2:00-2:15pm - Journalists don’t know best – creating a “mutualised” newspaper website - Alokh Jha
At the Guardian we are experimenting with several ways of embracing the more open and transparent way of doing journalism through “mutualisation” – the process of encouraging collaboration between journalist and reader. The approach recognises that organisations and individuals all now have the capability to be online publishers. Institutions, NGOs, governments, scientists, bloggers and many others can all contribute to stories in ways that were not possible with print. I will outline a few of these experiments including our efforts to cover science stories using live blogs and story trackers. These follow news events in real time over hours or days using a combination of traditional reporting plus curated (and linked) content from the wider web. I will also present our open news list which we set up in October 2011. This lays out publicly the selection of stories we plan to cover in advance (something that in the past many news editors would have regarded as virtually suicidal) and encourages feedback from readers.
2:15-2:30pm - Multimedia for Science Communicators: What do you want to learn? - Kelly Izlar and Jay Heinz
How about a solid introduction to video shooting and editing, graphics and animation, data visualization and posting to the web in five days? The Morehead Planetarium and Science Center is joining forces with the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to put together just such a program. But we need your suggestions. We¹ve held general multimedia how-to bootcamps for years, but we want to tweak this new one specifically for science communicators. So we¹re hosting an open discussion about what science communicators need to learn in order to transform them into multimedia ninjas. We are in pursuit of an effective, efficient program to help convey science in the digital age.
2:30-2:45pm - Break
2:45-3:00pm - North Carolina Health News - experiments in local media - Rose Hoban
This business model for journalism is changing. Traditional papers are laying off reporters, and journalism entrepreneurs are experimenting on the web. But the challenge is making a living! North Carolina Health News is a local news service dedicated to keeping people in North Carolina informed about health care in the state, and is looking to experiment. We're about to launch, and we'd love to hear what you have to say about the best local news sites you've encountered.
3:00-3:15pm - The MarcoPolo Project: funding Research with Blogs - Enrico Balli
In August and October 2011 the group of scientists, journalists and media representatives who participated in MarcoPolo2010 have traveled through Armenia and the Crimea to continue collecting data along the Silk Road. Just as they did on the previous expedition in 2010, the travelers have met representatives from the Terra Madre communities and collected DNA samples to explore the links between genetics, food preference and culinary traditions. http://www.marcopolo2011.it is the blog that could fund the research project, collecting money from many organizations and companies that were interested in sponsoring the dissemination project. The project will continue in 2012, completing the genetic path along the Silk Road.
3:15-3:30pm - Break
3:30-3:45pm - Developing a communication mix to build and engage an online community - Rob Thomas
Robert Thomas from the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, in Australia discusses the challenges of developing and maintaining an online presence in a media rich environment. Citing the public awareness and community engagement work of the National Enabling Technologies Strategy, examples will include the effective use of Facebook groups, YouTube, and Twitter to gain and maintain the public’s interest in science communication activities.
3:45-4:00pm - EVOLUTION:THIS VIEW OF LIFE, a Medium for Communicating Evolutionary Science to the General Public - Robert Kadar
Expanding evolutionary science beyond the biological sciences is one of the most important intellectual developments of the 21st century. EVOLUTION:THIS VIEW OF LIFE will catalyze the rate of the expansion at the high end of the intellectual spectrum in addition to serving as a medium of communication for the general public. The reason that the general public accepts physics and chemistry more than evolution is not because they are better supported by facts, but because they are so eminently useful in everyday life. Once evolution is portrayed as a practical toolkit for understanding and improving the human condition, it will be accepted just as easily. EVOLUTION:THIS VIEW OF LIFE will catalyze the transformation of public understanding about evolution, in the same way that EvoS (Evolutionary Studies Program) and the Evolution Institute are catalyzing the transformation for higher education and public policy formulation.
4:00-4:15pm - The Rise of Cinematic Journalism and The Atavist - Olivia Koski
The Atavist started out as an idea at a bar. A couple of friends wondered how to rejuvenate the tradition of great longform writing amidst the crisis in print media. So writer Evan Ratliff, web designer Jefferson Rabb, and editor Nicholas Thompson decided to make an app. A year later, the Atavist has published a dozen enhanced stories, sold on a variety of platforms. Fusing text with imagery, video, maps, audio and timelines, it's the invention of an entirely new form of storytelling. Come learn how the software behind the Atavist works, and join the digital longform revolution.
4:15-4:30pm - The new Science section at Huffington Post - Cara Santa Maria
Cara Santa Maria, Science Correspondent for The Huffington Post ("HuffPost"), will introduce the site's newest section: HuffPost Science, which combines comprehensive coverage of science with HuffPost's singular blend of real-time news and analysis, community engagement in real-time, and leading edge social tools. HuffPost Science is meant to encourage a deeper understanding of the natural world and how it works, covering scientists, academics and thinkers, the latest discoveries and approaches, and more. The site is meant as a dynamic hub for all things science, a starting point for conversations about what we know -- as well as what we don't know. HuffPost Science covers the breadth of what's happening in science, and explores every day phenomena through the lens of science, whether it's studying Mariano Rivera's wicked fastball, the latest developments in longevity, or the science of love, sex, and spirituality.
4:30-4:45pm - Break
4:45-5:00pm - Mathblogging.org - Peter Krautzberger
Mathblogging.org started out as a copy-cat of http://scienceblogging.com but with a focus on the small niche that is mathematical blogging. The project is now little over a year old and has slowly grown in terms of its database and functionality. In this process we moved away from mimicry to ideas that serve the mathematical community better, such as supporting other projects like mathoverflow.net.
Techno Blitz presentations will happen on Friday afternoon, from 2pm till 5pm in rooms 7 and 8 at McKimmon Center. This is a preliminary schedule.
2:00-2:15pm - Get credit for all of your research - Mark Hahnel, FigShare
FigShare is a open data project that allows researchers to publish their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner. The data can come in the form of individual figures, datasets or video files and users are encouraged to share their negative data and unpublished results too. All data is persistently stored online under the most liberal Creative Commons license, waiving copyright where possible. This allows scientists to access and share the information from anywhere in the world with minimal friction. This demo will walk you through how to use the tool, and what's planned for the future. Come see how FigShare has grown from a seed of an idea at #scio11 to a full-fledged project supported by Digital Science. For more, visit http://FigShare.com
2:15-2:30pm - Writing for Robots: Getting your research noticed in the algorithmic era - William Gunn, Mendeley
With the volume of research output always rising, it's very hard to stay on top of what you need to read. Practically no one finds research articles anymore by going to the journal first and reading the table of contents. We all depend to some degree on algorithms to help us find what we should know. I'd like to talk a little about how some of the major algorithms work, how knowledge of the algorithms can make you a better writer, and how search and recommendation work together to bring you just the right paper at the right time. I'll present some specific examples of situations where these principles can be applied in three phases of research - starting a project, actively doing research, and writing up your results.
2:30-2:45pm - ORCID - Martin Fenner
Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) was incorporated as an independent, non-profit organization in 2010 to solve the name ambiguity problem in scholarly research and communication by establishing a global, open registry to provide persistent, unique identifiers for researchers (http://www.orcid.org/). The ORCID service will launch in 2012. ORCID will facilitate the attribution of scholarly contributions that go beyond journal articles, e.g. datasets, peer review, blogging, or microattributions. The presentation will introduce ORCID to the audience, and will discuss several interesting scenarios using ORCID identifiers in scholarly communication.
2:45-3:00pm - Break
3:00-3:15pm - Research Discovery: Finding Networking Nirvana on the Semantic Web - Kristi Holmes
VIVO is an open source, open ontology research discovery platform for hosting information about scientists and their interests, activities, and accomplishments. The rich data in VIVO can be repurposed and shared to highlight expertise and facilitate discovery at many levels. Across implementations, VIVO provides a uniform semantic structure to enable a new class of tools which can use the rich data to advance science. There are currently over 50 VIVO implementations in the United States and over 20 international VIVO projects. This presentation will provide a brief description of VIVO and will demonstrate how diverse groups are not only using VIVO, but are also developing apps to consume the semantically-rich data for visualizations, enhanced multi-site search, discovery, and more. Learn more at http://vivoweb.org.
3:15-3:30pm - Article-Level Metrics (ALM) at PLoS - Jennifer Lin
PLoS launched Article-Level Metrics (ALM) to provide a more meaningful and granular understanding of the importance and reach of a piece of research work. The digital environment of today’s research enables far more modes of dissemination and, subsequently, the collection and analysis of these conduits than ever before, offering new and interesting ways to understand impact. ALM captures the reach of research dissemination across online usage, citations, social bookmarks, notes, comments, ratings and blog coverage. With this suite of data, the entire academic community can assess the value of articles after publication. A free, open-source ALM application is available for the public to build third party applications. Also, the ALM API makes the data available for anyone to re-use and mash-up. This presentation will exhibit features and tools for using ALMs in research discovery (filtering, aggregating, and navigating the research of others) as well as professional advancement (tracking, benchmarking, and evaluating one's own research). It will describe the value of ALMs for scientific researchers, funding agencies, academic institutions, and governmental organizations. For more information, please visit: http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/.
3:30-3:45pm - Break
3:45-4:00pm - PaperCritic - Jason Priem (on behalf of Martin Bachwerk)
In a world where our lives are broadcast by Facebook and Twitter, our news consumption is dominated by blogs and our knowledge is defined by Wikipedia articles, science somehow remains 20 years behind in terms of communicating about its advances. PaperCritic aims to improve the situation by offering researchers a way of monitoring all types of feedback about their scientific work, as well as allowing everyone to easily review the work of others, in a fully open and transparent environment. The demo will give an overview of the site's main functions as well as discuss some plans for the future. Feel welcome to visit http://www.papercritic.com in the meantime to check it out for yourself.
4:00-4:15pm - Annotum, an open source, open access scholarly authoring and publishing system based on WordPress. - Carl Leubsdorf
The process of authoring, reviewing, and publishing scholarly articles remains an expensive, time-consuming process that can require significant up-front investment and technical expertise. Coupled with lengthy review processes this can create delays of up to a year before new scientific findings are published. Annotum, a new, open-source, open-access authoring publishing platform based on WordPress, provides an easy-to use alternative to existing publishing systems that supports very rapid expert review and professional online publishing.
In this live demonstration, we will show how Annotum can be used by scholarly authors to collaboratively author articles with rich text formatting, structured figures and equations, and citations. Then we'll show how authors can submit their article to a peer-review process, demonstrate the review and approval workflow, and publish the approved article online as well as in PDF and NLM-compatible XML formats. And did we mention that Annotum is completely free and open source, and available for free on WordPress.com?
Annotum is a product of Solvitor LLC with heavy lifting by Crowd Favorite. Annotum is free (speech and beer).
4:15-4:30pm - Break
4:30-4:45pm - REACH NC - Sharlini Sankaran
Leaders from UNC General Administration, NC State University, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University, and the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) have partnered with Elsevier to create REACH NC (Research, Engagement And Capabilities Hub of North Carolina), a portal to access information on the expertise of university personnel - www.reachnc.org . REACH NC users can search for and view the expertise profiles of individuals or entire units. Profiles are generated using publications, sponsored research awards, intellectual property, and course descriptions. Expertise profiles are built upon institutional or publicly available data and generally require minimal upkeep by individuals. Whether building new collaborations, attracting and retaining businesses to North Carolina, or enhancing the effectiveness and competitiveness of other NC institutions, REACH NC is positioned to help, with information about and access to potential collaborators in research, problem solving, and economic development.
4:45-5:00pm - Get Visible or Vanish: Digital Publishing for Science Professionals – Courtney Enzor
In today’s digital age, "publish or perish" has become "get visible or vanish." How do you build this critical visibility the right way without undermining traditional academic and publishing opportunities? Building visibility is more than just posting on a WordPress blog and waiting for people to find you; it’s about creating a comprehensive online presence in the right environment that showcases the range of your work and makes you more likely to be found, understood, cited and published by mainstream media and journals. BestThinking’s content publishing platform is key to creating ranked visibility. As an open access publisher and syndicator of journal quality content, we help you publish all elements of your work, from articles and blogs to conferences speeches and eBooks. BestThinking offers a comprehensive platform to a respectful community of identity verified experts and provides full customer support from real people. Learn more atwww.BestThinking.com.
2:00-2:15pm - The Scientists with Stories Project: a media training collaboration for Duke-UNC PhD students - Clare Fieseler
Science communication is an increasingly important component of the broader impact of scientific research projects -- and the grants that fund them. Yet, most science curricula at the PhD level lack formal programs to help young scientists develop the skills needed to communicate via newly dominant mediums of digital communication. This session will describe a new 1-year pilot project between the UNC and Duke marine laboratories. The project’s goal is to provide media training and exhibit platforms for PhD students. Student project leaders welcome discussion on how to create an effective interuniversity program that could secure the project’s survival past the pilot year
2:15-2:30pm - Booles' Rings - Peter Krautzberger
At first sight, it may appear that Booles' Rings is yet-another-blogging-network, running a WordPress multisite installation to host a couple of sites. However, the goal of Booles' Rings is to change the way mathematicians (and other researchers) use their academic homepages: we are developing best practices for using a modern website technology to present and connect our online presences as researchers in the fullest sense. Using WordPress and other open-source tools we incorporate aspects of decentralized social networks hoping to bring the scientific community a tiny step forward towards being an actual community of people: in control of their content and making connections and interactions with other researchers transparent and visible beyond publication metrics. I will demonstrate the features of and ideas for our very young project (beyond the well-known WordPress features) focusing on the potential of WordPress and other decentralized social networking tools.
2:30-2:45pm - Measuring the Ocean Online- Rachel Weidinger and Kieran Mulvaney
How does the ocean measure up in social media? For the first time, aggregate, issue-level benchmarking analysis will be available. A new team will present findings-- including content analysis, keyword trends, and possibly sentiment and influencer analysis-- from project underway to lay down a baseline on the state of ocean conservation conversations on the social web. The goal of the yet unnamed project is to help science-based ocean content providers reach wider audiences with greater impact. Though it'll focus on ocean issues, the benchmarking pattern may be of use in related disciplines.
2:45-3:00pm - Mapping, knowledge sharing, and citizen science on the web using CartoDB - Andrew Hill
CartoDB (http://www.cartodb.com) is an open source, geospatial database on the web that provides storage, simple APIs, and mapping. Using components of CartoDB, we have helped develop a variety of science tools on the web from citizen science projects like OldWeather (http://oldweather.org/) and NEEMO (http://neemo.zooniverse.org/), to knowledge sharing projects like Protected Planet (http://protectedplanet.net/), and science support tools like GeoCAT (http://rlat.kew.org/). Now we would like to share some of CartoDB capabilities as well as discuss some of the lessons we have learned building science tools on the web.
3:00-3:15pm -Break
3:15-3:30pm - OpenHelix Online Apps: Connecting Researchers, Research, Resources and Data - Jennifer Williams
In this session I will discuss online apps for connecting research publications to research data. These apps are designed by OpenHelix in collaboration with publishers such as BioMed Centraland Elsevier that extend the information ecosystem, and function to connect bioscience resources mentioned in journal articles to the actual databases and to training on their usage, and also help readers extract and extend their understanding more easily. I will touch on apps for and on BioMed Central, and for the SciVerse platform from Elsevier, which help researchers access OpenHelix tutorials, as well as data at OMIM, Reactome, and SMART databases.
3:30-3:45pm - Experimonth: One citizen, one scientist, one month at a time - Beck Tench
Experimonth (http://experimonth.lifeandscience.org) is a month-long participatory project that connects citizens, scientists and artists through blogging. From its humble beginnings as food experiments between museum co-workers, hear how this project has evolved to an NSF-funded model for engaging people in using science as a way of knowing about their world. Also learn how we're measuring the project through discourse analysis and how we're expanding it to face-to-face events and exhibits at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC.
3:45-4:00pm - Cachalot: A Scalable, Open Access Digital Textbook for Marine Science - David Johnston
The Digital Sea Monsters Project at Duke University recently developed a digital textbook – called Cachalot - for courses focusing on Marine Megafauna. This textbook integrates the use of text-based, photo, video and audio teaching materials and delivers them to students in a freely downloadable application optimized for the Apple iPad. Cachalot represents a new form of digital textbook, one that is completely open access and populated with current content written by experts in the field. As a textbook, Cachalot sits at the intersection of transformative philosophy (e.g. it is open access and crowd-sourced), pedagogy (e.g. it provides for location independent and just-in-time learning that can fully exploit multimedia) and technology (exploits hand-held devices that integrate computational, communication and visualization capabilities). The app integrates open access journal articles, textbook-style content (including great photos and illustrations), video, audio and animations of animal behavior and anatomy within an annotation interface. Cachalot provides direct access to the experts that contribute to it, and the app incorporates a twitter-based messaging system for students to communicate about course materials. Much of the content in Cachalot is highly accessible to the general public, providing a novel way to educate people about marine science. This application has been developed as a framework, portable to other classes and other purposes.http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/cachalot
4:00-4:15pm - Break
4:15-4:30pm - TechNyou – Building an online teaching community and developing critical thinking in students - Rob Thomas
Robert Thomas from the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research discusses the science education resource www.technyou.edu.au/education, an Australian Government initiative for high school science teachers. The resource provides materials in the fields of biotechnology and nanotechnology, and covers student learning objectives, including creative thinking and effective communication.
4:30-4:45pm - A new way to fundraise for science: the SciFund Challenge - Jai Ranganathan
Can scientists raise money for their research through crowdfunding? In November and December, 49 scientists took the leap in the SciFund Challenge. Find out the lessons that were learned about how research can be funded in this new way.
4:45-5:00pm - Quartzy.com: Accelerating Science with Free Web-Based Lab Management Tools - Adam Regelmann
Quartzy.com launched in 2009, and is quickly becoming the standard way for bench scientists to manage their lab Inventories, Orders, Protocols, and Shared Equipment. Thousands of scientists from all over the world use Quartzy to manage their labs. Because of the networked environment, Quartzy encourages collaboration by helping scientists find and use the stuff they need for their experiments. Quartzy co-founder, Adam Regelmann, MD, PhD, will give an overview of the site and announce some exciting updates for 2012.
