ECHO Blogging Central

Internships, coincidences, childbearing and passion for communicating seems to be key themes in making a career in science communication in Germany. At least those are some of the conclusions I made when attending Science Communication Career Day at Heidelberg University last week.

The Career Day was all in all a good experience. Logistically well organised and with an interesting bunch of speakers. There was even ‘fancy new media’ involved. A hashtag (#scicomcareerday) had been assigned and it was enthusiastically noted when 20 tweets had been reached and later on 50 tweets! Being beginners in using this it worked remarkably well.

The day was organised with a first session focused on ‘Press and Corporate Communication’. The presenters were in general at the level of Head of Communication etc. They all came from a scientific background (predominately in biology and with a ph.d.) but had moved into communication. 5 of 6 speakers were women, and in presenting their road from science to communication they all mentioned “and then I had children…” as one of the reasons for leaving their academic field and getting into science communication, which granted more flexibility. Although many did say that they found communicating to be fun and through internships had found a passion for exactly communicating, I was surprised to find that none of the speakers of the session seemed to have a passion for their scientific area, and that it wasn’t a desire to communicate their knowledge which was of interest to them. My impression was, putting it a bit roughly, that their science background had basically just proved to be an advantage in getting jobs in communication… Perhaps one of the reason I got this impression was that the presenters where at Head of Communication level, and thus had gone on to much more than science communication and also (or primarily) worked crisis communication, corporate communication etc.

The second session made up for the tendency of working with communication in general and not specifically science communication. Especially inspiring were three communication officers from EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) who with enthusiasm talked about the joy of communicating science. Again, it was clear that internships seems to be the thing in Germany if you want to get into science communication. When asked by the participants (who were primarily ph.d. students at University of Heidelberg) if they should go for getting an internship or take an extra degree in communication or journalism the response was either that it didn’t matter or that they should definitely go for the internships! Not being so well acquainted with how things work in Germany, to me it seemed at bit surprising that this was their main recommendation. I guess however it could be translated into: get practical experience! and that internships is one way of getting this.

All in all, it was a good day and it was fun to get into some German Science Communication. The round table lunch idea, where you could have lunch with a speaker was a good idea and worked okay. Being a career day the objective was of course to inspire to and show how you can also take your science career into a communication direction. This meant that at least the round table I participated in became very focused on the internship discussion and concrete questions about how these internships work.

For me personally, corporate communication took up a little bit too much of the day and I wonder if the participants, being mainly ph.d. students, wouldn’t have found it interesting also to hear about how getting into science communication doesn’t have to mean saying goodbye to your scientific career and how science communication can help your scientific career – but perhaps that could be a whole theme for another career day…

In asking around for science communication networks in Germany it was my impression that there is not formal network and few of the presenters had knowledge about formal science communication training programmes at university (see below), but were much more practice based. As in many other places the science communication community seemed much more to be a personal network thing. Many of the presenters had either worked or done internships with DKFZ (German Cancer Research Center), who was also one of the main organisers of the day, and knew each other from there.

Three study programmes in Science Communication in Germany were mentioned. The all seem to be in German, but none the less I thought I’d share them here on this blog:

Science Communication M.A. (Wissenschaftskommunikation) at Hochschule Bremen – University of Applied Sciences

Science Journalism B.A and M.A. (Wissenschaftjournalismus) at the Technical University of Dortmund

Science Journalism B.A. (Wissenschaftjournalismus) at Darmstadt University

Here in Santa Cruz, we're brushing off our tents and lining up the counselor whistles for Hack the Museum Camp, a 2.5 day adventure that starts today. We have 75 campers here from around the world who will be working in teams to develop exhibits based on artifacts from our permanent collection that challenge museum conventions and traditional exhibit design practice. The campers are about half museum professionals, half artists, architects, and designers of all stripes.

This project is a big, audacious risk for everyone involved. For the campers, there's the stress that comes with trying to design and execute an exhibit idea in 48 hours. For me, there's the uncertainty that comes with turning our museum's largest gallery over to a motley crew of risk-taking campers.

But as we work out all of the kinks, I've come to realize that my biggest fear is that the projects won't be risky enough. That even when given the space and opportunity to push boundaries, most of us will settle into our traditional comfort zones of doing it "right," not "screwing up," and playing it safe.

As the camp director, I've been spending a lot of my time thinking about what we can do to scaffold this experience to really encourage creative risk-taking. For me, this comes down to two big areas: how we create space and support for risk-taking, and how we orient the risk-taking towards work that will excite and energize visitors.
Risk-Taking Requires Space-Making On our staff team, the most important tool that encourages risk-taking is our organizational culture. We can talk all we want about being experimental, but what really matters is the kind of cheerleading, coaching, and love that staff and interns get when they take risks. As Beck Tench has beautifully expressed, every risk-taker needs a "space-maker" to clear the way for true experimentation.

I am asking all of our Hack the Museum counselors and our staff team to think about how we can be those space-makers for campers, focusing not so much on how the projects can be executed but how the campers can really pursue their risk-taking passions. I feel lucky that one of our camp counselors, Kathy McLean, spearheaded the incredible "No Idea is Too Ridiculous" project at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage - and I'm hoping she and others will be able to bring some of the energy from that work to our campers this week.
Taking Risk-Taking Beyond Provocation Assuming that campers are ready to take risks at Hack the Museum Camp, the other big question on my mind is how we encourage teams to do so in a way that is about opening up new possibilities instead of shutting down old ones. One of the things I've noticed in working with students in particular is that many risk-takers want to jump directly to confrontation. They see risk-taking as a way to give the finger to the establishment.

While confronting traditions can be a useful starting point, confronting visitors can be lead to unpleasant experiences. Instead of confronting, I always encourage risk-takers to think about how they can approach their work in a way that is "generous" to visitors. It can be just as subversive to hand someone a flower as it is to slap them in the face--and they are probably more likely to be receptive to your larger message. Some of the most powerful risky work I've experienced has started with an invitation, not a confrontation. Our museum's mission to "ignite shared experiences and unexpected connections." I believe that we are most likely to achieve this mission if we invite people into the unexpected in with experiences that radiate generosity and possibility.


I'm not sure what we are going to get out of this week. I am very, very excited to find out (and to share it with you). You can follow along on Twitter and Instagram via @santacruzmah and #hackthemuseum. We'd also love to hear how YOU would hack a museum exhibit if given the opportunity. Happy hacking!

Many moons ago, I produced a number of images visualizing various aspects of the blogosphere. These pictures proved of interest to a number of people in part due to the notion of visualizing the fundamental network structure of the blogosphere and in part, I hope, due to some amount of aesthetic presentation.

I haven't done much more tinkering in that area excepting a few visualizations of the G+ network and some animated diffusion videos. Recently, however, I started thinking about re-visiting some network visualization projects. As I considered what would be a novel twist I realized that I was just as interested in the visual aspects of the experience as the data aspects and started thinking about producing something with more of an artistic twist. A visual presentation inspired by data rather than an attempt to visualize the data itself.

In deconstructing the aspects of the earlier network graphics I identified a number of key components: the data, the environment (some aspect of the system that influences the presentation), the visual objects (i.e. the shapes, lines etc.) and the presentation surface itself (which might be a simple plane or something more complex like a hyperbolic transformation). All of these elements can be cast as some sort of agency: the data, for example, is an agent which generates information; the visual objects are agents which can transform and present themselves, the environment is a set of objects whose characteristics might interact with the visual objects and so on.

In the video below, I've captured a very rough attempt to bring these thoughts together. Here the data is the simplest stream I could think of : the current time. The time is represented by 3 objects which move around a circle representing seconds, minutes and hours. These objects emit visual objects (circles) which are influenced by an environment of initially random forces that change over time. Clearly this is mostly form with a tiny bit of data, but it acts as a starting point for more complex and richer ideas. Data might modify the visual and environmental aspects of the presentation.

[note that the numbers on the 'hands' of the clock indicate the angle of the hand and are remnants of testing the code.]

DigitalArtProject 2013-07-07 19-57-57-620 from matthew hurst on Vimeo.

 

 

I’m participating with a paper titled “The material life-course of a scientist” at workshop ‘The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies’ to be held at Science Museum, London, on 18 July.

There are many things I would like to take issue with in this call for papers: Isn’t the notion of ‘return’ of biography long overdue? Does the notion of ‘biographies’ of things and places make sense? Are biography and historiography necessarily narrative (story-telling) genres? Is it really true that the role of the individual in historical writing hasn’t diminished?

But given the restriction of a 20 minutes talk and my need to say something new, I would rather like to engage with the explicit point of departure for this meeting (Science Museum’s Turing-exhibition), and ask: Are biographical museum exhibitions really possible?

I haven’t seen Codebreaker yet (will certainly do so before the workshop), but I have long been thinking about making a biographical exhibition at Medical Museion, because I would like to be able to combine the two major strands of my scholarly life: Writing (about) biography and curating (and reflecting on) the use of material artefacts in science museum exhibitions.

So far, however, I haven’t been able to make one. There are two reasons for this. One is more conceptual, having to do with the uncertain role of material things in the life-courses of scientists as opposed to the role of ideas, concepts, writing, etc. The other reason is more practical: scientists often save their documents and images for archives but rarely donate their material things to museum collections, which makes it difficult to display the material life of an individual scientist.

Thus, the ‘material turn’ in the humanities doesn’t easily translate into an artifact-based museum exhibition about the course of a life in science.

And here’s the programme as a whole:

The Return of Biography: Reassessing Life Stories in Science Studies, 18 July 2013, Science Museum, London (see more here)

10.15 Introductory remarks
10.30 Panel Discussion: The Pleasures and Perils of Biography
- Georgina Ferry, author of Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (1998) and Max Perutz and the Secret of Life (2007)
- Andrew Nahum, author of Frank Whittle: Invention of the Jet (2005) and Senior Keeper at the
Science Museum
- Henry Hemming, author of In Search of the English Eccentric (2008), and a forthcoming biography of the inventor, educationalist and writer Geoffrey Pyke

(12.00 Lunch)

13.00 Biography Case Studies
- Salim Al-Gailani (University of Cambridge), ‘Domestic Science: Life Writing, Religion and Medical Identity in Edinburgh around 1900’
- Kelly O’Donnell (Yale University), ‘The Muckraker: Science Writing as Radical Critique, 1967–1977’
- Oliver Marsh (University of Cambridge), ‘The Life Cycle of a Star: Media Myths of Feynman and Sagan’
- Peter Collins (Royal Society), ‘Sources for the Biography of an Institution’

14.30 Keynote: Janet Vertesi (Princeton University), ‘Robotic Biographies: Living with/through NASA Spacecraft’

(15.30 Break: tea and refreshments)

16.00 The Biographical Mode
- Geoffrey Cantor (University of Leeds), ‘Do Scientists Have Minds?’
- Sally Horrocks (University of Leicester/National Life Stories), ‘Do Scientists Have Lives? Oral History as a Methodological Tool for Finding Out’
- Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, Copenhagen), ‘The Material Life-Course of a Scientist’
- Commentary by Ludmilla Jordanova (University of Durham)

(17.30 End of workshop: tea and refreshments)

Dinner Event
18.15 Tour of Codebreaker: Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy led by exhibition curator David Rooney
19.15 Drinks reception followed by Dinner in the landmark Who Am I? gallery
22.30 Close

It's an idea that everyone has had, and I'm sure I'm not reporting something new. Foursquare has a feature that allows you to see their best guess at opening hours based on when people checkin to a business.

At the It’s Not What You Think-workshop this March we experimented with a number of changes to the traditional format of academic meetings. One of the key things we knew we wanted with the workshop was to bring together a properly interdisciplinary group of people –not just scholars from different academic disciplines, but also artists working with different forms of expression and in very different contexts. While everyone shared a common interest in the materiality of medicine and ways in which to communicate about it, the participants approached the problem in about as many different ways as there were people. The diversity was both dizzying and fascinating. But such diverse backgrounds and methods brought up one of the major problem areas of interdisciplinary engagements, namely how to open up a genuine conversation. How could we, as the workshop organizers, try to experiment with the workshop format in order to facilitate as much interaction as possible?

We thought quite a bit on how to approach this problem, and we decided early on that we wanted to do a sort of methodological speed dating. We wanted everyone to get a chance to get to know everyone else as part of the workshop program itself, and not just those you happened to know beforehand or stood next to in line for coffee. After some deliberations, we decided that all 40 participants would be given four minutes each to present themselves, their work, and what they hoped to gain from the workshop. Since we wanted to avoid paralleled sessions, not everyone could give a stimulus presentation, but we felt it was important that everyone got to say who they were and why they were there. You can see videos of almost all of the presentations here (just click the link under each participants name)..

We had little idea how the session would go. We hoped that it would be stimulating, but worried if it would feel stressed and superfluous. Would it just be a blur? When it was done (impressively, just 10-15 minutes behind schedule) we felt that it ended up doing two very important things: On the intellectual side, it gave a kaleidoscopic view of a multitude of practice, methods and theories that all converged on similar concerns; it felt like a glimpse into something that might not be a neatly bounded field of study, but which nonetheless had enough of a contour to give a sense of coherence and shared sensibilities. As an intellectual exercise, we felt it set the right tone and established a series of questions right at the outset. This carried over into the thematic sessions and gave everyone some context when people were asking questions and bring up new issues. On the social side, it was also greatly beneficial that everyone got some idea of who they might want to get to know. It made it much easier to start up conversations and seek out people whose work struck chords. It also, we think, helped shake everyone together early on and create a positive atmosphere for working on the partial solutions, pragmatic fixes, and novel approaches called for in the workshop description.

This is definitely something we will use again for later workshops! Anyone have examples of other conference/workshop format experiments for this kind of introductory sessions? Or maybe just ideas of how to tweak or remake what we tried at It’s Not What You Think?

Over the past year, I've had a hazy sense that the social web is transitioning from a text-based to visual medium. Services like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram are growing at incredible rates, especially with younger users. Facebook shifted its design to focus on photo and video-sharing in response to data showing that this content is shared way more frequently than text and links. Visual content motivates more responses than text, engages younger participants, and is often cited as a major trend of 2012 and 2013.

A trend in which I take almost no part. It's surprising (and a bit embarrassing) to realize how little I engage with tools that appear ascendant broadly and are in constant use by my colleagues. I appreciate these tools--the attractiveness of Instagram, the usability of Vine, the utility of Pinterest. But I live in a digital world in which text is still king. I spend my professional time online reading blogs, reading reports, sharing articles, engaging in text chat. I use an RSS reader to aggregate articles to read, a bookmarking tool (pinboard) to save links of interest, and conversational tools (Twitter and Facebook) to share. And of course, I use this blog as a reflective space to learn by writing.

In contrast, many of the people I work with use visual social media formats as their lead tools for creating, sharing, and consuming information. At our museum, Pinterest is a primary tool for brainstorming and sharing ideas. Instagram has become a popular way to share photos, along with Flickr, where we catalog all our images from events and exhibitions. And the most recent excitement is around Vine, which we're using to make snippets of video showcasing our work. Individual staff members use these tools both personally and professionally. They are invested in them beyond their workday.

I'm supportive of all of this. At the same time, I recognize that these tools and this form of content-sharing is (so far) not for me. Part of that has to do with my personality--I love to write, and I rarely take photographs. While I'm comfortable working out my thoughts in a half-baked way in words, I rarely use images as part of that learning/reflecting/sharing experience. I just haven't figured out how to integrate these tools into my workflow.

But what's awkward for me is actually probably very good for museums. Museums, and museum staff members, tend to be highly visually-oriented. It's about the objects, the display, the people, the process, the event--the image of the experience. I suspect that there are many more museum professionals who are ready and eager to share photographs or videos documenting their work than are ready to write about it.

This is great for museums looking for authentic ways to engage with people online. We don't have to hunt for photogenic projects: we have impressive feats of construction and wonder on display on a daily basis. Visual content can build excitement about museums in a way that would be hard for a social service agency or nonprofit to emulate.

At the same time, we might think about how these tools might be used inside our field in the context of professional development and building communities of practice. Most of the professional networks I belong to online operate using the most antiquated of text-based tools: the listserv. Even sites that do encourage use of images or video as part of professional sharing tend to make those elements optional while text is required.

This makes me wonder: are younger practitioners creating their own online communities of practice in visually-based social networks? Are there opportunities for explicit knowledge-sharing that are rooted in photographs and videos? Does the growth of visual content affect who within an organization produces digital content and how those resources are managed?

Clearly, this is not my area of expertise. I'd love to hear what you think.

When I moved to Bonn, Germany six months ago it was with great ambitions of exploring the German (Public Health) science communication community. Somehow time flew by and different job opportunities, unexpected travels, practicalities and even sickness kept me from getting started on my exploring.

But last week, into my inbox dropped an email with an update from one of the LinkedIn groups I follow (it’s called Science Communication). The headline was Career Day in Heidelberg: Science Communication and Journalism. After orienting myself on a map and finding Heidelberg to be only two hours train ride from Bonn, I decided to sign up for the day.

The Career Day is organised by Heidelberg University Graduate School (HBIGS) and German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). It’s a one-day event organised as a seminar with presentations and panel discussions and then an opportunity to have a round table lunch with one of the speakers for a more informal chat. I have signed up for lunch with Dr. Monika Mölders, who is working for the medical company Roche.

As I understand it, the presenters are mainly scientists whom have gone on to become professional communicators. Some work at Press and Public Relations Offices others work with Corporate Communication at companies and others are science journalists.

Practically all the names on programme are new to me, so I look forward to meeting them and hopefully get into the German Science Communication community. Coming to science communication from a public health perspective it is also great to see that there is a good representation of people from health related organisations (perhaps not so surprising now that one of organisers is the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)).

Should you want to join, but is not at as easy distance to Heidelberg as I happen to be then they give you the option of “receiving information without attending”. Am not sure what that means, but if you go to the registration page you can check this option at the bottom of the page and see what happens.

[Briefly] Take a look at these images created by Nelson Minar and found on Wired - they not only do a great job of representing the rivers (and, by complement, additional features like mountain ranges) but also of what can be done with large data sets and a simple idea well executed.

Dear Nico,

You’ve been calling everyone by their name. Well, sort of. All cats are still Aki; but you know (and incessantly say) Martin, Eleanor, Mark, Baba (for babushka, which is accented on the first syllable). When I say “Mark-k-k-k-k,” you dissolve into peals of laughter.

Things you do all by yourself include:

• learning to drink from a big-kid cup (in the bath tub), and use spoons all by yourself (at the table, often followed by the bath tub);
• putting together and taking apart Duplo blocks (a bigger kind of Lego);
• ferrying everything in the apartment from where it was to other places;
• leafing through books;
• laughing to yourself in a vaguely maniacal fashion;
• practicing your diction;
• running around in sprinklers.

 

Things that you demand be done for you include:

• setting “tops” spinning, including a spare kitchen drain food catcher;
• walking up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down stairs;
• opening doors that have knobs;
• putting on your shoes.

Things that are hard basically boil down to molar teething and big feelings. And hey, it’s understandable to not want blunt objects to poke their way through your quite solid gums. To add insult to injury, you don’t have any molars yet, though that last front tooth finally did make its appearance. Ah well, at least you can have artichokes. They don’t require molars.

Your circadian cycle is much better established now than it was at this time last year, as evidenced by your great confusion when I woke you up at 4am last week so we could go to the river and greet the solstice sun. You were up for it, though, enjoying the weird pre-dawn light and eventually going wheeeeeee! along the river bank.

Your favorite word of the moment is potato (patapatapata).

But all of this is trifles. This is nothing. The big news of the month is that last weekend you went deep into Maine with four grownups and four other kids, and I stayed home.

You had a great time in Maine. While I accomplished all the things on my considerable to-do list and then some, and also had a leisurely date and slept without being demanded for nourishment or comfort, you played and danced and examined pine cones and hung out on the bank of a lake. You are having a summer vacation. It’s so great to see this season through your eyes.

After you got back from Maine, Rio informed me that you love, love it when people sing in the car. Secretly, I already knew this. You’ve even started singing along, to one song for now: “cowwwww.”

And now shhhhh, my darling, keep sleeping while I pack our stuff for tomorrow, brush my teeth, and crawl into bed. For tomorrow is an even fuller day than most.

Love,

-Mama

P.S. Sorry about the night weaning. On the other side of it, we’ll both get more and better sleep. Oh, and more pix.

Over the past three years, the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) has served as the museum poster child for the debate on the public value of the arts. Last year, the DIA was saved from financial crisis by voters in its three neighboring counties who elected to take on an additional property tax to support the museum. And now, in the past month, Michigan's Attorney General and State Senate have blocked the emergency manager of Detroit from seizing the DIA's collection to pay off the city's debt.

Like last year's tax, this newest development is an important step for the DIA, but it has even greater impact on the field overall. From a non-museum person's perspective, it's a little mysterious.
What's Happening in Detroit Detroit is in serious trouble financially. The city's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, is pursuing many options to avoid bankruptcy. One option he put on the table in May is to sell off the DIA's multi-billion dollar collection of art. The DIA and its collection are owned by the city, which makes it a city asset.

Museum supporters and art lovers were up in arms about this proposal, arguing that these "cultural gems" are held in the public trust and should not be shed to pay off creditors. But this argument for the public value of the art is tough to uphold in a time of severe challenges. Detroit's city leaders are looking at a host of tough choices, and it's hard not to be sympathetic to the idea that a bunch of artwork matters less than emergency services, schools, parks, and any number of other city programs and assets that might be slashed to avoid bankruptcy.

For museum wonks, there's a more specific ethical reason that the DIA's collection should not be treated in this way: we don't see museum collections as assets on the balance sheet the same way Kevyn Orr does.

The American museum profession has an ethical standard that says "in no event shall they [funds raised by deaccessioning collections objects] be used for anything other than acquisition or direct care of collections."

In other words, in the museum world, if you sell artwork, you must put the proceeds into a restricted fund to either purchase or preserve other artwork in the collection.

Of course, Kevyn Orr doesn't see it that way--he sees the DIA's artwork as assets, and that's not unreasonable. This DOES come up when museums go bankrupt, at which point collections can be seen as assets by creditors. However, in this case, it is not the DIA that is going bankrupt but the city. If the city (or state) forces the DIA to violate museum ethics to satisfy city debts, it will have grave consequences for the museum and for the museum world.
Think of Artwork like Organs Here's a weird but apt analogy: organ donation. For large organs like the heart and lungs, there is a national body that governs all organ donation and distribution in the US. All organs are given voluntarily without compensation (usually by dying people), and then the national body manages a list with complicated algorithms to determine who receives which organ.

Imagine if Detroit's largest hospital had an organ donation program, and Kevyn Orr required that the hospital violate medical ethics by selling any large organs received to the highest bidder. This could be a significant income stream for the city and help settle debts. At the same time, it would likely lead to that hospital and its surgeons facing grave consequences in the medical world... just like the DIA will face if the city forces it to violate museum ethics.

I know organs and artwork are different, but the situation is functionally the same: a professional field with a particular code of ethics whose rules may or may not be recognized by government bodies. That's why it is so significant that the Michigan Senate voted to take on the American Alliance of Museum's code of ethics regarding collections - it functionally means that the state is acknowledging and abiding by the professional standard in the museum field.
Complications and Ethical Dilemmas But let's not start cheering just yet. There is an ironic sidenote to this "victory" for museum ethics. At the same time as this controversy is playing out in the public arena via Detroit, museum professionals are in the midst of debate about whether the ethics of deaccessioning still apply. A recent article in Museum magazine (published by the American Alliance of Museums) talks about the ugly realities of how a collection may be sold if a museum goes bankrupt. The Center for the Future of Museums, which is also run by the American Alliance of Museums, has been hosting a virtual "ethics smackdown" on its blog about the ethics of deaccessioning over the past several weeks. Only a small percentage of museums are formally signed onto the AAM code of ethics. While deaccessioning may be a museum sacred cow, it is not broadly considered our field's most important challenge.

I feel conflicted about this whole question. On the one hand, it drives me nuts that the ethical rules around deaccessioning force museums to protect objects in a way we do not comparably protect other core aspects of our work. There is no requirement that if you cut an educational program that you have to use the funds saved from that to fund other educational experiences. I've worked with museums that have hefty collections and restricted acquisition funds but are closed to the public because all of their dollars and assets are wrapped up in objects and none in public service or access. I can also see the argument that it actually makes museums MORE relevant if our assets are considered fair game in a situation like Detroit's--just as important and just as endangered as other core services.

On the other hand, I feel strongly that as arts are generally misunderstood and marginalized in the public eye (and funding sphere), it's important for us to do whatever we can to help people understand WHY artwork is like organs, and why these objects remaining in the public trust matters. In an offline conversation about Detroit, Margy Waller, who is brilliant at framing the public value of art, put it this way:
The arts are already pretty much ALWAYS seen as a low priority among things of public value. In fact, they're (I want to say we're) often seen as a private matter -- and not a public good at all.  The arguments about sale of DIA art strike me as forming inside that frame. And if it happens, I worry that it would reinforce what is already the dominant way of view of the arts --- and set back our case-making: that the arts create places where people want to live, work, invest, and visit -- all things Detroit desperately needs right now.

Are you reading this via our RSS feed? Then according to our feed statistics there’s a 70% chance you’re using Google Reader. And if you hadn’t noticed the warning when logging in, here’s a friendly reminder:

That’s right. After 1 July 2013 there will be no more Google Reader. So for the ~300 of you still using it to access our feed, it’s time to look for an alternative. There are numerous great sources online on what reader might be the best, so I won’t spend time on describing everyone of them. But I will give one recommendation which is my personal favorite and the one I’ve now been using for around a month instead of Google Reader: Feedly.

Very briefly, switching to Feedly only takes seconds. It’ll automatically import your feeds from Google Reader, so you don’t need to worry about exporting and importing. The good people at Feedly have even been kind enough to implement most of the keyboard shortcuts you might be used from Google Reader. So switching is painless. Feedly also has apps available for iOS and Android devices.

So go for it. 1 July is only a couple of days away! If you know of better alternatives, I’d love to hear about them!

I taught my first “digital humanities” course in the spring of 1998 when I was a visiting assistant professor at Grinnell College. My students created a “virtual archive” of primary sources, building a website that made it easy (in 1998 terms) to access the sources they placed in the archive. They wrestled with such things as metadata, whether or not to post the sources in both English and the original language, user interface, and website design issues. While they liked the class, that group of pioneering students found their lack of technical knowledge – when it came to such things as website design and information architecture – to be very frustrating and inhibiting.

Fifteen years later, not much has changed.

Sure, the technology has changed a lot, and there are many tools that have lowered the bar of entry for students to start building digital humanities projects. But the challenges I faced in 1998 are, in many ways, the same challenges I face today. Every course I teach that has a digital humanities component requires me to spend a significant amount of time getting the class up to speed with the technologies they need to use so they can create whatever it is that either I’ve assigned or they’ve determined they ought to create.

I find that I am doing just as much tech support in 2013 as I did in 1998, and all that time devoted to tech support detracts substantially from the final results my students achieve. We just don’t get to spend enough time on the important and interesting historical and humanities issues that are central to the course. And my students are often just as frustrated, if not more frustrated, as I am by this problem.

There are plenty of reasons why many undergraduate students come into our digital humanities classes ill prepared to do the work we expect. Despite their facility with the technology when it comes to making connections with others, locating that video/song/story/picture/meme they are interested in, they are often very inexperienced with digital work beyond the creation of a slideware presentation.

One solution would be to urge our colleagues to add a digital “making” course to the general education curriculum. But doing that means either adding one more course to often overly burdensome general education requirements, or deleting some other course, with all the controversy such a change to the general education requirements can cause on our campuses.

Another possible solution, and the one I plan to start advocating, is to try to break free from the 14 week semester or 10 week quarter when we teach the digital humanities. The semester/quarter, it turns out, is just not enough time to do sophisticated work in this emerging field. My proposed solution is a new digital history “course” that will extend over multiple semesters, giving students the opportunity to enroll for one, two, three, or even four semesters, as they work together to realize a much larger and more sophisticated group project than is possible in just 14 weeks.

The idea I have in mind lives somewhere between a standard course and an internship and so for lack of a better term, I’m calling it a workshop. We have no such name or classification in our catalog, so I’ll end up having to call it a course, unless I can get away with calling it a lab, which is actually much closer to the reality of what I have in mind. Because I’m also very interested in learning spaces, I’m planning to use this “course” or “lab” or whatever as a way of experimenting with the intersection between public digital history and making space on a college campus.

Right now I have a draft proposal just starting to float around campus. My hope is that by the end of the summer I’ll have something acceptable enough that I can start it through the necessary approvals that will then lead to a roll out of the course in the fall of 2014. Once I get some feedback on version 0.1, I’ll post it here for further public comment. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from people who have been teaching digital humanities to undergraduates – what has worked, what hasn’t?

I’m 17,000 or so words into my first novel and I realise I’ve been suffering a bit of writers’ block. It’s probably been a couple of months if I think about it realistically. I now see I’ve been in avoidance mode, ostriching the fact that I couldn’t get past this particular issue, and it’s been bugging the shit out of me.

I’ve realised for a while from friends who write or from poking the web that cracking on and just bloody writing is a good strategy for doing fiction. But it is also the case that a bulk of text this size needs a good (sorry: office bingo alert) “helicopter view” to make it flow. I’ve got a plan, of course, and a plot (yay), but there was a crucial motivation thing missing for my main protagonist – Palmer – that I’ve been really stuck with. For the last two months this one question has been whirling around my head: Why the hell would he do what I need him to do? 

(What I need him to do, by the way, is to leave his hugely successful company and the love of his life and run away from it all so he can live in isolation in the arse end of nowhere…) (oh, and later in the book head back to the company to face his demons..)… so the motivation had to be big, overwhelming, unstoppable.

I’ve come up with pages and pages of notes riffing around the motivation that might make this rupture happen, and things got fanciful and weird and then frankly terribly unbelievable – and then I read the amazing, emotional and heart-lifting last interview with the brilliant Iain Banks:

“…only real life can get away with the really outrageous stuff. The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t. It’s incredibly annoying for us scribblers. A lot of the time you’re simply deciding how far down the path of unlikeliness you can go while still retaining the willing suspension of disbelief in the reader…you’re trying to decide how much you can get away with”

…and realised that this needed to be blindingly simple to make it believable.

And finally, I’ve got it. It came to me yesterday after about a hundred beers. I’m not going to tell you what the motivation is – just, you know, so you buy my BESTSELLER when I finally get it done (the butler did it)…but needless to say, it’s terribly simple, and I think (think) will work beautifully to tie up a whole bunch of stuff I needed to tie up.

So yay to breaking the block, and thank you to the gods of beer for helping out.

Meanwhile, as they say, here’s an excerpt. Just to give a bit of context, this is the first time the crack underlying the business (it’s a kind of virtual reality escapism holiday company, if you must know..) shows, and things start to go to shit:

>>>

We’d been back at the beach for the day, hanging out and enjoying exploring an environment which I’d designed out there but had no recollection of. The sun was setting and bright stars emerged in the clear sky as we walked back along the beach towards the boat. Suddenly, Lang stumbled, half falling, and ending up on his knees, his head in his hands. I thought he was just drunk, and sat down next to him. Then I turned to speak to him and saw with shock that his eyes were wet with tears, his jaw clenched and his upper body shaking. Behind us in the darkness of the jungle, a long, loud moan rose up, ripping the quiet night air with its intensity. The yacht, the sea edge, the deck chairs – all suddenly faded and we were pitched into an impenetrable blackness. Lang cried out; the noise from the jungle stopped briefly, and then there was the sound of hard galloping hooves, heading inexorably in our direction, louder and more intense, pounding at what was once sand. My heart was thumping as I reached for Lang, pulling him upright and beginning to run. I could feel his breathing, and his terror, and it matched and built with my own until we were both screaming with the intensity and running as hard as we could, holding on to each other for fear of losing it – whatever the fuck “it” was – completely. Behind us, the noise increased in volume, the hooves dashing down against the ground, a rush of air as the noise gained on us. The darkness was absolute. I knew and understood nothing apart from fear; a primal fear of the thing behind us but also a deeper, stronger fear of being left alone – alone in this place, with the darkness and the noise. Lang obviously felt the same: we ran holding on to each other, stumbling over each other, pulling each other up, willing ourselves to get the fuck away from whatever was making the noise. Suddenly the darkness was split by a flash of white light and I saw the thing, reared up on its back legs, its horrific red mouth poised open above Lang’s head. I pushed him to one side and struck out forwards as hard as I could with my fist but I hit nothing but air. The light came on again, and then again, beginning to strobe. I turned with my back to Lang, and we twisted a circle together, back to back, staring outwards into the beyond. Whatever it was had evaporated and instead the space was filled with people, their faces twisted in pain and suffering. With horror, I realised I recognised some of them: Lang’s brother, his father, his mother, shuffling forwards as their broken, bloody arms flailed towards our centre. Lang just stood and screamed, frozen like a rabbit in headlights, the horror burnt on him. I fell to my knees, and covered my ears, needing the rasping sound of Lang’s terror out of my head, unable to offer him any more comfort or solace. Suddenly, the light stopped flashing, and with one fluid movement, the figures receded and were gone. I suddenly found strength from somewhere and pulled mentally upwards with everything I had, feeling myself slipping back into the darkness for a moment, but just about managing to open my eyes and pull myself up and out. I ripped the headset off and opened my eyes again, and instead of the darkness or the beach, I was back in the kitchen, slumped forwards on the table, the computer still chattering away as the hard drive worked on the simulation…

There has been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere recently about some of sociologist Kieran Healy's really interesting preliminary findings about citations in the 'Top 4' philosophy journals (Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and Nous).  The question he is trying to answer is: 'What conversations are leading philosophers having?'  The original post is here, and the follow-up (which I want to talk about) is here.  NewAPPS and Feminist Philosophers have both opened up interesting discussions of the data and what they mean -- and what we could/should do in light of them.  Go check them out, if you are at all interested: they're worth your time (first of each here and here).

I wanted to add an ego-centric point to the discussion.   These Top 4 journals are also called 'generalist' journals.  I am not sure exactly what philosophers who use the word 'generalist' to describe journals usually mean, but I (perhaps incorrectly) assumed that they meant that it's a journal where a variety of types and/or sub-fields of philosophy are well-represented.  The point I wanted to make is that Healy's results suggest that the Big 4 are NOT generalist journals in this sense, insofar as philosophy of science is pretty seriously under-represented.  (I would guess that this is true for certain other sub-fields as well, but I don't know enough about those other fields to be confident in my assessment.)

Now, I am NOT saying that these journals never publish philosophy of science.  There is no question that they do; some really great philosophy of science has appeared in these journals in the last two decades.  But there are two pieces of evidence that suggest that these four journals are not a place where conversations in philosophy of science are happening.

1. In the second post, Healy has a list of the 526 most-cited items in the Top 4 from the last two decades.  A grand total of 9 of them (by my count) are solidly, squarely in the philosophy of empirical science.  Now, if we open up the criteria a bit, and count e.g. philosophy of mathematics, we can add 3 more.  That's 1.7% and 2.3% of the total highly-cited items.  I'm guessing that more that 1.7% of professional philosophers are philosophers of science.  (Mere counting of course will be misleading, because many people will describe themselves as philosophers of science AND something else; but even after adjusting for that, 1.7% is going to be too low, I think.)

2. In the first post, Healy presents a chart with a bunch of connected nodes.  Recall that the basic motivating question was: what are the main conversations?  Each node represents an item cited in an article in one of the Top 4 journals.  A line is drawn between any two items that are cited together in any one (third) article in the Top 4.  Healy's rationale: "the more often any two papers are cited together, the more likely they are to be part of some research question or ongoing problem or conversation topic within the discipline." Healy then cleaned up the picture by 'erasing' any lines that connected items that had not both been cited at least 10 times.  In the resulting chart, there are 'clusters': these represent the conversations Healy was interested in finding.  Interestingly (and here's my point), there are no 'pure' philosophy of science clusters.  There IS a cluster where the metaphysics of causation borders philosophy of science (in the chart: it's green, about halfway down, on the left-hand side).  But other than that, there aren't really any 'big conversations' in philosophy of science happening in the Top 4 journals.

Bringing this together: looking at Healy's chart, I thought: maybe the so-called 'generalist' journals aren't really generalist in a strong sense.  Rather, they are the most prestigious journals for people working in metaphysics, epistemology, language, and mind (LEMM).  To put the point in an analogy: the Top 4 play the same role for LEMM philosophers that the journals Philosophy of Science and the British Journal for Philosophy of Science play for philosophers of science.  There is (in my limited impression) no absolutely top-prestige journal for the four LEMM components, though there are very, very good journals that specialize in one or the other of them (e.g. Episteme, Mind & Language).

If something like this is correct, the Top 4 journals are not generalist in the sense of being a forum for all the best conversations in professional philosophy as a whole.  But perhaps they could still be called 'generalist' insofar as specific LEMM topics are of general interest to all philosophers, even those not publishing on LEMM topics.

One qualification, however: the Top 4 journals DO occasionally publish pure philosophy of science pieces.  Philosophy of Science never publishes an article on e.g. Rawlsian justice.  So that is a clear and unequivocal disanalogy between the two cases.

It’s been more than a year and a half since we launched our new website. In other words, it’s hardly new anymore. However, it still does feel new because we keep working on it and updating it all the time. The frontpage contents are a reflection of what goes on in our museum and what the staff are working on at the moment. But, we still feel that it might be time for a – shall we call it – minor facelift?

Some considerations so far:

• Making the navigation bar float at the top of the screen
• Making the logo banner smaller / less dominant
• Making the feature banner less wide, so that the sidebar can be moved up
• Disable the WPML String Translation plugin (seems to be slowing down the site considerably)

I would also like to know what ideas and suggestions you might have as to how to improve our site – make it haster, more beautiful, more interesting, etc. Nothing is sacred and everything is possible (almost). Just drop a comment below or an e-mail to me at dnoes (at) sund.ku.dk.

When I was in college, I spent almost all of my free time in the slam poetry scene. A few years and a few hundred open mics into that experience, it became obvious that some venues fostered amazing poetry communities, others, not so much.

One of my favorite open mics was at the Cantab in Cambridge, MA. The Cantab had a formula. Everyone got five minutes on the mic max. Slots on the list were first-come first-served, though newbies were usually placed early in the set so they would have a gentle onramp (and so seasoned poets could skip the kiddie pool if they chose to). Once the list filled, there were still shadow spots for special poets--but you had to be good to get one of those. The crowd was uniformly supportive of all, but effusive applause was meted out based strictly on quality. Experienced poets worked hard to bring their best to the stage, and they got honest feedback from a motley gang of peers and spectators. The whole experience welcomed newcomers while helping them understand what "value" constituted in that community.

Compare that with any number of lousy open mics. Some were so exclusive that it was impossible to feel welcome as a newcomer. Others lavished praise so indiscriminately that poets were never challenged to improve or bring forward new work. Some had no clear time limits or criteria for participation, and the poetry swung between brilliance and poke-your-eye-out horror.

I was reminded of these experiences when reading Dan Thompson's excellent post about what makes a good jazz jam. Dan writes about the explicit and implied "rules" of participation for musicians that create great music both onstage and for the crowd. He casts the whole idea of a great jazz jam in the context of the tragedy of the commons--like a poetry open mic, the jazz club is a community whose experience is fabulous or awful depending on the extent to the culture cultivates and enforces a healthy participatory process.

When I think about what makes for great participatory experiences in both poetry open mics and jazz jams, it comes down to three basic things:

• The process is open. There is some way for anyone to walk in the door and sign up.
• The process is discoverable. If there are implied rules or idiosyncrasies (and in the best cultures, there are), they are not completely shrouded in mystery. Repeated participation can make them knowable and understandable. 
• The process is unequal. It acknowledges differences in talent, experience, and effort, and has a system--either explicit or implicit--for rewarding greatness.

These might sound obvious, but when you think about how they relate to bad participatory processes, it becomes apparent where things can break down. Here are just three participatory processes I think are in serious need of improvement:

• Public comment at city council meetings. These suffer from an excess of equality. Have you ever stood in line for your two minutes on an issue at a government meeting? The process is incredibly open and equal. Wackos and experts all get the same amount of time. And the end result--what politicians actually decide--rarely seems meaningfully correlated with the participatory process. These systems are open, but they are also excessively equal and not discoverable. The result is that people get turned off, cynical, and leave. Only the extremists remain. And thus councilmembers have to go outside the process to get good input from community members (if at all). The process becomes even less discoverable. It gets killed by the equality of it.
• Grant application feedback. These suffer from a lack of discoverability. You spend hours agonizing over the language for a grant application. You put it in, wait a couple months, and then you get a one-page form letter informing you that you did (or more likely, didn't) receive funding. Occasionally, the funder will offer limited opportunities for feedback on the proposal. Even more rarely, you will receive panel comments directly. Grant processes are inherently unequal--the funder is trying to find the best work to support. But they are also problematically not discoverable. It's rare that you get direct feedback about your proposal without aggressively asking for it. The whole process of grant applications would be improved if providing panel comments was a matter of course. Applicants would learn what they lacked, and funders would (hopefully) receive better applications. Opaque funding decisions don't help anyone.
• Exhibition proposals. These suffer from a lack of openness. This is an issue we are actively grappling with at our museum. We receive frequent inquiries from artists and community members about how thy might submit exhibition proposals for consideration by our institution. At many museums, the curatorial process is completely closed and undiscoverable--"don't call us, we'll call you." Others have clear and open processes for submittal and proposal review. As we figure out what's right for us, I'm guided by the desire to create something open and discoverable--but not necessarily "fair" and equal.

Do these three criteria--open, discoverable, unequal--resonate for you in designing or experiencing participatory processes? 

I had an idea for a thing – but I don’t know if it’s an event thing or a blog thing or a gathering thing or just a thing thing, or maybe not even a thing at all.

Also, I’m in Devon in order to do less developing of things, so maybe it’s just a “put it in the list for later” thing.

But anyway.

Men, right, they’re all about BEER and WIMMIN and CARS and FOOTBALL and NOT TALKING ABOUT STUFF and DEFINITELY NOT CRYING and BEER and COMPUTERS and WIMMIN and GAMING and BEER?

No?

No. The very best men I know – the ones I keep in touch with and consider my real, proper, bestest friends – are sensitive and funny in a non-PHOAR way, and maybe cry every so often and read books and may like the odd car or two but still wonder about the meaning of it all and don’t always feel terribly secure and aren’t afraid to say so in front of other men and (frankly, maybe this is sexist or out-dated or something – sorry) have a bit more of a feminine side to their nature..

And I like that, because I might at times be a brash bastard (and social media doesn’t help with this, it has to be said – sorry) but inside I’m all of those things too. And there’s nothing I hate more than watching a room full of men trying to be all ALPHA and hiding their fears and pretending to be BRAVE when really they’re probably full of fear about where the next paycheque comes from or how to tell their wife that they love them or how to express that they’re depressed.

Then there’s the kids. Mrs E and I are bringing our two boys up with bows and arrows and tents and exploring and Lego – but we’re also helping them cook and read and paint and create and hug and cry and knit and tell us how they feel inside – and our biggest thing is to make them realise that this is all OK, in fact it’s better than OK, it’s really the only way to be. End of.

And I wondered if a kind of League Of Sensitive Men or a Gaggle of Sensitive Dads or something might be a good thing to help support men in realising that this stuff is a good thing and should be encouraged. But I don’t know what that thing might be.

Just thought I’d throw that out there.

Peace

x       <– man kiss

Click here for the newsletter, in Danish and English.

6th newsletter from Medical Museion in 2013.

• “Seminar with Professor Bruno Strasser on Thursday, June 20th”
• “Museum opening hours and tours this summer”
• “Lucy Lyons’ exhibition ‘Experiences of Aging’ at Panum”
• “The popular biohacking lab mentioned by DR. Lab exhibition period extended”

Have a great summer!

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Writing – whether a new song or a bit of fiction – is very often like walking along a thin wire over an abyss. The abyss isn’t death but the loss of the idea – if you look down too long, or think too hard about the almost intangible thing you are running through your brain then it’ll go, just like that, and it’ll never come back.

That crucial moment when an idea is just forming is the most precious, fragile thing – you’re a matter of seconds away from falling off the edge. All it takes is one of your kids to ask you a question, for the phone to go, a text to arrive.. and your idea has gone, tumbling down over the edge into nothing.

This is why I find rapid, easy to use tools are absolutely key to the creative process. For music, it’s either Audio Memos on my phone or a piece of paper on the piano (and a totally non-stavelike and slightly quirky musical notation system I seem to use in preference to writing down real notes..). For writing, it’s a paper notebook or Simple Note. When I’ve caught it with one of these, the fear of losing an idea subsides – and that’s when I can turn to more serious tools like Ableton Live or Scrivener to shape and hone.

What’s interesting though is how many times I tend to come back to the original rough-edged bits – a terrible, static-laden recording of a guitar or a half nonsense scribbled down in the middle of the night. These snippets start off as the most fragile thing but further down the line they quite often turn out to be the most important part of the whole idea…