nc science blogging conference wrap up

NC Science Blogging Conference Wrap-Up

Now that I'm home I thought I would post a quick summary of the

conference. (BTW- I keep getting strange things when I visit the wiki

site - like really old versions of the pages and something was written

over one of the pages)

First, it was very well organized. Some conferences run by for profit

companies or professional societies don't go this smoothly! The hotel

was close and reasonably priced. My room was very nice, and the hotel

went out of its way to ferry people around and make sure we had what

we needed. It would have been nice if the bar had been laid out so

people could socialize and congregate, but that's really pretty minor

in the course of things.

Sigma Xi was a great host ("zi" if anyone else forgot their Greek).

The center was very attractive and the wireless was great. The food

was fabulous (the pulled pork with the NC-style sauce, oh and the cole

slaw and the hush puppies, and the locopops ... amazing, now I'm

hungry again!).

The goodie bag of swag was packed full. The bag itself was from the

local museum and unlike some from other conferences, I'll probably use

this frequently. I have enough science magazines to last me for a

while, and a business card case, a massager, a USB laptop light, a

beautiful coral reef calendar...

The dinner beforehand, the drinks at the bar both nights, and the

socializing between sessions were all very useful. I really got a

chance to talk for a while with scientists in many different research

areas as well as with other interested parties such as science journal

editors, PBS consultants, ethicists, gender studies-interested

scientists, other science librarians/information scientists,

scientific software engineers, museum workers of all sorts, writers...

They taught me a lot about what they do and how they use their blogs.

With all of this, there is still a need for a ton more research on how

scientists blog. Also, what it means for a scientist to blog for an

organization, event, or experiment. I really need to get my article

edited and submitted to a journal. I want to dive back into another

study on the topic, but I'll have to figure out what it should be

next. (btw- Tara's article on science blogging has not been published

yet, I was afraid I'd missed it. I'll link when it's out)

As for the actual sessions - they were great, too. It's unfortunate I

could only be one place at a time. The marine research one actually

reminded me of something I'd heard from other bloggers and also

something a book author I was sitting next to at dinner mentioned:

blogs are a great place to put the extra stuff - stuff that is in

excess of what's needed for a journal article or a book or a film, or

maybe stuff that isn't enough for a journal article or ... So maybe I

should say what I mean by that. Eric Roston will be using his blog to

put out a lot of information he found for his forthcoming book, The

Carbon Age. Really good stuff, but it just didn't fit into the book.

Likewise, the marine researchers go out on extended cruises but

sometimes only four papers result. One thing they will do is to

communicate with land-based researchers to get their guidance on

things - like if they don't have that flavor of expert on board. Now

they can use blogs for sort of mini reports of new science. Things

that maybe aren't enough for an article, but are still the results of

cool research. They can post these things very quickly, too.

We didn't resolve in this session what the difference is between live

and real-time blogging, and we didn't figure out what the difference

is between blogging for an organization and for yourself (I think most

agree that blogging for an organization should still be only lightly

controlled and not be overly restricted).

A theme I can't support that I heard at the end of the conference is

that science bloggers should go full time and they should be paid to

do nothing but blog-- I think some of the best contributions come from

scientists who get material through their research, their reading to

keep up in their fields, and their attendance at professional

conferences. I really think this should be in addition to other forms

of communication. With that said, I think we still should try to

actively recruit unheard voices. We need many more scientists in all

research areas to really establish this as a new way of doing

business.

Unfortunately, there are many disincentives for female and

underrepresented group scientists to blog at all, even more so with

their real life identity. I don't know how to help this - at all - but

I think we can learn something from the adoption of other ICTs. Big

things need to happen to fix the face of science - but it's a chicken

and egg thing, too. Visible female and underrepresented group

scientists will recruit more, but the low percent that exists have too

much riding on being seen like everyone else, or better than everyone

else, to perhaps actively recruit... don't know. Luckily Pat and Zuska

(and others) are on the case. I'm sort of building up a backlog, but

this would make a great study (women and science blogs...)

As far as open data goes -- this is huge right now, and plenty of

computer scientists and librarians and archivists (a special flavor of

librarian in case you didn't know) and discipline specialists

(bioinformaticists, astronomers, etc.) are on the case (with some help

from NSF funding). There are several issues related to culture

(getting people to contribute, learning what people need to be able to

trust and reuse data), information representation/organization,

information retrieval, and data structures required for such massive

piles of data. There are also preservation issues (migrate the data,

what format to store it in, etc). I totally support what J-C is doing

but I also think that if many, many labs do this, we'll need some

better way to search and organize than google (IMHO). BTW - I also

feel pretty strongly that it is the wrong way to go to look to

Congress for a mandate for open data! (ok, if you are a scientist and

reading this, do you want Congress to force you to publish your

hard-earned stuff and then have all of the Canadian, British, German,

etc., scientists dine out on it without sharing their own?). It has to

come from the relevant international professional societies and

journal publishers, sort of from the bottom up, and so that it impacts

everyone with interests in that research area.

The closing session on framing and the science debate was not well

done and that's too bad because there was a large audience who were

prepared to listen. By presenting the information on framing poorly,

they probably lost some support instead of gaining support. As for the

science debates, well, it's hard to see how they would make a

difference. AAAS has gathered the statements of the candidates and

that stuff is pretty telling. So I'll leave this for now, but I will

try to weave in more thoughts in future posts.

Labels: scienceblogging.com, sciencebloggingconference

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