old-style public media and gvmt-sponsored science communication policy? Part of the explanation may lie in the  professional backgrounds of the 24 authors. Despite their focus on ‘biotech, biomedicine and genetics’, surprisingly many of them are affiliated with schools, departments and centres of public and community health.

My general impression is that scholars of public health tend to be more bound to have faith in goverment-sponsored health campaigns and less bound to trust bottom-up citizen health initiatives. Also that the basic rationale for much public and community health is a tendency to support government solutions for health policy issues.

If so, this co-authored plaidoyer for enhancing science communication is just classical public health communication policy writ large. I doubt a group of writers from departments of medical engineering would come up with similar recommendations for science communication. And Medgadget would probably find the commentary outrageous.

A few weeks ago I attended the Science Online London 2009 conference – a conference on science communication in the new era of “the Web”. As they wrote on the conference homepage:

The Web is rapidly changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Science online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

The conference itself made good use of the online tools. As an apropriate feature it was possible to attend the conference online via Second Life (SL) instead of on site (in ‘First’ or ‘Real’ life). So I attended the conference while sitting in my living room in an appartment in Denmark, joined in virtual reality by people from various parts of the globe and quite different time zones. Blogger Dave Munger even gave his presentation through Second Life, as the screen picture below is an image of (notice also my freshly created SL avatar sitting in the lefthand corner):

The Second Life feature in itself made the conference interesting, so let me start there and come back to the actual contents of the conference later. By doing this, I am also letting you experience one of the unfortunate aspects of doing conferences in Second Life: the technology is not only a media but also distracts you from concentrating on what is going on. Or in one case when there was only a bad audio available from a breakout session, it made attending the conference difficult. Then again, there were other benefits.

One major benefit (and major distraction too) was the ongoing commentary and debate going on in Second Life while speakers were presenting. The presentations were communicated by video and audio streaming (see programme and streams here), while powerpoint slides were visible on the virtual screen you see to the left in the picture above. Ad to this a chat browser with ongoing commentaries and an ability to rotate your view around the virtual amphitheatre that set the stage for the SL conference – to view the often very elaborate, fancily dressed avatars, whom you were chatting with – and you get an idea of the set up. Commentaries varied from quick resumes of what was just said to parallel discussions or sharing of links and jokes (like this one) – kind of like handing notes to each other during a lecture. This was really helpful for a newbie like me, and it also gave a feeling of inclusion and made a great opening for networking, since everyone spoke to everyone in the chat.

From a museum-outreach perspective the chatting also gave me a couple of unexpected examples of what SL can do. Chek for instance the HMS Beagle (Darwin) exhibit in SL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Elucian%20Omega/175/103/23. Second Life may be a relatively small online community and you may need a lot of computer skills to pull something like the HMS Beagle off, but – for me at least – it opens up for a whole new perspective on the use of online tools in a museum context.

As for the actual content of the conference there were several interesting presentations: aforementioned blogger Dave Munger, science editor of The Times Mark Henderson and ‘Genetic Future’ blogger Daniel MacArthur talked about ‘Blogging for impact’, how to use the blog as a tool to achieve fame, present journalists with a good science communication opportunity, and further/damage your academic career. Basically saying that blogging is the future of science communication and of becoming a popular academic, and that comments are usually of a much higher quality in blogs than on the mainline web (please feel free to prove them right ;-)). But also that not all universities recognize this (yet), and that being publicly critical of collegues on your blog may damage your career. There was a breakout session on institutional barriers afterwards, but I’ll skip that here. See here for videos of most of the conference or here for a blog that has links to all the blogposts on the conference and its different sessions.

Another interesting presentation was on managing online scientific communities – both on the technical issues involved (tech support, spam, legal aspects etc.) and on building communities on the Web. Taking the online scientific community ResearchGate as a good example, the presentation stressed the need for learning from the community what their needs are, continously developing the online resources (search engines, interface, applications), and engaging visitors. 30-35% of ResearchGate’s registered users are active ca. once a month (doing literature search, asking a question etc.), so it seems they have found a productice way of making an online community. Knowing what your audience is interested in and would want to know about or be able to do seems to be the way of creating an actual community. Interaction and involvement are important.

The conference ended with a presentation by science fiction writer and former research scientist John Gilbey under the headline: Far Out: Speculations on Science Communication 50 years From Now. Gilbey not so much outlined a future of science communication as he asked a lot of questions relating to the current way things are heading. The questions also (kind of) summarized the underlying questions in, and pointed to the context of, the conference’s different presentations. While thinking on a concept like New Museology, these questions made a lot of sense to me, so let me just end this post with some of Gilbey’s questions:

In a changed future who will our [insert scientist/blogger/profession etc.] sponsors be? How free will we be? Will we be encouraged to deal with public by employers? Would you blog against ‘evil’ organisations anonymously?

Will virtual reality be an obiqutiuos part of science communication in the near future? Scientists’ location becoming irrelevant?

Would a future environmental event spur more interst in science? Or would society crash totally following an unrecoverable internet failure? How many would loose information they couldn’t recover?

Most of the persons in SL answered in the positive to these questions. Would you?

The Accredited Online Universities website thinks this humble blog is among the “100 best blogs and websites for innovative academics”:

“Consider this your one and only stop for awesome biomedical news. It offers info on upcoming conferences, the role of technology in affecting social change, the importance of organ donors, and more”.

Well, that’s nice to hear!

Btw, the other 99 are:
BlogScholar ; ProTeacher Community ; Students of the World ; Experiential Education Portal ; Education Week ; Teachers.net ; Edutopia ; Science Fair Project Resources ; ProTeacher Directory ; Teacher Leaders Network ; Effective Teaching ; Building Excellence Together ; To Try to Teach to Wonder ; Teach Effectively ; The Education Wonks ; Critical Mass ; About.com: Graduate School ; Academic Productivity ; Technology Solutions for Teaching and Research; Techsophist ; Higher Education News from the Collegiate Way ; The Kept-Up Academic Librarian ; American Revolution Blog ; Early Medieval Art ; Art(h)ist’ry ; The View From Kalamazoo ; Confessions of a Young Professor ; Academic Sandbox ; Keywords for American Cultural Studies ; Literature Compass Blog ; New York Philosopher ; Objectivist v. Constructivist v. Theist ; Observations on film art and Film Art ; Quod She ; Varieties of Unreligious Experience ; A. Lincoln Blog ; Blogging the Renaissance ; The Cranky Professor ; English Eclectic ; Medieval Crusades ; World War II History ; The Victorian Peeper ; The Excluded Middle ; Mumblings of a Platonist ; Dial “M” for Musicology ; Musical Perceptions ; Renewable Music ; Smarter Music ; America’s Young Theologian ; Better Bibles Blog ; Just This Side of Heresy ; Slave of the Word ; Theologies ; Thoughts On Antiquity ;  The Becker-Posner Blog ; Biocurious ; Econ Academics Blog ; Bioethics Discussion Blog ; Women’s Bioethics Blog ; Ethical Technology ; Abandoned Footnotes ; Time to Eat the Dogs ; Cognitive Daily ; Advanced Studies ; Not Even Wrong ; Swans On Tea ; Watered Down Physics ; Union Street ; Rethinking Markets ; Uncommon Thought Journal ; Dynamics of Cats ; Bad Astronomy ; Law School Academic Support Blog ; Neuroethics & Law Blog ; Iconoclasm ; Art and Architecture ; “no words no action” ; Learning Architecture ; Don’t Forget Your Shovel ; Iterating Towards Openness ; The Stingy Scholar ; Chasing the Dragon’s Tale ; Procrastination ; iMechanica ;Design Impact ; Ars Mathematica ; Good Math, Bad Math ; Three-Toed Sloth ; Mind Reader’s Dictionary ; Thoughts of a Neo-Academic ; Looking At Nothing ; The Sceptical Chymist ; A Sibilant Intake of Breath ; Broadbanding the Nation ; The Duck of Minerva ; (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography ; Global Health Ideas ; Doctor of Journalism ; Thinking With My Fingers

While we’re at it, here is another interesting conference coming up. (See here or here for recent posts about interesting conferences.)

The Danish research center DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials) have organized a one-day conference at Roskilde University, September 22nd 2009. At the conference there will be presentations about a.o. the (maybe not so) new possibilities of using digital communication in a museum context; critical discussions about museums as learning institutions; and discussions about the relationship between the public and museum institutions in a new museological context.
These are themes which are discussed regularly at Medical Museion – and Museion will be represented among the conference participants. Some presentations will be held in English and some in danish according to the conference programme. Here is a rough translation of the danish conference teaser:

The digital culture brings forth new opportunities to strengthen communication to more, potentially interested users. But external communication is not only good communication of an academic subject. Communication influences, changes and distorts the subject. More, and more diverse, communication changes the relationship between communicator, message and recepient at the same time as boundaries between leisure centers, knowledge centers and museums are erased.
DREAM invites you to discuss these changes. What happens with the changed forms of communication? Who is communicating with whom? What is changed? And who is changed? What does the new forms of communication mean for the self understanding and development of museums and science centers?

The Akismet filter doesn’t work 100%, so we get a handful of spam comments for moderation each week. They are almost always deleted after a short glance, of course.

For the two last weeks, however, a certain dtpizk[at]yahoo.com has passed through the spam filter with a wave of comments, which are sort of interesting — a series of short, vague and polite comments about how great a particular post or the blog as a whole is. Like these ones:

Good post! I plan to move into this stuff after I’m done with school, as most of it is time consuming. It’s a great post to reference back to. My blog needs more time to gain in popularity anyway.

This is great! It really shows me where to expand my blog. I think that sometime in the future I might try to write a book to go along with my blog, but we will see…Good post with useful tips and ideas

This is great! Now I want to see your ways for us readers to become more involved! Expect an email later today.

Looks like your question thing at the end of the post worked. Also not having to sign in is nice too. Good job. Nice list. Thanks.

They are meaningless, in the sense that they don’t really comment on the post in question. Like most spam, they are probably automatically generated and sent out by a robot. But the phrases as such are nevertheless interesting, because they resemble the kind of short, polite comments I sometimes construct when I want to reply in a friendly way to an unsolicited email.

Together these spam comments thus constitute a repository of phrases that could be useful in situations where you want to leave a vaguely courteous but uncommitted response. So in a paradoxical way they are quite useful, after all. Thanks, dtpizk!

Also, for some peculiar reason I cannot escape being flattered by the robot’s nice words. Even though I know they are automatically generated. The damned trick works! It’s like in movies I’ve seen of elderly Japanese being taken care of by a human-looking robot — the humans respond to the robots as if they were living beings.