Biomedicine on Display

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.

Despite our current low posting frequency, the new blog-ranking service BlogRank has Biomedicine on Display as #7 on their museum blogs top 25-list.

There has been rather scarce posting on this site for the last couple of weeks. Several of us are extremely busy preparing the new exhibition, Split and Splice, which will open on Friday, 11 June, in our main building — hopefully, we will be able to come back with a few appetisers in the next few weeks.

But posting has also been slow because I have developed tendonitis (”mouse arm”) by using the computer mouse too much. My GP has ordered me to abstain from any sort of writing for the next month (80% reduction in working capacity). However, one on my friends in Gothenburg (Jan Nolin), who has had the problem for several years now, recommended a speech recognition software, Dragon, which I just bought and installed, and which I’m now training.

It is quite fabulous. I can write in Word, I can use Outlook — and, as you can see, I can also dictate text here into the WordPress blog (it even recognises when I say ‘WordPress’, although it cannot put the name in inverted commas, and it cannot end the sentence with a smiley, which I have to do by hand, as in the old days :-).

It has taken me three minutes to dictate the paragraph above (should be paragraphs, not paragraph, you need to be distinct when you speak to it! — and it cannot end a parenthesis for some reason). I’m trying to figure out if it can also link as well. It probably can, let’s see! The more tricky exercise will be to add pictures from Flickr (wow!, it can spell Flickr!), and to place them where I want to have them.

Does anybody have any experiences from working with Dragon in WordPress?

Our colleagues at the National Museum of Health and Medicine (in DC) are right now experiencing a dramatically increasing traffic from all over the world to their unofficial Repository of Bottled Monsters blog. From about 100 views a day to 300 views an hour last week.

The reason for this stunning outreach success is that Wired.com and many other websites have spread the news about the NMHM staff’s work to put the museum’s picture archive on Flickr. In a few week’s time, more than half a million Flickr users have seen the exquisite collection of images, especially of American war medicine.

The US Army (which owns NMHM) are imposing a general ban on letting its employees and institutions have access to Flickr (and other social network sites), so the NMHM staff decided to put the pictures on Flickr from their home computers in their spare time.

Many other institutions already do this (in their working hours :-). For example the Smithsonian has a great photostream on Flickr Commons. So do Powerhouse, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Swedish National Heritage Board (two weeks ago), and many others. But what the NMHM example shows better than these is that a presence on the Commons can make a small institution and its blog blossom.

Here at Medical Museion we have so far been somewhat reluctant to think in these terms, not only because it’s a big and expensive operation to put our rich image archive online, but also because we are already getting some direly needed income from selling images.

But maybe we should put the image collection online for free? We will miss a few thousand DKK a year in monetary revenues, that’s right. But the good-will revenue from posting them in the public space, for example, under a Creative Commons license, will probably be much higher — and in the long run it might, as a side-effect, increase our overall revenues.

Looks like this blog — together with some 1700 other health-related blogs — has been taken advantage of by WellSphere (see the ugly little banner at the bottom of the right column), which has now been sold to HealthCentral Network. Read more about their copyright scam in this well-researched post on BetterHealth. In principle they seem to own the copyright of everything we’ve posted here since last September. Better be more careful next time one gets mails from a former Stanford physician (Geoff Rutledge) turned CMIO in an internet company.

The number of interesting (read: thoughtful and reflecting) museum blogs is growing steadily. One of my newfound favourites is Bridget McKenzie’s cultural interpretation & creative education, started in 2006. Bridget was, among other things, responsible for learning at the British Library before she became director of a consultancy firm that helps ’cultural bodies’ engage with audiences, use digital technologies and build capacity. Accordingly, her blog is — or rather was — full of useful experience and comments on major trends in the museum world.

Was — because it looks like Bridget has defected to Twitter. Here’s her excuse for not writing a single blog post in the last six weeks:

[Twitter]’s the place where I get feeds from the media tailored to me … It’s where I find out about the latest cultural and digital initiatives … It’s where you can get blog feeds and ideas from people you admire or support, individuals or organisations. My delicious links are growing much faster with the links I’m being fed. … Also, my mind is boggling much more about big issues to do with the environment, science, religion and society. I feel more immersed in the world (or in the web?!) than I ever did before. It’s like being in a giant library where you’re dipping into everything, skipping between the humour, crime, philosophy and art sections, as fast as you can, whilst chatting with other people and sharing what you find.

The argument is pro-Twitter contra Facebook, but that aside Bridget’s Twitter-activity has nevertheless kept her off her fine blog. Reluctantly, she admits there is a downside to Twitter, viz., that she’s ”spending a good deal more time online and have spent less time doing personal writing and blogging”. Well, to me that seems like a major loss! Please, come back!

Media people say that the essence of news is that ’Dog bites postman’ never makes it to the headlines, while ‘Postman bites dog’ does. So here is a news item from the blog world:

Like other museum blogs, this one (and its Danish sibling) writes comments about exhibitions — either about our own shows or those of other museums. However, I’ve never seen the reverse, i.e., an exhibition that discusses a blog post.

Until now, that is! The new exhibition ‘Kroppen/Usynlig verden‘ (The Body/Invisible World), which opened at the Norwegian Technical Museum in Oslo a few weeks ago, discusses, among other things, the new trend of organising biomedical image competitions (like the Wellcome Image Award). In this connection the exhibition quotes an earlier post (’Biomedical image fatigue’) from this humble blog:

The top of the biomedical image pops? Or what? Am I the only person who is beginning to feel saturated with biomedical images? Not only is this culture as a whole swamped with pictures—on billboards, in newspapers, on websítes and blogs, not to speak of the pictorial explosions on Youtube and Flickr. The professional biomedical media are also rapidly becoming heavily visualized. Every life science journal with self-respect puts eye-popping bio-pictures on its covers; and the articles between the covers are filled with micrographs and visualizations. The popular science media are no exception: amazing picture of dendrites, ribosomes and embryos everywhere. […] Instead of being bombarded with albums of beautiful pics, I would like to see more aesthetic assessment. Instead of just displaying their choice, the jurors should come out of the aesthetic closet and pass some outspoken critical judgement. Give us some arguments pro and contra the chosen image. What makes this select image a good picture?

Haven’t seen it myself yet. But Ellen Lange (one of the curators of the Oslo exhibition) kindly noticed me. Feels like an endorsement.