Biomedicine on Display

I love playing Angry Birds when I’m tired, but I never thought I would play a game that helped curate a museum collection.

But now I know better after having read an interesting post on the Open Objects blog by Mia Ridge (Open University) about the session on ‘Entrepreneurship and Social Media”, which she chaired yesterday at the Museums Galleries Scotland conference.

Mia’s session was largely about crowdsourcing and her own approach was crowdsourcing through games. Mia has worked at the Science Museum in London, where she researched and developed ‘Museum Metadata Games’ to explore “how crowdsourcing games could get people to have fun while improving the content around ‘difficult’ museum objects”. As she points out, most collections websites are not that interesting to the general public, partly because of a ’semantic gap’ between everyday language and curators’ catalogue language. Her solution was a crowdsourcing interface that worked like a game (after all 250 million people worldwide play social games; some even play museum games, like Wellcome Collection’s High Tea and the National Library of Finland’s DigitalKoort which had 25,000 visitors complete over 2 million individual tasks in two months. Here’s Mia’s example of a curating game called ‘Dora’s lost data’:

A few weeks ago, Paul Ginsparg, founder of the immensely popular (among physicists) preprint publication archive ArXiv, reflected on the future of scholarly communication (Nature vol. 476, pp. 145-147, 11 August 2011).

He wrote what many of my generation colleagues in the medical faculty consider outlandish, but which is self-evident to everyone who has some experience in online communication — namely that configuring the next generation scholarly communication infrastructure ”requires getting into the heads of current undergraduates and graduate students”.

Because, as he noted, the life experience of todays students “is of immediate online availability and global search engines, and they arrive imbued with the social-network mentality of sharing links, photos, videos and status updates”.

In other words, if you’ve been brought up with Facebook, you will expect scholarly communication to work the same way. And to add to Ginsparg’s reflection: you will probably assume that scholarly and public communication can be done on the same platform.

Many museums struggle with how to integrate Facebook (and other social media) in their collections, exhibitions and physical venues.

Therefore it was interesting to read Benjamin Thompson’s report from a Eureka Live event, ‘Facebook: bad for friendship?’, held at the Wellcome Collection in London, some time ago.

One of the discussion topics was whether you can have too many friends on FB. Spreading yourself ‘too thin’ means you can’t invest as much time into each ‘friend’.

Agree! And, by the way, what does the word ‘friend’ really mean? Frankly I just hate the word ‘friend’ in this context. Facebook is actually more an ‘acquaintancebook’ than a ‘friendbook’. And when people have more than 150-200 ‘friends’ (Dunbar’s number), these aren’t even ‘acquaintances’ anymore, they’re reduced to fans. In fact, institutions, including museums, mainly use FB as a broadcasting platform.

Accordingly, there seems to be a trend that people are purging their Facebook accounts, leaving only close real friends and family, using Twitter instead for the broadcasting of their thoughts. Maybe that’s why our museum recently has put more emphasis on being present on Twitter?

So whereas Facebook is about branding and broadcasting under the disguise of ’friend-making’, Twitter is a least honest — it’s openly broadcasting, period.

“Why Proteins Have to Die So That We May Live”. This was the title of the talk given by Nobel Laureate Dr. Aaron Ciechanover at the international symposium entitled Protein Chemistry: Applications to Combat Diseases held at the University of Copenhagen earlier this week. Three days packed with talks from the world’s leading protein chemists and researchers. The focus of the conference was the life of proteins from their synthesis to their degradation. This was highlighted by talks from three Nobel Prize laureates: Ada Yonath, Avram Hersko and Aaron Chiechanover – each of whom have contributed immensely to our understanding of these processes.

The symposium featured talks from invited speakers only, and as such the quality of the talks reflected this in being very high. The papers presented were mostly already published, but some did include unpublished data (although I’m sure these were already on their way to being submitted). Each speaker was given twenty-five minutes to present their papers, and unfortunately due to a complete lack of control by the chairs, this was exceeded over and over again. Annoying. Not only are breaks important when you sit through three hours of talks, they are also where a lot of the magic happens! They must be respected and cherished! Thumbs down, organizers!

The conference format for communicating science is interesting. It takes the researchers out of their daily routines (well, more or less), and to some extent forces them to listen in on subjects that they otherwise wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention. This is good. Even the most experienced researchers cannot keep up with all the data being published. Meeting colleagues in an informal setting and discussing work over food and wine also works great. It’s brilliant for networking! However, this must happen organically and cannot be forced. The organizers attempted to schedule informal meetings betweens speakers and audience during breaks (“science dating”), but I think that defies the point of informality. In this case, a lot of empty slots emphasized this. Or maybe it was just the lack of breaks?

What about social media? I’ve been going to a number of medical conferences over the past few years, and to be honest I haven’t really noticed anyone actively using it. My first conference in the museum world was very different. Granted, it was a conference about the web, but everyone was tweeting throughout the entire event. Online forums were being used actively for discussions. And (of course) all information about the conference was available online. Including all abstracts. This is very far from the case at medical meetings I’ve attended. Where the rest of the world is moving towards Web 3.0, they remain an early beta. And this is sad. It seems there is too much focus on controlling information rather than letting it flow free. Sharing. Engaging. Not only for the benefit of the meeting attendees, but perhaps also the rest of the world? Am I being naïve?

Score one for the usefulness of facebook in science. In January and February, a group of scientists, led by Dr. Brian Sidlauskas, assistant professor of fisheries at Oregon State University (OSU), had been conducting the first ichthyological survey on Guyana’s Cuyuni River. The purpose of the study was to find out which species of fish live in the Cuyuni and get a good estimate of their abundance. After two weeks of fishing, the team had more than 5.000 specimens in their nets. But then trouble came:

“In order to get the fish out of the country,” says Bloom, “we needed an accurate count of each species.” The team’s research permit required them to report this information to the Guyanese government. “We couldn’t leave the country until we turned over our data to the authorities.” Time was of the essence, as Sidlauskas, Bloom and OSU graduate student Whit Bronaugh had to return to North America as soon as possible. But how could a handful of people possibly identify 5,000 fish in just a few days?

The answer became facebook. A Ph.D –student suggested uploading the fish to facebook, and within 24 hours the 5.000 fish had been identified with the help of a network of ichthyologically-minded friends.

This story made me think of the points that Andy Clark makes in his book Supersizing the Mind – Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension about the functioning of what he calls the extended mind. Facebook and other social web media has the same potentials as other tools in our cognitive environment -  like pens, smartphones, computers, fingers or calculators – to become part of our extended mind. And a powerful one at that, given the distributed power of a network of that size.  This raises serious questions about how social web media will influence the way our extended minds work. How will it impact scientific production and what new forms of life will it produce? Crowd sourcing certainly opens for scientific experimentation in new and interesting ways – www.fold.it is one of my favourite examples.

I’m proud to present our new staff member, Daniel Noesgaard, who will work with biomedical science communication on the web, especially through social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc., and maybe especially the many forthcoming cetera).

Daniel’s position is financed by the science communication grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation through the new NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research (which I will tell more about on this blog later).

Daniel’s first task (besides attending the Museums and the Web 2011 conference in Philadelphia last month) is to work out a new web platform for Medical Museion that will have all the usual functionalities, but which will hopefully also integrate our blogs and our presence on social media into the site. When the platform is ready some time later this spring or early summer, he will begin to fill it with exciting content — and specially incite the rest of us and other users to make the site flourish.

Daniel has a Master’s degree in molecular biomedicine. For his Masters thesis he did laboratory work with lysine deacetylase inhibitors (see publication here) and their use for the treatment of type 1 diabetes. He has also worked in the internet business, where he worked with all possible kinds of things, from domain registration to network design, and has also done quite a lot of a voluntary work in a student association, including communication through social media.

Yes, we knew that:

State-of-the-art: Museums use social media mostly for marketing reasons and PR. In many institutions social media (social networks, sharing platforms, blogs, wikis etc.) is treated as an information tool, not as a dialogue oriented and participatory media tool.

(from here). This is indeed one of the major problems that enthuasiasts of social web media in museums are being confronted with …

Last week we put up a computer in the staff kitchen with Twitter as the only application and main page.

I call it a Tweet Machine. Over the computer I hung a small sign, urging all staff members to write about everything from philosophical reflections to descriptions of what their packed lunch contained that day:

The computer is placed so that every staff member cannot avoid passing it on their daily routine oscillating between coffee machine and office.

Our hope is that the natural curiosity, so stimulated, will help us lure the more shy species of museum staff out on the web.

The experiment has already lead to promising results, as this twitter excerpt shows:

Follow the everyday life of Medical Museion; the museological object-apotheosis’, the indoor decorating debates, meteorological pocket philosophy, coffee drama and cake: https://twitter.com/medicalmuseion

In case you have forgotten where to find Medical Museion on the (social) web:

• Biomedicine on Display: www.corporeality.net/museion

• Museionblog: www.museionblog.dk (in Danish)

• Facebook: www.facebook.com/medicalmuseion

• Twitter: www.twitter.com/medicalmuseion

• Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/medicalmuseion

• Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/53284874@N02/

• and, of course, our traditional home page: www.museion.ku.dk

Taking our Twitter session at the EAMHMS conference two weeks ago (“a qualified kind of success”) as his point of departure, Danny Birchall (Museum Cultures) summarizes his view of the pros and cons of conference-tweeting:

On the negative side conference-tweeting tends to be personally distracting (and possibly insulting to a speaker forced to regard an audience gazing deep into their phones and laptops); susceptible to triteness and glib summation rather than reflective thought; and elitist: it excludes from a conversation those without the appropriate technology or ability to cope with distraction.

On the positive side, it provides a kind of collective note-taking, accessible even to those not involved; it provides for an additional, multiplicitous and open conversation, not directed through a chair; and sometimes allows for people not present at the conference but connected to its participants, to join in the conversation and bring new information and perspectives to it.

Despite the fact that only four of us tweeted throughout the conference, and that for half of it there was no wifi available, we did a not not bad job, and towards the end of the conference did indeed begin to get others chipping in, asking what ‘the problem of the medical museum’ was, and questioning our assertions about the situatedness of art.

With reference to one of the last tweets I wrote during the EAMHMS-conference (while we were discussing Thomas Schnalke’s presentation),

I would like to add to Danny’s pros and cons:

Tweeting during a conference allows you to make much more succinct statements than you will usually make in the oral discussion. I don’t think I would have said this so sharply in the oral discussion; but in the tweet format it looks more acceptable.

Conference-tweeting gives rise to two interconnected levels of discourse. On the one hand, the usual oral, polite, verbose, slow, performative (and often somewhat self-aggrandizing) conference discussion mode; and, on the other hand, a more direct, written, snappy, and less self-oriented networking kind of discourse (twittering) in the background.

What’s most interesting about this, I think, is how these two levels of discourse are connected in real time; and how they actually invert the traditional relation between a slow, polite and formal written discourse, and a faster and less formal oral discourse.

PS: Danny has generously compiled a transcript of all the tweets on #EAMHMS over the course of the three conference days, which he believes gives “an interesting, if inconsistent, overview” of the proceedings.

Medical Museion is on Facebook. Not because because we love it, but because we follow the siren calls of other museums that believe they need this part of the social media spectrum to be visisble online.

Personally, I just hate Facebook. It’s not just the sneaky way they treat their customers (see the long list of their objectionable activities here), it’s also their business idea — to commercialise the need of human social interaction — which turns me off. For a short period I had a profile on it but left when I realised Facebook has effectively made the word ‘friend’ devoid of any useful meaning.

Micah White suggests that earlier protests against Facebook (like the outrage against the Beacon system) were made under the assumption that it was a cool hangout community that could be changed from the inside.

But with the new ’social plug-in’-system that gives commercial websites access to your personal information through ’I like’-buttons this myth is about to be shattered. White describes it as a sinister reinvention of Beacon. The bottom line is that Facebook is about to cash in its former reputation as a hip online social medium and is turning into just another MySpace.

Ready for some digital intoxication again:

Adrienne Fletcher, a graduate student in the Department of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida has made a social media museum research survey which says something about how (American) museums intend to and actually use social web media.

Facebook is considered the most effective medium, with Twitter on a second place. Typical time spent is 1-2 staff members for an average of 45 minutes a day. Fletcher’s summary of the results is that:

American museums believe that social media are important but are not currently using it for high levels of dialogic engagement. For the moment, museums are mostly involved with one-way communication strategies using mostly Facebook and Twitter to focus on event listing, reminders, reaching larger or newer audiences, and promotional messaging. However there does seem to be some evidence to suggest that museums are trying to increase their use of social media for more two-way and multi-way communication strategies.

Sounds pretty plausible, also for European ears.

Rose Sherman (Director of Enterprise Technology at the Minnesota Historical Society) is circulating a survey about how museums are engaging their communities through social media technologies — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.

Rose asks a lot of relevant questions, like:

• How frequently, on average, are your social media web sites updated?
• What function(s) in your organization has staff assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?
• How many full time equivalent (FTE) positions are assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?
• What function in your organization is primarily responsible for actively using social media tools to engage communities?
• On average, how many hours per week do staff spend on actively using social media tools to engage communities, e.g. they Tweet, update Facebook pages, post photos to Flickr, post videos to YouTube, etc. ?
• Do you have a full time position(s) assigned to engaging with your social media networks?
• Do you have a social media policy? (e.g. http://sites.google.com/site/wharman/social-media-strategy-handbook?

Thought-provoking questions which remind me that the function of such surveys is sometimes to make you aware of what you haven’t done yet. A small museum like ours is particularly provoked by questions like “How many full time equivalent (FTE) positions are assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?”.  I would rather have preferred: “How many infinitesimal part time equivalents …”.

So we’ve got lots to do on the social web media side.

You can fill in the survey here.