So how do you communicate science with people
A field guide from an introvert who struggles with this every day.
This past week was GEM, the Geospace Environment Modeling Workshop. This workshop is one of, if not the primary, place to share magnetospheric research within the US1.
GEM is a fantastic workshop as it emphasizes students and builds up the research community. Other workshops and conferences have started taking their lead, but GEM (I believe) has always had a student day. The Sunday before the conference begins, and before the official networking/icebreaker for the conference, the students meet with just themselves.
This is important - there are only students at the sessions on Sunday. No advisors are looking over them, "judging" what they might say, what questions they might ask. There are no potential postdoc supervisors there making decisions on who they might ask to come to work with them based on the discussions. There are only peers. It is a time to form new collaborations with peers, discuss issues they may all be facing, and, most importantly, a place to ask those questions you might not ask in the sessions.
Now that's a lot to put into a day - so how do they do it? I think I know, but it's been a while since I've been a student. When I was a student, the students further along in their Ph.D. led introductory sessions on the topics that would be covered later in the week. Each speaker discussed the most recent papers and current competing theories and ideas. Sometimes we would even have pictures of who the different scientists were so we could recognize them during the workshop. No idea how close this is to what they currently do as I'm on the outside - as it should be, and perhaps one of them will write up a post about what they do nowadays!
The introductions to the focus topics aim to help the students feel included and give them a foundation to participate in the discussions no matter the length of time they have been in the field. Perhaps more importantly, it also helps them understand how their research is integrated into the field, know that we care about them being part of our community and that we and their peers support their growth as they become active and participatory members.
Another aspect of GEM that is less unique is our plenary sessions. Each focused topic for the year is given a slot to have a member of their subfield provide an overview/review talk about the current efforts and interesting questions.
The students also get a plenary session and ask someone from the community to come and share their expertise. This year the students asked me to discuss a wide range of topics that I think all fall under the topic of communications; How to bring scientists together, how to get into doing media relations, how to communicate well with others, be it scientists or the public. That is a huge ask... and I'm not sure I'm always the right person to ask.
So how do you communicate with people - a field guide from an unpopular introvert who struggles with this every day. That's the title I should have gone with - the real one is much more boring…
But the Bottom Line Up Close to the Front (BLUCF)
Step 1: Just do it
Step 2: Remember that you will make mistakes
Step 3: Listen when people show/tell you that they don't understand you
Step 4: Take a beat to find a new way to say what you are trying to say
Step 5: continue the dialog and go back to step 1.
Okay, that's the high-level overview, but there are more good things to consider.
Why do you want to communicate your science? This goes back to at least my time at Augsburg University, but even further to the values my parents taught. However, at Augsburg, there was an emphasis on service. Service to all the communities you are a part of. That includes the physical neighborhood you live and work in and the more geographically dispersed communities you live and work in. Mark Engebretson, my undergraduate advisor, taught us the importance of making sure we peer review papers, serve on proposal review panels, and participate in committees and other aspects of service to our communities.
As I’ve gone through my career and become a civil servant, this drive to ensure that my research community is served and service to the broader American public has become even more important to me. And I can’t give an outreach talk now without showing and highlighting an Astronaut.
Now that you’ve found your own motivation for sharing science, there are three questions you might start with.
What do you want to communicate,
Why do you want to communicate,
How do you want to communicate, and
Who do you want to communicate with?
Those questions are all internal; they are all about me. I want to communicate about my research! I want to communicate because I think what I do is so interesting. Everyone should also think it is fascinating! I want to communicate it to everyone (see, I think everyone should also find my work fascinating). That's a great first step, and if I don't care how it is received, I am good to go. I should go preach the gospel of Alexa's research activities through research papers, social media, TV interviews, etc. But there is one problem... I can shout about this across all platforms, but will anyone care? Will anyone pick up my research and use it? Will anyone come back for the next story I tell about my fantastic and flawless work? The answer is probably no.
So more than three questions are needed. I need some outward-looking questions to match those inward-looking ones.
Who do I plan to communicate with?
Why should someone care about what I have to say?
How much time do they have to listen to me?
What background do they have/what type of language are they using through this platform? 2
In other words, what type of bridge do I need to create to help flow information from me to the other side of this communication path.
We do this all the time within the scientific community. Am I giving the talk at AGU, where I have 6 minutes to convey my message to experts in the field? Do I have 45 minutes to give a speech to an audience at a university seminar that includes undergrads through research experts? How do I want to craft my introduction within my paper? Am I trying to get people in a neighboring subfield to pay attention and continue reading?
These same principles can be used to start broadening your reach about your science. The audience can be different; you can access many more platforms than just a talk or a paper.3
I first stepped into science communication outreach like most people do. I volunteered to help with science days at local (or not-so-local) high schools. At the time, I thought of it as more practice for how to teach - but it was also a great place to start practicing communicating with an interested public.
My next real foray into science outreach was twofold. This first was an opportunity to work on a science/art collaboration through my Ph.D. uni, the University of Newcastle Australia (Go Seahorses). The scientists all thought this endeavor was an opportunity for us to further our artistic pursuits, learn how to paint better, improve our photography, etc. The Artists all came in thinking we could build them fantastic gadgets to make their artistic envisions grander (i.e., we were all lab rats with engineering backgrounds). What happened next didn't align with our preconceived ideas but was even cooler.
So obviously, our goals needed to be aligned, and we needed to start over. We started with a conversation - what was their art, what types of media did they use (notice the different definitions of media here), and what was our research, our passion for science. Then the collaborations began.
I was working with waves and their impact on particles - even though my research wasn't aligned with the waves and particles that cause the aurora, they were cousins of theirs - that became my subject matter. I wanted to build a lean-to where we could project videos of the aurora with the quiet winter forest sound or recordings of different types of plasma waves.
This needed to be more artistic... I needed to push myself or the idea more for the artist. So we went bigger. We recorded glow sticks moving through water - distorted them further. Then that became our movie of the Aurora. We then recorded the sound of cars driving down the street. We modulated this noise and got something vaguely similar to the sounds from space. In the lean-to, we made sure people had to duck in and that there were blankets and pillows. We made tree cut-outs along the bottom as if you were sitting on one side of a lake or meadow looking off into the distance at a forest with the aurora overhead. It was a bit kitschy, but it was a hit. The lean-to reminded people of the pillow and blanket forts they made as a kid. The cut-out trees were nothing special, but just enough to play into the kids' fort feel and spur the imagination. People would spend time in other areas during the art show, but they came and ended up in our little camp because it was cozy. Did they walk away with a deep understanding of the aurora? Not necessarily. But they did walk away with a new interest to learn more or, really, to see it in person someday. The outreach started when they would ask me when and where to see the auroral lights. When they asked me what the sounds were, I could transfer my knowledge about the different plasma waves to them. It was such a new way to share my science with a diverse audience, and it was amazing.
Later that year, our university encouraged people to visit our local radio station to discuss our Ph.D. thesis. I had done radio interviews for non-science topics, so I figured it would be fun - and boy, was it. Here the outward questions were clear and provided to me by the producers:
The audience was interested in science.
I was speaking to non-experts but science enthusiasts (who may be scientists or engineers themselves, just unlikely in my field - though a few who listened were).
I had a 45-minute slot that included radio ad breaks.
They used G-rated language and little jargon, but the language may be at a New York Times level.
Here the key was to be me, enthusiastic, and relaxed. The interviewers were well practiced in talking with experts, so they would stop you and ask clarifying questions or definitions. Something great for a new communications person. We tend to forget what words are not "everyday" words. It was so much fun... and some people criticized or joked about how I described some science. That will always happen, so you need to learn to say, "Great, well, I'll consider that, but it would be great if you shared your science, and you can then describe X in that manner." And while it can hurt - because putting yourself out there is intimidating no matter how often you do it - think of it as a reminder that you need to continue to practice, you will always make mistakes, and they are just keeping you humble.
Those great experiences helped me prepare for my next career step. When I worked on the BARREL mission, I was unprepared for the amount of outreach I would have to do. With Robyn and others in the field, many of the media requests went through me - and they were not the type that I expected, well, not all of them were. Of course, we had requests from NASA (as a NASA mission), primarily for blogs where we provided photos or a few key statements. But then there were requests from scientists.
One of the big hits with BARREL was the amount of coordination between the different science groups. At the very start, I was writing a daily newsletter. What was the status, what balloons might launch, which might come down, what events did we see, and what conjunctions did we have with the satellites. Or that's how it started. We eventually added ground weather (how likely would a new balloon be launched), what was the expected space weather for the next 3 - 5 days, and what was the recent space weather like?
It turns out that a daily email that takes 2+ hours to put together isn't something that everyone wants to get. They want to be able to reference that information - just not in email form. That led to the development of our BARREL Blog. We then curated our email to remove sensitive information and published it on our website. And then some amazing things started happening. Others started seeing our work and wanted to be involved. They started sending me updates from their own instruments and satellites to include in the updates. I would tweet about our launches and other exciting events. More people started sending us information and requests to collaborate.
Then we started getting requests for splitting the blog into two... our audience was divided. The scientists (the audience I was originally catering to) enjoyed the daily updates, the science updates around the data processing and analysis tools or papers that came out, and the more public outreach posts and updates from the team in Antarctica. The general public wanted to avoid sifting through the science-heavy material.
Maintaining two websites for two different audiences is not something that I recommend to anyone who is in the middle of a campaign. Neither blog was as successful after we tried to split - it was too much work for one person doing this in their spare time.
We need to add another best practice: recognize your own time and how much you can devote to your outreach. Know your limits.
While I learned one lesson the hard way (don't do too much - you can't please everyone), it was still incredibly worthwhile. However, I did not expect social media to be such a great tool for science communication among scientists.
So let's dive into some of these less traditional tools for science. Less conventional as they are becoming vital, and we as a community must recognize them.
As already alluded, the first place I used social media for outreach was on blogs. They are a great way to share multiple forms of media, they can be short or long, and there is some feedback if you enable the comments 4. It's also a great way to dip your toe into the water, so to speak. If you don't advertise your blog, you won't have a large, or possibly any, readership... so no trolls in the comments. That is not really the reason to have a blog, but as you become more comfortable with the format and sharing your ideas and science, you can expand your reach.
I tried FaceBook as a place to share science. While others have done this very successfully, I was preaching to the choir and really to family and friends. So, while they were interested, they were not the audience I wanted to reach. I wanted to see how their lives were going, not lecture them. That's what BBQs are for when they ask me how work is going :).
Tumbler was my next try at a platform. Again others had great luck with it, but it didn't suit me. Instagram was the same. I loved it as a place to share my photography, but my science outreach didn't ever evolve on that platform.
Then I found Twitter. The short tweet length was like a game. How can I say something impactful about something most people know nothing about in fewer words than this sentence? I was hooked.
I had found balance at the extremes. Long-form blogs where I could wax on and on about my science and then share that and more pithy everyday science on Twitter. This worked well for sharing my science and finding and building new collaborations. But nothing lasts forever, and on the internet. Things may stay up and findable forever, but the platforms constantly change.
I am currently finding new platforms to share my science online.
Substack has been a great way for me to share my blogs. But I have yet to find a great replacement for Twitter. Nothing quite has the reach. But something will come along, and in the meantime, I can revisit the other platforms - stretch the way I try to share my science and my experiences as a scientist.
In the meantime, I plan to continue giving lectures, participating in comicons, and enjoying the in-person outreach as much as the online sharing of science. And hopefully, sharing my experiences will encourage more people to try out some outreach. The more our community shares our passion and the cool science we do, the better!
Now you notice that it is called Geospace Environment Modeling Workshop. Yes, I am not a modeler, and yes, I do think there are issues with the name highlighting one part and not the whole community... but that is historical, unlikely to change (especially as GEM is such a nice acronym), and not the point of this post Obviously it bugs me though - otherwise I probably would have edited out those comments.
Even the same person in different settings will expect and appreciate different language used. I want something relaxed and edgy when I see talks at NerdNite or the like. When I am talking to someone in a more professional setting: well I prefer that it's still relaxed, but the expectation is that it will be more, well, professional.
Jaye and others have shown us that you can inject other platforms into our talks with amazing results. We are human; even if we think of ourselves as scientists (read - rational non-human humans), we sometimes connect more with art, music, and when a dynamic range of platforms are used to convey a message. Thus, part of my attempt to use footnotes in a blog post :). Ooh, and look, I've now used an emoji which, as Abraham Lincoln used it, I'm calling it professional. Sure, it was in his notes, but now after reading this winding footnote, you'll remember that it is sometimes good to use various communication tools.
You don't always want to enable the comments… good rule of thumb, don't feed the trolls - even when they say they are starving for conversation and attention, they don't need it. There is enough food for them to forage in the internet wilderness; you don't need to feed them.