Monthly Archives: March 2018

How to talk about the science coming out of your organisation when your organisation is not producing any science

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Behind all of the biggest scientific discoveries, there’s the infrastructure that lets it happen. We’ve all heard of the Large Hadron Collider, maybe the most famous bit of research infrastructure in the world. Unfortunately, most other research infrastructure is much more anonymous.

In Australia, one of those is the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), home to our fastest supercomputer. Computational research of any kind – climate modelling, molecular design, fundamental physics, genomics, satellite imagery – requires a facility like NCI to function. Working in Communications at NCI, I try to tell stories about the kinds of groundbreaking and life changing research that gets done using this machine.

A bank of dark computers fills a room, glowing with many green LED lights.

NCI’s Raijin supercomputer, the fastest in the Southern Hemisphere. Click to enlarge.

But here’s the issue: what do you do when the research stories you’re trying to tell don’t belong to you? We aren’t the ones doing the research, we’re providing the platform for it to happen. The research belongs to the researchers and all of their different universities and research organisations around the country.

We cover the research outcomes that come about from the use of our supercomputer because the findings are often hugely significant. But detailing the scientific findings is not always our primary focus. It serves us well, but sometimes it’s better to leave that to those researchers’ media teams. For NCI, we need to go beyond only reporting on the successes of other researchers, no matter how noteworthy. We need to tell our own stories, not rely on those of others as a proxy for our own.

Australia’s national science infrastructure is hugely important to the progress of Australian science, and provides a backbone for millions of dollars of research and economic benefits each year. It is valuable in and of itself, and the challenge as communicators is to find ways to make that clear.

For one thing, there’s real scientific and technical achievements being made to keep our supercomputer operating at maximum capacity, and those are already stories worth telling. We also play a central role in a whole range of national advances, from improved weather forecasts to the development of national genetic databases, so let’s focus on those too!

Now, we angle our research stories, Annual Report and web content to focus more on our strength and value as a key cog in the scientific machine, which hopefully will give us a clearer voice and a more consistent platform. The lesson for us is to keep in mind the aims of our communication activities. We want to reach out to people and show them all the ways that national supercomputing infrastructure improves their lives: if the stories and videos we produce point us in that direction, we’re probably doing ok.

President’s Update

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Trust Me, I’m a Science Communicator.

With thanks to Dr Craig Cormick, President, Australian Science Communicators

Let’s start with a quick poll. Who do you think people trust the most?

Scientists?

– sorry. No.

According to a poll conducted by Roy Morgan, nurses topped the trust charts for the 22nd year in a row as the most trusted profession. And they were followed closely by pharmacists, doctors, engineers and school teachers. Bottom of the list were those working in car sales, advertising and real estate agents.

Scientists as such weren’t even thought of to be included on the list as a profession worth asking about!

A US poll conducted by Gallup in 2018 also rated nurses as the most-trusted profession. They were followed by military officers and teachers. Medical doctors and pharmacists rated a bit lower.

Also no scientists!

We all know celebrities hold a level of trust way above their qualifications, on all kinds of topics – but just how much are they actually trusted? A study by the Korn Group found that in Australia, the most trusted celebrities are Hugh Jackman, Jamie Oliver and Ellen Degeneres. At least there were no wacky foodies on the list, or crazy health faddists, sprouting paleo diets and vaginal steam baths.

So what about those polls that did look at trust in scientists?

And an Australian National University poll, conducted in 2014, found that 71 per cent of respondents trusted scientists (much more than they trusted the politicians responsible for science, at 15%).

In Britain a poll conducted by Ipsos-Mori in 2017 found that 83% of the public thought that scientists were trustworthy (though again nurses topped the poll with 91% trust).

And in the USA a 2016 survey by the National Science Foundation found that more respondents expressed “a great deal” of confidence in science leaders than in leaders of any other institution except the military.

But  not all US polls were so glowing – another conducted by GSS over several decades found only about 4 in ten people had a great deal of confidence in scientists (though they were the only group amongst 13 whose confidence rating remained stable, which might be some consolation).

So trust in scientists isn’t actually too bad – but why then do many people not much trust science? That’s an altogether more interesting question to ask, and several researchers have looked at it in detail.

According to the Pew Research Centre in the US, there are distinctions in those who trust scientists in general, and those who trust scientists on contentious issues, such as childhood vaccines, climate change, and genetically modified (GM).

A report by Pew stated, “Overall, many people hold skeptical views of climate scientists and GM food scientists; a larger share express trust in medical scientists, but there, too, many express what survey analysts call a “soft” positive rather than a strongly positive view.”

In the USA at least, many people are either skeptical about scientists’ level of understanding of contentious issues, or think scientist disagree on them.

So what’s to be done to stop trust being eroded?  The answer according to many researchers is in better engagement on science. Put simply. Build a relationship between scientists and the public.

And that’s the role of science communicators.

Trust me on this. I’m a science communicator!

Sixteen Legs

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Posted on behalf of Dr Neil Doran, UTAS

I am a prior threatened species management officer from Tasmania. We have an upcoming screening of the award-winning Australian cave biology documentary SIXTEEN LEGS in Canberra this weekend (18 Feb), and Devonport, Brisbane and Sydney later this month.

It’s a film that aims to inspire care and appropriate management of unique ecosystems in Australia, and proceeds from the screenings will also support educational work with Australian students.

As added incentive, we are planning to give away a couple of seats on our next Antarctic Flight (later this year) to attendees at one of the premiere sessions – so it’s worth people coming along! We (the researchers and filmmakers) will also be there for a Q&A session following the film.

View the film trailer here.

Film Description

SIXTEEN LEGS is a nature documentary like no other. Featuring Neil Gaiman alongside appearances by Stephen Fry, Tara Moss, Adam Hills, and Mark Gatiss, and with a score co-written and performed by Kate Miller-Heidke, SIXTEEN LEGS tells the story of the world beneath our feet through 6 years of filming, over 25 years of scientific research, and hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Journey into a shadowy world of weird animals and strange rock formations, overseen by giant prehistoric spiders trying to find love in the dark. Meet animals that outlasted the dinosaurs, survived the splitting of the continents and that have endured the entirety of human civilisation in Australia?s deepest caves. As the world seemingly descends into the next period of global mass extinction, a message of hope comes from an unlikely hero: a creature, often reviled, that has survived previous mass extinctions and climatic change in a magical ecosystem hidden beneath one of the world’s last great wildernesses. With award-winning imagery and a dark-fantasy twist, this real-world “Charlotte’s Web” takes you on an adventure through an ecosystem that preceded us and may still outlast us.”Followed by filmmaker and scientist Q&A. Proceeds will support the Bookend Trust’s work supporting students studying unknown aspects of the natural world.

Final Screening Date

SYDNEY (with filmmaker Q&A): 18 March 3.30pm, Chauvel Cinema, 249 Oxford St, Paddington.

Book tickets here.

2017 Grant winner shares story

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Explore. Climb. Knit. The secrets of good science writing with Jo Chandler

If you want to be a great science writer, you’ve got to explore. Then you need to put a fence around it and etch out your landscape. Yes, you need character. You’ve got to nail it, you’ve got to knit it, you’ve got to kill your darlings and drown your kittens. But most of all, you’ve got to be brave enough to climb the ladder. All the time remembering that, hey, it’s not about you.

These are some of the ingredients of the special sauce that takes science writing from a Tuesday-night meal of information-sharing to a Michelin-starred story of science that is engaging, powerful and connects deeply with a reader. With the (much appreciated) help of the Peter Pockley Grant for Professional Development in Investigative Journalism, I travelled to the Melbourne offices of The Monthly to hear Walkley-award winning journalist Jo Chandler share her secrets for good science writing with a small group of aspiring science journalists, communications professionals and scientists.

Here’s a taster of what I learnt from Jo’s workshop, as well as a few other complementary morsels from some of the other masters of their craft.

Explore. Then put a fence around your story and etch out your landscape

The first stage of storytelling, Jo explained, is exploration. Is there some interest around a particular piece of research? Journalist Michelle Nijhuis uses Kathleen Jamie’s phrase ‘a turning in my head’ to describe this early stage of developing a story idea; the feeling that there might be something to say about an experience or topic. This is followed by what Jo called the ‘long-haul phase’ of gathering and organising information (aka reporting): searching for and bringing together clippings, scientific papers, facts, scenes, details, statistics and characters that need to be sifted, stacked, rated, and then tossed or filed. At this point, a good writer will take a step back and focus. What is the story about? Jo advised us to resist the urge to tip the contents of our notebooks onto our readers. Now’s the time to put a fence around your story and decide its boundaries. Then you can begin to etch out the landscape you want to lead the reader through by plotting the story’s beginning, middle and end, and thinking about how to draw the reader into this landscape using powerful opening scenes and interesting characters.

Yes, you need character

Scientists are concerned with the why, the what, the where and the how of their research. But the who? When you’ve been trained to write about your own work as if you’re a passive, emotionless observer, thinking of yourself as a ‘character’ in a story may, for some, seem anathema. Yet while people may be fascinated by super blue blood moons and fishes that live in a sea cucumber’s anus, what people are most fascinated by is other people. Finding great characters—or revealing your own—is a powerful way of drawing readers into a story, particularly when the central topic is not the sort of thing that usually captures the public’s imagination. Jo used herself as the central character in ‘Gut feelings’, where she divulged (with much comic relief) the sad state of her own microbiome after being treated with potent antibiotics for multi-drug resistant TB. Another masterclass in using character to lead readers into a story on a subject they may never have heard of, let alone care about, is Ed Yong’s ’How a guy from a Montana trailer park overturned 150 years of biology’, a story about symbiosis in lichens.

Nail the essential bits to the wall, then knit together a tight story structure

All this talk of landscape and character is all well and good, I hear you say, but this is science, so what about the facts? Jo suggested that, when you’re ready to write, decide the key facts, key quotes and key scenes that are essential to the story and then ‘nail these bits to a wall’ (write them all down in one place) so that, no matter how many times you revise your piece, you can make sure that these essential elements have been retained. Then it’s time to knit your story together with a tight and compelling structure. Structure is the connective tissue that leads the reader through your key facts, quotes and scenes; it gives context to events or scientific findings and helps the reader digest difficult pieces of information. Good structure creates tension. Jo used the analogy of a good movie: the mood might shift between quiet and loud but it’s never ‘dead’; the story could move back and forth in time; the camera can pan across the landscape and then zoom in for a detailed close-up before panning back out again. The scene changes. The point-of-view shifts between characters. The audience is given a hint of what is to come. Kathryn Schulz’s essay ‘The really big one’ is a powerful example of how great structure creates a tension-filled story about an event that hasn’t even happened (yet).

Kill your darlings and drown your kittens

That great quote from your main character that’s hilarious, but doesn’t illustrate a key point? Kill it! That clever metaphor that will only make sense to diehard fans of Red Dwarf? Drown it! Good writing means being (at times ruthlessly) selective about what you edit out, even though you really, really liked that bit.

And she’s climbing the ladder…of abstraction

Jo explained the ladder of abstraction as a tool that writers can use to organise a story so that it conveys both information and meaning, and appeals to the senses as well as the intellect. The ladder rises from the most concrete details of a story (the facts), up through increasingly broader and more abstract categories. Good writers move up and down the ladder, giving their readers a view that varies between the specific and the comprehensive; between detail and generalisation. In his book Storycraft, Jack Hart writes that reports convey information and emphasise outcomes, but stories convey experience and have meaning. He observes that anybody who works in an institutional setting deals mostly with information, and all this reading and writing of reports can trap you on the middle rungs of the ladder of abstraction, crippling your ability to tell a good story. As a former scientist making the transition to science writer, I know how terrifying it can be to climb up onto those top rungs. But now that I’m beginning to conquer this fear, I’m finding the view from the top magnificent.

It’s not about you

In ‘A manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25 commandments for journalists’, Tim Radford writes that the only person you are writing to impress is someone hanging from a strap in the train on their daily commute, who will stop reading in a fifth of a second, given the chance. Even science writers at the top of their game, Jo included, remind themselves that ‘nobody has to read this crap’. So, to paraphrase Alan Alda, forget thinking about what you need to say, and write about what your reader wants to know.

Follow Viki on Twitter @VikiCramer or at her website www.vikicramer.com.au