Biomedicine on Display

Kostas Arvanitis at the Centre for Museology, University of Manchester, draws attention to the proliferation of museum blogs at the Manchester Museum. More and more members of staff are creating blogs “to reflect upon their own work, offer a glimpse of what happens ‘behind the scenes’ and invite people to voice their views about all these”.

Currently Manchester Museum staffers run seven: Egypt at the Manchester Museum, Lindon Man blog, Myths about Race, Our City blog, En-quire blog, Palaeomanchester and Frog blog. More might come.

As Kostas points out these are not part of the museum’s official website, but individual blogs, hosted on different platforms. Vice versa, visitors to the official website are invited to visit the staff blogs. In Kostas’ words, they open

‘new spaces’ where the Museum takes place; online spaces that escape the ‘digital walls’ of the official website of the Museum.

Kostas’ comment relates to the question about the relation between individual blogs and institutional communication that I raised in an earlier criticism of Batts, Anthis, and Smith’s paper on bridging the gap between blogs and academia. In other words, the issue here is not ‘blogs vs. website’. It’s not a question of platform. What’s at stake is individual vs. institutional online presence.

Would be interesting to see how other museums have solved the balance. For example, the staff at the National Museum of Health and Medicine run a joint private blog (A Repository for Bottled Monsters) which, as far as I can see, isn’t acknowledged on the museum’s official website. And here at Medical Museion we are currently runnng two joint staff blogs: this one in English and Museionblog in Danish, but maybe some staff members wish to start on their own — in that case I guess we would link to these from the official website.

A rapidly increasing number of scientists and scholars are learning about the advantages of using the blog medium for both internal and external research communication — see for example Batts, Anthis and Smith’s recent paper “Advancing science through conversations: bridging the gap between blogs and the academy” in Public Library of Science: Biology (vol. 6, Sept., e240 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240) (discussed in an earlier post here).

But it can surely be pretty demanding to keep up a quality blog. As Stanford bioinformatician Russ Altman writes under the heading “Blogs are hard!” on his excellent Building Confidence blog (about biomedical informatics, genetics, medicine, and bioengineering):

Well, maybe you all know this, but I am having a heck of a time coming up with material that is relevant and (hopefully) interesting for this blog. These difficulties are occurring despite help from my blog angel (she knows who she is) who is constantly feeding me excellent ideas. Why are blogs hard?

• Things are busy and you need to take out time to be a little reflective about stuff. That’s hard when you are just running and running all day.
• In order to opine, you need to know what you are talking about. That usually requires doing some homework.
• It is difficult to formulate ideas alone. Almost everything I do is as part of a team, and this is a much better way (generally speaking) to draw conclusions or make decisions. If I really wanted excellent blog items, I think I should work with a team to formulate good thoughts, debate them and then present them. But I’m not sure that’s part of the blog culture, which is marked by rugged individualism

OK, that’s my thoughts about why I have blog block. I will get going again soon. Blog angel has sent some great ideas, and I just need to ponder them, form opinions, and commit them to screen.

A sobering voice amidst all the exhausting enthusiasm that’s swirling around the science blogging multitude. Searched for “blog block“, and got a staggering 8,331 hits.

(thanks to Deepak for the tip about Russ Altman’s post)

Universities aren’t precisely drawback-free zones — yet I’ve been thinking about how privileged university-based blogs are when I see some of our science blogging peers who (have to, or feel they have to?) fill their blogs with banner ads and Google Adsense links. A university financed blog doesn’t have to think about blog ad networks, average payment per blog post, pay-per-clicks, pay-for-post marketing strategies, banner advertising spending, or speculate about how to provide better value for advertisers. And we don’t have to meet with target audience advertising agencies and their ilk. That’s a privilege.

Last year, this blog participated in an online survey of medical blogs undertaken by Ivor Kovic, Ileana Lulic and Gordana Brumini at Rijeka University School of Medicine in Croatia. Now they have published the results in a paper titled “Examining the medical blogosphere: an online survey of medical bloggers” in the last issue of Journal of Medical Internet Research, one of the top-ranked journals in the health informatics.

Among the results:

• 6 out of 10 medical bloggers are men (more balanced than I thought)
• 1 out of 3 is a physician (that’s pretty much — will probably grow)
• over 50% have published a scientific paper (impressive!)
• 1 out of 4 medical bloggers prefer to be anonymous (bad habit!)
• 60% of the respondents spend 20 hours or more per week on the internet (not unsurprisingly)

In other words, the typical medical blogger is a male medical doctor with some scientific training who spends most of his spare-time on the internet. Not surprising, I guess :-)

You can also see a summary of the report in this slide show presentation.

In yesterday’s issue of Public Library of Science: Biology (vol. 6, Sept., e240 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240) bioscientists Shelley Batts, Nicholas Anthis, and Tara Smith have an interesting article titled “Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy”.

The authors notice that scientific institutions have been pretty slow to adopt the blog medium, in spite of the fact that both institutions and bloggers have a common interest in advancing public engagement with science. They suggest that:

By combining the credibility of institutions — trusted gate-keepers for scientific truth — with the immediacy and networking infrastructure of blogs, we believe that these shared goals can be better served with benefits to both partners.

More specifically, they propose “a roadmap” for turning blogs into educational tools for institutions (mainly universities). They present examples of collaborations that can serve as a models for others to emulate, and they offer suggestions for improving upon blog platforms to make them more acceptable to institutional hosts.

In many respects, this is all very commendable. The PloS-article describes and evaluates a number of interesting institutional blog initiatives, like Rudd Sound Bites (www.ruddsoundbites.typepad.com), the ChemTools blog (chemtools.chem.soton.ac.uk/projects/blog, the Berkeley Lab Energy and Environmental Research Blog (bleer.lbl.gov), and the Oxford Internet Institute (www.oii.ox.ac.uk), and so forth. Very useful stuff, which many academics (and not only scientists) could learn a lot from.

One important critical point though. The authors seem oblivious of a crucial aspect of the relationship between individual science bloggers and institutions engaged in science communicating, namely the power dynamics involved. True, they are aware of the fact that the science blogosphere is a bottom-up driven network. But they don’t expand this observation into an analysis of the conflict patterns involved.

For a thorough understanding of how blogs and institutions relate to each other in a science communication network, however, one has to take such potential and actual conflict patterns into account. After all, institutional actors have quite different set of political and economic agendas than singular science actors.

This was in fact one of the themes we discussed in the ‘The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0′ session at the 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference in June (see paper here).

Generally speaking, I’m afraid the growing literature on science blogging reflects a widespread naïve view of the medium. Like the authors of the PLoS-article, most commentators on blogging as a genre of science communication are pushing for the medium with their critical mindset on standby, even disabled. In other words, there is too much technological optimism, and too little critical analysis involved in the current discourse on science blogging.

We’ve just been hit by a chain-blog game started by Arte y pico [Top art] a few months ago: they asked five other blogs to recommend another five, and so forth, and now the chain is rattling along.

I wouldn’t have thought of participating if it hadn’t been for the fact that one of the most interesting and most beautifully illustrated medical blogs these days, The Sterile Eye by Norwegian clinical video photographer Øystein Horgmo, was the immediate precursor in this chain. Øystein recommends Monash Medical Student, Øystein in Antarctica (another Øystein!), IntraopOrate, Sushi Or Death – and Biomedicine on Display. In our case with these kind words:

Packed with interesting information and thoughts on medical history, both ancient and contemporary, reading this blog is like watching a making-of-documentary where the museum is the feature film. Always interesting.

On behalf of the Medical Museion blog team: Thank you, Øystein, very much appreciated!

Chain-blogs can be as awful as chain-letters once were. The chances that it will stop pretty soon are high, either because people don’t bother to continue or because they increasingly recommend blogs that have already been cited. This chain is pretty okay, though — it’s always nice to take a few minutes off to think about why one really likes some blogs more than others — and because I think The Sterile Eye is such a pleasure to read, I feel obliged to continue it. So, without having consulted with my co-contributors, I recommend the following five blogs which I find very inspiring for the kind of work we are doing here at Medical Museion:

1) First and foremost In the Pipeline, single-authored by Derek Lowe, a first-rate blog for anyone who wants to understand what goes on behind the scene in the pharma industry. Derek publishes almost daily, he knows what he writes about, keeps a professional distance to the events, yet is passionate about his job. The best science blog I’ve ever come across (the only drawback is that there are rarely any images).

2) Then Medgadget, founded by Michael Ostrovsky in 2004 and co-authored by a team of medical doctors and biomed engineers who write daily about ”the latest medical gadgets and technologies, discoveries in medical science, and the progress of the digital revolution in the healthcare industry”. A must for anyone interested in med-tech and its impact on the medical system (the only drawback is that they apparently don’t care about the history and cultural context of the field).

3) Third, Relevant History — I link therefore I am by Alex Pang, a former historian of science who has transmogrified into a research director at the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley think tank. Alex is one of these creative and independent minds who combines solid humanistic scholarship with an ability to connect very different roads of thinking — and he also writes with a nice personal touch (see also his The End of Cyberspace) (the only drawback is that The End of Cyberspace looks a trifle dark and gloomy … like, well, the future).

4) I also love Bioephemera by Jessica Palmer, a Washington based biologist and artist who posts regularly about all kinds of odd things and images, with an emphasis on biological and medical stuff. A wonderful repository of curiosities and ephemera which might one day become the internet version of the classic Museum of Jurassic Technology (the only drawback is that Jessica’s blog has been included into ScienceBlogs which is a strong recommendation in itself; on the other hand this doesn’t necessarily disqualify her from getting this chain-post).

5) Finally, I wish to recommend bbgm (business, bytes, genes, molecules) by Deepak Singh, a Seattle-based ”geek, business developer, strategist, marketer, technologist, scientist, global citizen, and musician” who writes about the social and business aspects of open science, collective intelligence, the semantic web, bioinformatics, drug development, medicine 2.0 etc. with equal gusto (only drawback is that I rarely have time to digest all the interesting content in the latest post before he has posted another).

The rules of this particular game limits the number of recommendations to five. Otherwise I would have added, for example, A Repository for Bottled Monsters by Mike Rhode and his friends/colleagues at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC; Street Anatomy by Vanessa Ruiz; and Indulge in the Fascinating World of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine by Hungarian medical students Imre Kissík and András Székely — all three are very useful for our combined research and curatorial project here at Medical Museion. And personally I’d like to push for a handfull of Swedish blogs, including Det Perfekta Tomrummet by Gustav Holmberg, mymarkup - old school and shit by Erik Stattin (about everything!), and Kuriosakabinettet by Karolina.

If you want to continue the game, see the rules here.

Have said it before, and am saying it again: In the Pipeline is a damned good science blog. Why? Because Derek Lowe (a bench chemist in a pharma company) tells us about laboratory practice in a way that makes you feel you understand what the craft is really about. The posts almost smell and sound like a lab itself.

Take, for example, today’s post about why chemists use vacuum devices so much and what havoc a wrongly applied water aspirator can create. Science studies people — not to mention science communicators and us science museum folks — have something to learn here. Science communication is very much about immediacy. That’s the skill Derek brings to his posts.

Science blogging has been on the Nature Group’s radar screen for quite a while. On Saturday 30 August Nature Network organizes the ’Science Blogging 2008′ meeting in London to promote the genre — especially among scientists and science educators:

What can science bloggers do to maximise their impact? Can blogging contribute to scientific research and careers? How can blogs be used to help educate the public about science? What other emerging online tools will play a role in science?

The day starts with a keynote by physician/journalist Ben Goldacre (who writes The Guardian’s weekly Bad Science column), followed by a panel about “how science blogs can change the public’s perception of scientists and provide a support framework for scientists themselves”. The rest of the day is devoted to breakout sessions: 1) Can blogging unlock your creativity?, 2) How to make friendfeeds and influence people, 3) How to enhance your blog?, 4) Science in Second Life: a virtual tour, 5) Science blogs and online forums as teaching tools, and 6) Communicating Primary Research Publicly.

Read more here.

Here’s the audience gathering for the session on ‘The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0′ organised by Gustav Holmberg for the 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference (PCST-10) held in Malmö a month ago (read more on our joint session blog).

And here’s my own paper for the event (responses are welcome, it needs a lot of improvement and re-writing before it can go to publication):

Abstract:
Within a few years, science blogging has emerged as a new genre for science communication. But is science blogging really best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’? Or does the phenomenon of science blogging suggest other dichotomies? This paper argues that ’science communication’ is better conceptualized in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global ’scientific field’ entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively.

And here’s the talk:

1. Those of you who have followed the field of science communication over the last decade have seen how earlier approaches to public understanding of science — usually based on what is often called the ‘deficit model’ — have repeatedly been challenged by demands for more participatory (dialogic, two-way, etc.) models for science communication.

2. In spite of these attempts to foster more participatory modes of engagement, however, the traditional one-way public understanding of science through institutionalized mass media, such as newspapers and magazines, radio and television, museums, etc., still constitutes the ruling paradigm, both in communication practice and in communication studies. Even the internet and web-based science communication is more often than not used for institutionalized one-way communication — a kind of digital broad-casting. More dialogic practices are still a largely utopian vision.

3. However, the possibility for developing more dialogic science communication practices has become much more realistic with the recent emergence of the participatory web, i.e., web platforms and services that aim to enhance user-driven content, easy and informal information sharing, and collaboration among users. Podcasting, image and movie content sharing services like Flickr and YouTube, social networking services like Facebook, wikis like Wikipedia, and not least blogging provide the means for a new flourishing of dialogic science communication.

4. In other words,  Continue Reading »

A couple of days ago I tried to make a cloud of eDrugSearch’s latest list of health and medicine blogs. But since I couldn’t make Wordle process all 883 blog names on the list into one single display, I abbreviated the run to the top 100 blog names (see the result here).

Wordle doesn’t explictly say there is a size limit, however. So I ran the list again and — lo and behold — after 90 minutes heavy traffic between my Thinkpad and Wordle’s server (it takes time because it’s a phrase cloud and not a word cloud), this image of all 883 health and medicine blogs on eDrugSearch’s list gradually emerged on my screen:

Cannot find yourself in it? Well then either you’re not a visible health-and-medicine-blog — or you just need new glasses. Or click on this image (if it doesn’t open properly you have to update your Java version to make it work):

Such a huge cloud isn’t very useful, of course, it’s mainly for the fun of it. Again, here’s the list of blogs that went into the image above: Continue Reading »

I was so glad to find this disclaimer at the bottom of Museumblogs.org’s site: “No animals were harmed in the making of this website”. I mean, so many animal lives could be saved if only web masters were just a little more aware of what they are doing.

But we should also be aware of the harm we may afflict on innocent, sentient beings after having closed down our rich html source editors. As Gerard Butler writes on his blog: “No animals were harmed in the making of this website, although the Chihuahua next door is living on borrowed time, let me tell you”.

Last week I used Wordle to create a blogroll cloud from my link list (which worked quite well, see here) — and today I tried to make a similar cloud of eDrugSearch’s latest (25 July) list of 883 health and medicine blog names (i.e., the full names of the blogs, not just the single words).

It turned out to be too big a mouthful for Wordle to turn the whole health and medicine sector of the blogosphere into a cloud display. So I abbreviated the run to the top 100 blog names on eDrugSearch’s list. But even then it took Wordle about 45 (!) minutes to complete these 100: (click image to make it bigger; added 28 July: if it doesn’t work, upgrade your Java version).

Wordle has rapidly become a favourite pastime among internet users so their bandwidth seems to be quite filled up. Maybe its slow also because it takes more computing power to construct a phrase cloud than a word cloud. But if you want to make a blogroll cloud, as opposed to say a tag cloud, then phrase clouding is the only option, of course.

The image is printable, but so far not clickable. Maybe Jonathan Feinberg could add a function that makes it possible to open a blog by clicking on its name in the image?

And here’s the list I took from eDrugSearch (again, only the first 100 are in the cloud; maybe I can try to process all 883 when Japan and California have stopped playing with Wordle tonight): Continue Reading »

Like many other blogs we here at Biomedicine on Display have a long list of (potentially) useful life science and health/medical blog links—all those sites which together constitute the hypertextual inspiration base for our web presence.

It would be great if these could be visualised as a blogroll cloud (like a tag cloud or a category cloud). So far I haven’t seen one, but last night, when I was playing with the new Wordle text cloud generator (see earlier post here), I used it to see what our blogroll would look like in cloud format.

First I created a cloud out of a net list of my 35 favourite blogs (using ~ between the words which is Wordle’s way of keeping words together in sentences):

Then I manipulated the picture a little (literally manually!). By repeating the names of my most-favourite blogs 2, 3 or 5 times I could produce a weight-effect:

Both look great, I think! Much better than most blogrolls I’ve seen so far.

It’s still just a dummy, because at the moment Wordle cannot make the links clickable (or make the size of the blog names correspond to the number of times one had visited the blogs), but I’m sure Jonathan Feinberg (the software engineer who has designed Wordle) can find a solution to that problem with some hard code work.

Then I tried something else. I pasted the whole list of blogs without using the ~ character—i.e., all singular words in all names on our gross list—into Wordle’s input window. This procedure visualised like this:

and like this (Wordle has a huge reportoire of fonts, layouts and colours):

These word clouds looks nice too, but they are nevertheless disappointing because the gross blog list (below) contains many more words than those that Wordle processed into the single word clouds. For example, the words in Pimm: Partial Immortalization, Bioephemera, The Sterile Eye and many others aren’t there. Apparently, Wordle only accepts rather small chunks of text. Or maybe it has excluded singulars? (Added 21 July: Oops, I had overlooked the ‘maximum words’ function, thanks Jonathan for drawing my attention; see comment below).

Anyway, it’s a fun way of producing a visualised blogroll. And with some added functionalities (e.g., clickability) it could be turned into a useful WordPress widget.

Here’s the raw unassorted gross list (it has been accumulated over some time so there may be some dead links and other inaccuracies as well): Continue Reading »

I’ve promised to write a chapter with the provisional title ‘Biomedical curating and the participatory web’ for our planned joint project anthology with the (also provisional) title Curating Biomedicine: Collecting, writing and displaying contemporary medicine. Here’s the abstract of the chapter (to be included in the book proposal; we haven’t found a publisher yet):

For more than a decade, museums in general have been exploiting the Internet for making their collections and exhibition available online. In the last 4-5 years museums have also begun to explore the potentials of the participatory web (web 2.0) for drawing users more actively into the production of the heritage. In this chapter I will explore, one the one hand, how museums actively promote the use of the participatory web for curating purposes, and, on the other hand how the increasing online availablility of iconographic and textual information about artefacts (both physical artefacts, images and documents) on user-driven websites (blogs, flickr, etc) provides an extra-mural source of curated objects. In addition, the chapter will also explore the vast resources of curated artefacts that are avaliable through traditional websites, including product catalogues of medicotechnical companies. The chapter will 1) give a state-of-the art overview over the variety of ways in which biomedical objects are represented on the web, 2) discuss the potentials of the participatory web for turning the curation of biomedicine into a more dialogical process between professional curators and amateurs (scientists, engineers, medical doctors), and 3) discuss the prospects for a synergy between museums and the web with respect to curating contemporary medical objects vs. a possible conflict between web-based curating and traditional curating procedures in medical museums.

Science and medical blogs will of course loom large in this chapter. So, in the next of couple of weeks I will post some examples of blogs and other kinds of user-driven websites that display biomedical objects. Ideally, the accumulated posts will then add up to the final chapter — don’t hesitate to engage in a critical discussion of my rambling thoughts. 

I wrote last week about the 3rd annual UK conference on ‘Science and the Public’ to be held in Manchester, 21-22 June. I thought I had missed the dead-line, but it turned out they had extended it, so I sent in an abstract—and to my pleasure it’s just been accepted by the program committee. Here you are:

Science blogging, singularities, and the multitude of technoscience

Within the last couple of years, blogging has emerged as a new genre for STM communication. The number of medical blogs and science blogs is growing exponentially, and famous science blogs like The Daily Transcript, In the Pipeline, MedGadgets, and Partial Immobilizaton have tens of thousands of readers each week. How can the rise of science blogging as an alternative form of science com-munication be understood? Is it best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’, or does the science blogging phenomenon suggest other, more critically based, dichotomies? In this paper I will argue that science blogging is better understood in terms of Michael Hardt’s and Tony Negri’s conceptualisation of globalisation in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global technoscientific field entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively. Blogs can thus be intepreted as ’singularities’: there are few group blogs, and even fewer corporate, organisational or national blogs. The large majority of blogs don’t represent any movements, parties, institutions or organisations; instead they function, in a Deleuzian sense, as ”an escape from the dominant codes and majoritarian categories—including those of ‘identity politics’—that otherwise trap the singular in passive or static relations” (Tormey, 2006). Yet blogs are not individualistic in a traditional way: many bloggers identify themselves by pseudonyms. Nor are they solipsistic: there is a high degree of cross-linking between blogs. Furthermore the current dominant mode of thinking among bloggers is (at least now) one of criticism and resistance.