In the final few weeks of my studentship, modesty forbids me to say that I have put a stupendous amount of effort into crafting a beautifully-written, compelling, thesis. Because everyone knows that the really important part of a piece of writing is the sub-title; that bit after the colon, the subtle, punning, quixotic, jesting play on words that hooks people and draws them into reading the big chunk o’ stuff that comes thumping along afterwards. I’ve had three years to think of a post-: and … nothing. Not a sausage. I’m still using the title I started with: Open Science and Public Engagement.

So, dear reader, while the damn-thesis (that’s its official designation) is still a draft, I’m open for suggestions. Here are few I thought of earlier:

• From PEST to PEST&R? (the ‘r’ is research).
• Muddying the waters or clearing the stream? (I’ve used this one for a conference paper.)
• Enhancing collaboration and communication (v. dull)
• Telling the whole story (although ‘narrative’ would be a bit classier)

Scientists know this; indeed, playing one’s part in moving towards certainty is an important reason for being a scientist in the first place. But that’s not always how it looks; from school tests marked with a red tick to the Daily Blah telling us we should definitely eat prunes, there’s always supposed to be an answer; this is right and that is wrong.

Uncertainty, interpretation, queries, possibilities aren’t usually presented as outcomes by scientists, which is why I find the extensive media coverage of the OPERA experiment so interesting. Here is a huge team of scientists who concluded that their results showed neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. Quite a daring conclusion, given that if it’s valid, breaks a fundamental concept of the Special Theory of Relativity. The Twitter flock came alive with fleas as the thought hopped from one tweeter to another. Jim Al Khalili offered to eat his boxer shorts if it turned out to be true, albeit carefully reserving the right to happen to be wearing edible pants at the time.

This result has not offered us an ‘answer’ but rather a glimpse into how science works; the whole process of scrutiny, checking and revision (http://tinyurl.com/3qkzkv9). The team has turned to the community and asked for the data to be reviewed, the result to be scrutinised, other postulations to be made and other solutions presented. Admittedly, most of the people doing the checking and revising are likely to be other physicists, not non-maths-speaking members of the public (like me) but the OPERA team has deposited their paper in a publicly-accessible archive (the arXiv website (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v1)), so it could just be that someone, with no formal qualifications, working in an office job, in a small quiet country, might be the person who makes the breakthrough. That could never happen.

*A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea. (John Ciardi)

How to hang a door in ten easy steps:

1 Ignore – preferably for several months – the fact that the sitting-room door won’t close properly and is getting, ever-so-slightly, a bit worse every day.

Put this down to either (a) the weather – the infernal English dampness getting into the wood and making it swell or (b) the yucca plant, in an ill-advised bid for freedom, making an escape attempt by curling its leaves around the door jamb. Think that at some point, one will probably get the plane out and shave a bit off the door. Probably.

2 Attempt to enter sitting room while carrying a cup of tea. Discover door now won’t open. Bang nose on door and throw tea down one’s front.

3 Swear

4 Don dry clothes and inspect door. Discover hinges are pulling away from jamb at both top and bottom.

5 Swear. Prop door up with pile of heavy books.

6 Next morning, gird loins, drink strong coffee and eat flapjack (important to keep up one’s strength).

Discover only six (of eight) holes actually have screws in them. Extract screws. Top hinge has two: one 2cm long (useless), one 3cm (and not even a wood screw). Bottom hinge has four: three 8cm long and one 6cm. Walk into town and buy 8 new, all-matching, long screws. Get home and discover pack only contains 6 …

7 Have a scrabble around in the shed for anything useful, such as two long wood screws. Discover tube of ‘no more nails’ glue. Decide screws are just nails with attitude, so glue might come in useful, especially as wood around bottom hinge resembles mature Emmental.

8 Hold up (did I mention it was very heavy?) door for a very long time, while son adopts usual manly role of tool manipulator. Allow blood to drain from arms while holes are drilled, glue inserted and screws screwed.

Allow bottom screws to go in with no discernible grip on surrounding wood. Close eyes to this and concentrate on fact screw heads are at least flush with wood. Allow top screws, on the other hand, to stick out for varying distances from the hinge. Such a pretty pattern!

Take over screwdriver from son in attempt to see if fresh (if feeble) muscle power will move the more prominent screws in a bit. No. Try different screwdriver. Still no.

9 Swear.

Extract long screws from top hinge and scrabble around in screw box for shorter ones.  Insert shorter ones; ignore the fact they go in with no discernible … (see above).

10 Prop door up on several maps and a biography of Isaac Newton; after all, it’s got to be important to allow glue plenty of time to set before attempting to close door. Gloomily suspect that we’ll be back to point 3 before long!

I’ve also unplugged the academic tone-filter – I’m writing up my thesis, so everything I write has a profusion of sub-clauses, brackets, dependencies and semi-colons – and hoping this will come out like normal English. This is also why this blog has been quiet for a bit. Too many words!

However, it may just sound garbled. This is because I got up at five to catch a very early train and yet still arrived just as the big ush into the auditorium began, thereby missing that very vital first cup of coffee, essential to get me through an extended session in semi-darkness.

This is a very online conference. Almost all the conferees are carrying one, if not more, tools for communication. During the morning’s keynote, I was fascinated by the rise and fall of the barely audible sound of fingers hitting keypads and tiny switches clicking; an instantaneous index of interest in the speaker’s remarks. (Drat – I’ve just realised that’s a very poor sampling technique; not taking in the legions of i-padders, smart phoners and the (like me) rare souls who insist on scribbling on real paper. Damn – gravelled for lack of matter.)

So far, it’s the usual conference mix of ‘whoo, interesting’, ‘er, dull’, ‘I wanted to say that’ and ‘I wish I had the gumption to stand up and argue about that’. Sadly, comments on ‘the public’ are the biggest fillers of the latter category. The poor old public has been educated at, communicated at, engaged at, been wondered whether it’s capable of understanding … and we haven’t even reached tea on the first day. I’m sure the commenters don’t mean it but – and I’ve moaned about this before – there’s low awareness of research in public engagement in the wider scientific communities. In the community I’m currently conferring with, that would probably be my fault. Back to the need for a gumption insert.

Day 2. Is may be me but aren’t panel sessions just the most drear?

Today was a brave attempt at an unusual format. Second days of conferences often lack energy – depending on one’s sociability level either one hasn’t slept properly or has spent too long in the bar the night before – and conferees can need a boost. So the day was themed around workshops on ways to open up the science for a small foundation supporting research into a rare but tragic childhood condition – Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Having learned a little about the condition, we split into workshops to look at using social media (like Storify, to agglomerate twitter commentary), data visualisation, xxx and yyy. But unfortunately – for various technological and organising reasons – it didn’t quite happen. Pity – I liked the idea of focussing on a genuine problem and attempting to do some real science, albeit in a short time.

But I feel kind of refreshed, I got to listen to some interesting stuff and I have pages of notes, studded with asterisks for ‘find out more’. And I have a few new thoughts for the thesis, which could well be a relief for its eventual readers.

NB It’s http://www.scienceonlinelondon.org/

A gentle wander across the social media uplands, led by Tristram Hooley (University of Derby), co-author of Social media – a guide for researchers, published by the Research Information Network. The slides he used are available from his blog. I’ve indicated bits I’ve pinched from his slides by putting them in “italic”.

‘Becoming a digital researcher’. That’s a tricky concept to start with: is it about using digital tools in research or about using social media to represent our research selves? We were asked to think about our “personal learning environment”;  the places where we get information and how we use it.

Using Google to track down a piece of information or find contact details for an interesting person you heard at a conference, riffling through the electronic library catalogue to find a book, belonging to an email list like psci-comm … these are digital routes to information that are a familiar part of the finding-things-out landscape.  But is Google (for example) a route to information or a source of information? Am I splitting hairs – is it a distinction without a difference?

Where do Web 2.0 social media like Twitter fit? Its messages can be vapid nonsense but they can also be great for listening to people who’s opinion you care about, finding out what’s going on, even collaborating, via hashtags. Where researchers are separated geographically, temporally or even just through sheer busy-ness, these are ways to keep projects and people together. Is twitter more of a professional tool than, say, Facebook? Where do tools for sharing citations, references, document production and so on fit?

The production of ideas is becoming more personal. Although still somewhat under the control of publishers, there are personal routes through now – open access journals, university repositories, even blogs. “All research processes are social and communicative, reliant on networks – writing, seminars, teaching, papers, conferences, reading.” In all sorts of ways, we stand – as Newton almost said – on each other’s shoulders.

There were the inevitable questions about intellectual property. What if we write about something on a blog, then someone snitches our ideas and uses them? (I’ll write some more about intellectual property later, having just got back from a lunchtime seminar about it which was deeply enervating.) As someone said, you use the same rules as you do offline: only let out into public what you’re willing to let out. Social media are now part of the “creation of knowledge: questioning via twitter; testing out ideas via a blog post”.  Blogs are part of reflective practice – as you can see! They’re also ways to collaborate – commentary on blog posts (such as the Polymath Blog), collaborative creation using Google Docs and so on. And researchers – especially early-career ones – can’t be sniffy about using social media to increase our public profile and work ourselves up the Google search list: “People like to employ people they know about”.

(We were encouraged to use twitter throughout the day (#druwe). And, I am guilt-free about keeping up with email, reading blog posts and like-mannered stuff during the session. If you can’t use email on a course about being a digital researcher, when can you! We were also asked to create a blog post in ten minutes, which I found to be a horrible experience. Not yet good enough at writing to be comfortable producing something raw and unfashioned. I did extrude a post but I’ve since taken it down.)

So hmm … what do I wish we’d talked about that we didn’t? Most obvious gap for me was the idea of developing a social media strategy for projects. Given my research area and interest in science communication in general, I would think that, wouldn’t I? But almost every publicly-funded project has a public engagement component; indeed, almost every project wants to be known and talked about – it’s part of keeping the process going. Novel, effective and targeted use of social media must have a part to play in that.

Surprised, because when I was first introduced to reflective practice two and a half years ago, I struggled to see the point. But I dutifully plodded on, incorporating it into my work until, almost unnoticed, it’s become natural, important and something I’m now suggesting to other people.

Maybe I shouldn’t be startled. I love abstract art – Mondrian, Matisse, Hepworth. I love editing written work – getting as close as possible to that magical pivot between minimum words and maximum explanation. For me, reflection makes sense as mental editing – catching experiences, mulling over their qualities and weighing them against knowledge. Paring thoughts down, trying to capture their essence and express them pithily.

I haven’t yet reached complete pith; I rather tend to waffle and persiflage, although I have written one or two paragraphs I think are pretty good.

But effective reflection takes time. Integrating experiment into practice and thence to understanding isn’t something (for me, anyway) that happens quickly. I’m lucky; the last two and a bit years have offered me unprecedented time to develop my thoughts (I’m still not sure anything useful will come out of it but I live in hope). PhD research might be meagre on bread but it’s rich in time to feed the soul with hyacinths; I’m unlikely to have such space afforded me again.

Silence is equally vital. Tentatively unravelling the strands of my thoughts and knitting them into solid sense can’t be done against clamour. Fortunately, I’m trusted to work at home for most of my time, where I look over my laptop’s screen on to my garden and my house’s thick Edwardian walls block out most unhuman noise.

Time crops up a lot when I talk to interviewees. Time flies. Time is like an ever-rolling stream. Time is of the essence (rapid move from poetry to the law!). Researchers taking an Open Science approach could be in danger of releasing a deluge of data and information on to the world. Does anyone have the time to deal with all that … stuff?

As I pondered in a previous post, does all that information muddy the water, making it impossible to see beneath the surface? Does it put science in the way of becoming like modern governments, which have to create policy lines in the sand in the face of the relentless tide of 24-hour news?

Unless you’re one of the rare but admirable researchers who runs an open notebook, committing to an open approach can be seen as taking time “away from the ‘real’ work”. It takes time to think through what it all means, write up the notes, tidy up the spreadsheet, comment the program code … but hang on, aren’t these processes truly a vital part of the real work; taking time to analyse, to evaluate, to ponder, to categorise … to reflect? Apparently doing nothing isn’t not doing anything. By making us stop doing in order to make what we’re doing transparent, Open Science could slow things down a little but such procrastination might be the donor, not the thief.

PS: by coincidence, my supervisor recently pondered the virtues of slow science in his blog. An object lesson in how to be an incredibly busy person but still reflect effectively!

A few nights ago, I went to an event with a fairly feeble speaker. I won’t tell you where, what, when or which sex (English could do with a neutral pronoun; I could only resort to the slightly awkward ‘they’ or the completely irritating ‘he/she’*). There was muddle, bad logic and general steam-coming-out-of-my-ears-ness but that’s not what I want to write about. I’ll just say “?!*&$#~/”. No, what interested me is that I seem to be developing a confidence in my critical faculties. A few years ago, I’d’ve known there was something wrong but doubtful why and certainly hesitant to say how. Now, unconsciously, I’ve developed an ability to question and criticise, absorbed from the environment I’ve luckily found myself in.

Yes, I think that must be it.

*English could also do with a new orthographic mark to indicate ‘this isn’t really part of the argument, merely me dribbling on for a bit; serious-minded readers might want to jump straight to the other side of the closing parenthesis’. We all have our favourite punctuation; I easily drift into being parenthetical (although I also scatter semi-colons liberally). Likewise, I have a friend who’s a great dasher – editors emerge from his work prickled all over like porcupines!

A conversation I recently had with a friend threw up – in the random way email exchanges do – Chaucer’s description of the Clerk of Oxford. The Clerk was new to me but I have a fellow feeling for him – I’m definitely not right fat, never held high office, spend all my spare pennies (and a few unspare ones) on books …

But what struck me was the last line. I left teaching without a backward glance some (aargh!) twenty-two years ago. I was no loss – although I might have been a reasonable teacher, I was an absolutely rotten lion-tamer. Recently though, I’ve been doing a little teaching as part of my researcher skills training. Not a lot – nowhere near enough data points to make a line – but some. And – to my pleased surprise – I’ve really enjoyed it. Some of it’s gone well and some not so well but it’s all been so interesting. Not just the actual standing in front of students but the whole devising, preparing, planning, reflection, thinking about how I could do it better. Why? The past has no glow on it that can light up the present. Age? Possibly. University students, rather than school pupils? Very likely.

Another surprise has been how much of the educational theory is as it was in the late 70s. This intrigues me. Is it that (a) nothing has changed, (b) I was very well-trained at teacher training college or (c) I’ve been away from educational theory for so long that the cycle has come back to where I was?

Gladly learning has never been a problem. The good thing about being released from the classroom all those years ago was the time it gave me to learn. Until the last couple of years, all by myself but the last two years, I’ve been like Peter Rabbit in the Mr McGregor’s vegetable patch. I hope I don’t lose my jacket and shoes; I’ll settle for the camomile tea.

A Clerk ther was of Oxenford also,
That unto logik had long tyme i-go.
As lene was his hors as is a rake,
And he was not right fat, I undertake;
But lokede hollow, and therto soberly.
Ful thredbare was his overest cloke to see,
For he hadde nought geten him a benefice,
Nor was so worldly to have high office.
For he wold rather have at his beddes hed
Twenty bookes, clothed in blak and red,
Of Aristotil, and his philosophie,
Then robes riche, or fiddle, or psaltery.

But although that he were a philosóphre,
Yet had he but a litul gold in cofre;
But al that he might gete, and his frendes sent,
On bookes and his lernyng he it spent,
And busily gan for the soules pray
Of them that gaf him money to scolay.
Of studie tooke he most cure and most heede.
Not one word spak he more than was need;
Al that he spak it was of heye prudence,
And short, and quyk, and ful of gret sentence.
Sowndynge in moral virtu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche

Murphy’s Law: everything that could possibly go wrong did. The abstract was lost, the registration process worked one time out of three; my slides didn’t make it, at one stage I was in the programme to speak in two sessions (both of them the wrong ones), my talk eventually vanished altogether and the paper never made it to the proceedings.

I did get to stay on for a very good holiday (but that’s the subject of another blog) although the scars still sting. I can almost think about it without howling but the pain lingers. Some would say it’s partly my fault. I am very organised; I send everything in at least a week before the deadline, which means there was more time for them to get lost.

So, not even in the conventional sense has the work been made available. Time to practice what I’m researching others doing; turn to the currently unconventional – and open. I’ve put it in my university’s open repository (or at least, started the process that will eventually land it in the repository) and now I’m making it available here. It’ll be fascinating to see if anyone engages with it: one of my mantras is that openness – and the Internet – means that if anyone is interested in something (however obscure) they can get to the information.

Last time I looked, my readership was in single figures; hope you enjoy it, guys! Let me know what you think.

Muddying the waters or clearing the stream

People practise Open Science for all sorts of reasons. They might be philosophical: it is A Good Thing-in-Itself. Or they might be pragmatic: it’s a way to get information out to as wide an audience as possible (and maybe back in again, but that’s another topic). But does making information directly available to anyone clear the stream of communication or does the data surge muddy the waters with a deluge of unfocussed, unclear and unvetted comment?

Within the community of scientists, a delicate structure of rules has grown up that sustains our trust in ourselves. We trust each other to cite references properly, to attribute thoughtfully, not to jump each others’ claims and knock down small children in the rush to publication.

Thing is, the rules are largely implicit and maybe you have to be a fully-paid member of the academy to get them. But as the furore over the leaking of emails from UEA (which I won’t cheapen by referring to as Climateg*t*) showed, in the light of common day, expectations can be very different.

The Russell Review – one of the tribunals that investigated the issue – found that while there was no reason to doubt the rigour and honesty of the scientists involved, there had been a ‘consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness’.

What exactly is the proper degree is a moot point. Does it matter that – as my 25 replies show – definitions of what the ‘open’ in open science means are many and various? I don’t think it does; the important thing is to be open in the first place – as open as feels comfortable. As the leaked emails saga shows, it’s easy to confuse ‘normal process’ with ‘deliberately secretive’. Openness can help … open things up. Humans have evolved pretty sophisticated ‘oops that’s not quite right’ detectors over the millennia but we need something to work with. We need the whole picture; the photograph, the list of other publications, the funders, the research question, the blog. It all helps build the narrative; even the twitter post about the particularly nice cup of tea they just had.