The Pope Clement Dichotomy

There is an irony in being a person interested in online engagement with science, digital research, social media and divers public stuff and yet being a person who twizzles up inside when she thinks about writing a blog post. Like Pope Clement VI sitting out the Black Death, I am caught between two fires.

I’ve been telling myself I’d write a post when the results of my PhD oral examination and thesis were properly sanctioned but really, the official procedures take an unconscionable time, hence the embarrassingly long gap. To bring you up to date, back in the summer I survived the oral exam.  and the examiners recommended I be awarded the PhD subject to some minor amendments to the thesis. I’m currently waiting to hear if the corrections have been accepted.

However, revenons à nos moutons, next week is Open Access Week around the world so I must ignore the flames of personal squeamishness and stoke the blaze of professional openness.

I will be playing a small part in the University of Exeter’s Open Exeter events, to talk about whether open science can be a shared space for fostering public engagement with science. The fact that citizens, community groups and NGOs are demanding – and in many cases getting – access to evidence that enables us to scrutinise research and participate effectively is widely recognised – for example by the Royal Society. That being so, we have to think about the relationship between professional and non-professional researchers; why might members of the public want to contribute to research? what knowledge and expertise will they bring? what new skills will participants need to develop? how are the contributions of all participants to be valued?

I’ll be helping to discuss the issues a bit further at SpotOn London, in November. With Cindy Regalado and Shannon Dosemagen, we want to explore citizen science as public participation in research. The spirit of SpotOn is very much about collaboration, connection and community discussion, so I intend to be as provocative as I dare! I’ll be starting the session by asking eh question of what we mean by ‘public participation in research’. Can we move beyond the concept of public participants as data suppliers, data organisers  and human computers (effective though we might be in those roles and exciting as many people find such participation). How we can open science support co-creation and collaboration? How will the roles of ‘scientist’ and ‘citizen’ change? What happens when scientists are nudged from their traditional role as research designers and decision-makers? How do we value the contribution of the expertise and skills of citizen scientists? What ethical considerations are involved in challenging the notions of what ‘people’ can do? How do we value the validity and credibility of the contributions of citizen scientists? What are the current issues in participatory research in environmental and health research structures?

SpotOn will be livestreamed and tweeted (hashtag #solo12citizen). It will be interesting to see if the conversation goes beyond the room and into the open air.

The index of interest

I‘ve taken a day off, unbound the fetters that currently lock me to my computer, and gone to a conference.

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/

Becoming a digital researcher

It’s all about the networks!

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.

deep in the forest …

I know, I know – a shamefully long time since I added anything to this blog.

I am inspired by the two days last week I spent cloistered in a lovely hotel in the New Forest, with twenty or so exceptionally intelligent people — roboticists, AI people, ethicists, philosophers, a lawyer, artists, historians and more — at a retreat to consider the ethical issues raised by ubiquitous robotics. Two days of intense listening and thinking.

Robots were supposed to be ubiquitous by now: I’m pretty sure I was promised in the 1960s that when I grew up, I’d travel everywhere by robotic flying car and at home, recline graciously on my sofa while my robot parlourmaid poured my tea as the robot nanny played games with my lovely (entirely human) children. That hasn’t happened – sadly.

While it’s not easy to define what a “robot”  is (believe me, we tried!), there are, apparently, eight million robots in the world already. They can be cuddly, like Paro; designed to offer emotional support. Or cute toys, like Pleo. But what are the ethical issues when robots interact with possibly vulnerable older people or children? Robots can be designed to do dirty and difficult tasks, like mining; but dirty and difficult might also mean military. Robots already ‘man’ factories – what implications do robot employees have for the future of the human kind?

You can’t get too far in two days but we ended the retreat delicately poised in agreement on the kind of questions we should be asking ourselves. As I write, the first draught of an ethical code for robot designers is being created. When it’s ready, it’ll be time to open up the conversation to the wider world. Because, of course, it’s not solely about the people who design the robots; it’s about the people who’ll use them, work alongside them, be cared for by them, play with them, love them, get operated on by them, learn with them, grow up with them, have sex with them, be killed by them …

Citizen Scientists

At the Citizen Science workshop, hosted last week by the Galaxy Zoo project, two of the people taking part were actual, real, citizen scientists. Both had careers outside science but had been drawn back into study through their involvement with the project. They were lovely, enthusiastic people and completely involved in Galaxy Zoo, spending long hours not just classifying the galaxies but helping to run the forum, gather material for papers, initiate new developments in the project and more.

They both said was that they liked being ‘zooites’ because they felt valued as collaborators, not used as ‘computers’ – that they were really ‘sharing in the science’. And also, most interestingly for me, that they felt those things because the  stuff they were doing is good science.

If citizens are going to devote time and energy to a project, they have to feel it’s worthwhile. No one likes to feel used or relegated to being a mere resource. Citizen scientists, like any other scientists, want to know that the research is hypothesis-driven and that the results matter. Science is driven by questions and citizen science is no different to any other kind.

In the process of …

Don’t get me wrong … it’s wonderful to have the time, space and freedon to read and think but I’m a scientist at heart and I’ve been itching to be ‘doing’ something.

And in the spirit of open science, I should tell … whoever’s reading this … that I am actually doing something. No, it doesn’t matter that I haven’t processed the data yet. Or that I have the teensiest possible amount of data to process as yet. The point is, I am in the process of …!

I’ve plunged in and done my first interview, with a generous scientist who kindly gave up an hour of his time to answer my rambling attempts at questions. A small step but I am ridiculously excited about it.

I’m mid-way through transcribing the interview as we speak. Writing this post is by way of giving my poor ears a rest.  There are two reasons to give my ears a rest: one physical – not being of the ‘digitial native’ generation (my first calculator was a slide rule), my ears scream after more than an hour with earphones in. and one mental – can anyone bear to listen to themselves in a recording?

The conversation was interesting and of course, as any good conversation should, threw up more questions than answers. For example – I’d missed an obvious point – I need to find some open science sceptics to talk to. And then there’s publishing … and journalism … and education …

A barrel of herrings to look over in case they turn out to be red.

Public engagement means points

I’ve read in a few places now that one of the reasons scientists give for not taking part in public engagement work is because, bluntly, it’s not part of their funding and they don’t get recognised for it.

This could be about to change in the UK. The Minister for Science, Lord Drayson, made a speech last week that committed the government to rewarding scientists who engage with the public. The government, he said, took public engagement very seriously.

However, the Times Higher Education supplement wrote much more clearly about his speech. See the article here.