Capturing conferences

Yesterday I grumbled about secret meetings. Enough whining, what's the opportunity?

Some technical societies already understand the need for recording proceedings. SPE workshops have clearly-stated deliverables, for example at the Marginal Fields workshop in Cairo later this year:

That's more like it. It would be better to publish the proceedings to the world, not just attendees, and to use an open license, but it's definitely a good start.

As we reported earlier, we used a variety of methods to capture the unsession we hosted at the Canada GeoConvention in May — video, photos, drawings and notes, interviews, a wiki, and an article. This is messy and chaotic, but it's also transparent and open, making it easier to reference and more likely that someone (including us!) can use it.

What other things should we be considering? Here are some ideas:

• Livestreaming. This enables people who couldn't make it to take part in at least one or two sessions via streaming video and social media. It's amazingly effective and can increase the audience by a factor of 5 or more. Even better: at the end of it, you have video of everything!
• Published proceedings. This is something we used to do all the time in geoscience, but it takes a lot of coordination. The GSL is the only body I know of that still manages it regularly. Perhaps a wiki-based publishing approach would be easier to arrange?
• Graphic recording. I have witnessed this a few times, and even tried it myself. In a workshop, it's a terrific way to engage the audience in real time; in a conference, it makes for some great conversation pieces in the break. It's also a brilliant way to listen.
• Podcasting. Having a small team of reporters capture the proceedings in short interviews, video clips, and opinion pieces could be a fun way to engage non-attendees, and leave the event with a record of what went on.
• Code and data. We could experiment with more 'doing' sessions, where code is written, wiki pages are hacked on, data is collected, and so on. The product then is clear: a new code repository, open dataset, or set of wiki pages. This one could be the easiest one to pull off, and the most valuable to the community.

Here's more inspiration: the EGU tweeting its round-up from Vienna this morning:

Looking back at the #EGU2013 - a whole lot of online action, excellent scientists, geo-photos, journals & more ow.ly/lE0jH #GeoQ

— EGU (@EuroGeosciences) June 6, 2013

Have you seen unusually effective or innovative ways to record events you've been at? What would you like to see? What would you be prepared to do?

Update on Friday, June 7, 2013 at 6:47 PM by Matt Hall

In my inbox today: SEG are offering video of something like 200 talks (of the 1000+) from last year's Annual Meeting. Unfortunately, they're trying to monetize, but at least they're only $0.99. I enjoyed this one on 3D image segmentation live — but haven't tried it online.

The plainest English

If you're not already reading xkcd — the must-read sciencey thrice-weekly comic strip — then please give it a try. It's good for you. Check out this wonderful description of the Saturn V rocket, aka Up Goer Five, using only the 1000 most common words in English →

This particular comic took on a life of its own last week, when Theo Sanderson built a clever online text editor that parses your words and highlights the verboten ones. Then, following the lead of @highlyanne, a hydrologist, scientists all over Twitter quickly started describing and sharing parsimonious descriptions of what they do. Anne and her partner in crime, @Allochthonous, then compiled a log of every description they could find. It's worth looking at, though it would take a while to read them all. 

What's it like using only the simplest words? I tried to define a well...

A deep, round, empty space in the ground that is only about as wide as your hand. The empty space is very deep: up to about seven tens of hundreds of times as deep as a man is tall. It is full of water. After making the empty space, we can lower small computers into it. As we pull them out, the computers tell us things about the rocks they can 'see' — like how fast waves move through them, or how much water the rocks have in them.

It's quite hard. But refreshingly so. Here's reflection seismic...

We make a very loud, short sound on the land or in the water — like a cracking sound. The sound waves go down through the rocks under the ground. As they do so, some of them come back — just as waves come back from the side of a body of water when you throw in a small rock. We can listen to the sound waves that come back, and use a computer to help make a picture of what it looks like under the ground.

Is a world without jargon dumbed down, or opened up? What is it we do again?...

It is very hard to do this work. It takes a lot of money and a long time. The people that do it have to think hard about how to do it without hurting other people or the world we live in. We don't always manage to do it well, but we try to learn from the past so we can do better next time. Most people think we should stop, but if we did, the world would go dark, our homes would be cold (or hot), and people would not be able to go very far.

Check out Up Goer Six — Theo's new editor that colour codes each word according to just how common it is. Try it — what do you do for a living? 

The image is licensed CC-BY-NC-2.5 by Randall Munroe at xkcd.com.

Journalists are scientists

Tim Radford. Image: Stevyn Colgan.On Thursday I visited The Guardian’s beautiful offices in King’s Cross for one of their Masterclass sessions. Many of them have sold out, but Tim Radford’s science writing evening did so in hours, and the hundred-or-so budding writers present were palpably excited to be there. The newspaper is one of the most progressive news outlets in the world, and boasts many venerable alumni (John Maddox and John Durant among them). It was a pleasure just to wander around the building with a glass of wine, with some of London’s most eloquent nerds.

Radford is not a trained scientist, but a pure journalist. He left school at 16, idolized Dylan Thomas, joined a paper, wrote like hell, and sat on almost every desk before mostly retiring from The Guardian in 2005. He has won four awards from the Association of British Science Writers. More people read any one of his science articles on a random Tuesday morning over breakfast than will ever read anything I ever write. Tim Radford is, according to Ed Yong, the Yoda of science writers.

Within about 30 minutes it became clear what it means to be a skilled writer: Radford’s real craft is story-telling. He is completely at home addressing a crowd of scientists — he knows how to hold a mirror up to the geeks and reflect the fun, fascinating, world-changing awesomeness back at them. “It’s a terrible mistake to think that because you know about a subject you are equipped to write about it,” he told us, getting at how hard it is to see something from within. It might be easier to write creatively, and with due wonder, about fields outside our own.

Some in the audience weren’t content with being entertained by Radford, watching him in action as it were, preferring instead to dwell on controversy. He mostly swatted them aside, perfectly pleasantly, but one thing he was having none of was the supposed divide between scientists and journalists. Indeed, Radford asserted that journalists and scientists do basically the same thing: imagine a story (hypothesis), ask questions (do experiments), form a coherent story (theory) from the results, and publish. Journalists are scientists. Kind of.

I loved Radford's committed and unapologetic pragmatism, presumably the result of several decades of deadlines. “You don’t have to be ever so clever, you just have to be ever so quick,” and as a sort of corollary: “You can’t be perfectly right, but you must be mostly right.” One questioner accused journalists of sensationalising science (yawn). “Of course we do!” he said — because he wants his story in the paper, and he wants people to read it. Specifically, he wants people who don’t read science stories to read it. After all, writing for other people is all about giving them a sensation of one kind or another.

I got so much out of the 3 hours I could write at least another 2000 words, but I won’t. The evening was so popular that the paper decided to record the event and experiment with a pay-per-view video, so you can get all the goodness yourself. If you want more Radford wisdom, his Manifesto for the simple scribe is a must-read for anyone who writes.

Tim Radford's most recent book, The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things, came out in spring 2011.

The photograph of Tim Radford, at The World's Most Improbable Event on 30 September, is copyright of Stevyn Colgan, and used with his gracious permission. You should read his blog, Colganology. The photograph of King's Place, the Guardian's office building, is by flickr user Davide Simonetti, licensed CC-BY-NC.

Update on Saturday, October 6, 2012 at 7:15 PM by Matt Hall

I was surprised to find no Wikipedia article on Tim Radford, so I created one. If you know anything more about Mr Radford, please add to it (with citations, of course!).

I also made an edit to this post: I changed the wording of my reference to Radford as Yoda, to better match the tweet.

Cut the small print

We received a contract for a new piece of work recently. This wouldn't normally be worth remarking on, but this contract was special. It was different. It was 52 pages long.

It was so comically long that the contracts analyst at the company that sent it to me actually called me up before sending it to say, "The contract is comically long. It's just standard procedure. Sorry." Because it's so long, it's effectively all small print — if there's anything important in there, I'm unlikely to see it. The document bullies me into submission. I give in.

Unfortunately, this is a familiar story. Some (mostly non-lawyers) like Alan Siegel are trying to change it:

Before we all laugh derisively at lawyers, wait a second. Are you sure that everyone reads every word in your reports and emails? Do they look at every slide in your presentations? Do they listen to every word in your talks? 

If you suspect they don't, ask yourself why not. And then cut. Cut until all that's left is what matters. If there's other important stuff — exceptions, examples, footnotes, small print, legal jargon — move it somewhere and give people a link.

Wiki maniacs wanted

Jimmy Wales, saluting the crowd at Wikimania 2012Jimmy Wales (right) believes profoundly in the Wikimedia Foundation's mission:

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

If that mission sounds a bit grand, that's because it is. The amazing thing about this crusade, possibly the most altruistic and ambitious goal ever undertaken, is that you can help. The grand mission, should you choose to accept it, belongs to you—and to every other highly privileged, highly educated person you know.

Wikipedia needs you

One of the most surprising things I heard last week at Wikimania was that the number of active editors is falling, down 4000 since 2011 at 85 000. You can help fix it: 

• Create an account to watch pages, change the look and behaviour of Wikipedia, and edit articles without revealing your IP address.
• Next time you see something wrong or incomplete, edit it! Just click Edit.
• Help improve articles on your home town, your hobbies, and your profession.
• Pick a subject you care about (Well logging?) and look for red links, which are articles in need of creation.
• Join a project like WikiProject:Geology to collaborate with other editors.
• The Wikimedia Foundation runs on donations. Donate!
• If you want somewhere to practise, use your Wikipedia Sandbox (requires an account), or poke around on SEGwiki or SubSurfWiki, where you're always welcome.

Imagine a world in which you can contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we have.

Update on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 at 12:03 PM by Matt Hall

I made a handy cheatsheet, in case you're not familiar with the markup language in MediaWiki-based wikis. It looks scary at first, but once you get accustomed to it, it's fast and easy to use. 

Almost anything is possible in wiki markup, but these are the easy things. If there's something else you wish was on there, leave a suggestion in the comments for this post.