The dinner on Saturday, after the entire day of sessions, will be at the Radisson Hotel across the street from Sigma Xi, where many of the guests are staying.

We have negotiated with the hotel for a nice buffet menu for $34, taxes and gratuity included. Limit is 200 people (so keep adding the numbers as you add your names). The menu can be found in this post at Abel’s.

Bar will have to be a cash bar but we’ll get good, inexpensive wine from our local experts the Wine Authorities.

Sign up below:

1. Anton Zuiker
2. Bora Zivkovic
3. David Kroll
4. Janet Stemwedel
5. Erin Davis
6. Cathy Davies
7. Bj

Monday, January 19th, and beyond:

Highly Allochthonous: ScienceOnline Day 2: generalised ramblings
The Intersection: Echinoderms Emerge Victorious!
White Coat Underground: I believe!
Lecture Notes: Gender in Science Section
Lecture Notes: Gender in Science Section Part 2: personal perspective
Lecturer Notes: Science Online 09
The OpenHelix Blog: <a href=“http://www.openhelix.com/blog/?p=730” target=”_blank” title=”“>

This session is moderated by GG, Brian Switek and Scicurious:

Why is History of Science important for scientists? How to blog about it. How does Open Access and the Web in general (Google Books in particular, for example) help/hinder the work of professional historians of science?

Discuss:

Hi folks, gg here! I thought I’d open the discussion of the history of science by polling our panel the following questions:

1. How did you get interested in blogging about the history of science?
2. How do you find the historical articles that you write about?
3. What do you personally find important about studying science history?

Now, to answer my own questions…

gg(skullsinthestars):
1. How did you get interested in blogging about the history of science? My thesis advisor has always been very interested in scientific history, and his enthusiasm spread to me. When I started blogging, I decided to write a post about the history of measuring the speed of light, and in the process I realized that Fizeau’s original paper was not readily available online. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I found the paper, translated it, and learned a lot of fascinating detail about an experiment that is usually described in passing in a paragraph in physics books. I was also a little in awe: here I was, reading about a groundbreaking scientific measurements from the original source. I decided to challenge others to do their own history of science blogging and the rest, as they say, is history.

2. How do you find the historical articles that you write about? A lot of the time I find articles through my other blogging interest: classic pulp fantasy/horror blogging! Weird fiction of the late 1800s/early 1900s often references the scientific work of the time, and I’ve come across lots of fascinating, obscure articles just by tracking down the references!

3. What do you personally find important about studying science history? In science classes, we often learn what a scientist has discovered, but not why they discovered it in that form. This additional context is important for understanding; for instance, the Bohr model of the atom is usually introduced as the first ‘quantum’ model of the atom, but it is immediately dismissed as incorrect and inaccurate. Why do we teach it, then? Looking at the attempts to determine atomic structure of the era, one sees that Bohr’s ‘intermediate’ model was a necessary intellectual step in the process of developing quantum mechanics.

What do the rest of you think?

scicurious
1) How did you get interested in blogging about the history of science?
I first got involved in history of science blogging when gg posted his history of science blogging challenge! I immediately thought of two or three things that I would really love to blog about. But it wasn’t just a one-time thing. I’m really interested in making complicated science easy to understand, and the history of science contains the best material. The science we do today is based on all the science that went before it, and some of the stuff we talk about is so old we’ve stopped citing it. But people outside of science don’t know the “basic” stuff that we talk about like it’s gospel. When I blog old scientific papers, I can take this old stuff and show people how it relates to the medicine and science they see around them every day, how a few key experiments founded entire fields studied by thousands, even millions, of people. And besides, there’s not a lot that’s more inspiring to future scientists than seeing the amazing things that people did back when science wasn’t a profession, but a hobby.

2) How do you find the historical articles that you write about?
A couple of places have really good aggregations of historical science in neuroscience and psychology. I’m a big fan of the historical archive on the Society for Neuroscience website, as well as Classics in the History of Psychology. And sometimes I’ll just Pubmed a keyword I’m interested in, find the oldest thing availible, and go from there.

3) What do you personally find important about studying science history?
I think it’s really important to know your roots, to know how we found out the things that we now think of as so incredibly basic. Knowing the real basis for your field puts the whole thing in context, and makes you keep the big picture in mind, which is something that can get lost in your lab work. And it’s really inspiring to think of those guys, doing science in their off-time because curiosity just wouldn’t let them quit.

Hey everyone, Brian here…

I think at some point we should do a little “demonstration” of how to look for history of science stuff on the web via resources like Google Books, archive. org, etc. Nothing major, but just something to show people useful resources and how easy it is to copy/paste illustrations and bits of text to posts. It also might be worthwhile to mention things like the “Turning the Pages Project” that are pretty neat. (http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2008/11/awww_yeah.php) In general, I think we should spend at least some time talking about digitization projects.

Maybe we should come up with a little demonstration on “How to blog the history of science” or something similar. We definitely shouldn’t just be chatting with each other for the whole time. Maybe we should pick out a few really good posts to show “how its done”, mention The Giant’s Shoulders, and show people a few practical things in addition to commenting on why history of science blogging is important.

As for the questions, here are my answers;

1. How did you get interested in blogging about the history of science?

The essays of Stephen Jay Gould inspired me to start reading more books on the history of science by authors like Adrian Desmond and Michael Rudwick. What I read about largely dictates what I write about on my blog, and so it was a natural sort of transition.

2. How do you find the historical articles that you write about?

I don’t often write about historical articles as much as I write about ideas, people, or particular events. In fact, I think I spend more time talking about public perception of science and historical science pop culture than the history of scientific ideas. Usually I just pop in some search terms (like “Pithecanthropus”, “devolution”, “chimpanzee”, etc.) into Google Books and tell it to return full-view only documents. I browse through what is returned until something interests me, at which point I look for more information on that particular topic. Other times I already have an idea (like my vague recollection about a pygmy kept at the Bronx Zoo) and I try to track down that information.

3. What do you personally find important about studying science history?

So much of what I had been taught about the history of science was wrong. It is far more interesting and complex than I ever imagined, but people today have a tendency to put their heroes on pedestal and demonize their enemies. By looking at science in a historical context, though, we can trace the development and interconnection of different ideas and gain a better appreciation for what was, at one time or another, cutting-edge science. It also teaches the lesson that even though we have come a long way, science is not a dispassionate process carried about by 100% objective robots. People have biases and are influenced by factors outside the small community of science, and who knows what future historians might write about us!

Note by gg: I wrote up some of my thoughts about the session at my blog here. The (very skeletal) slide presentation I used at the talk can be found there, as well.

Feel free to contact Apryl with any questions regarding SciVee or post your questions and comments here.

Possible Discussion Ideas:
1) Statement: The research community is ripe for a revolution in scientific communication and the current generation of scientists will be the one to push it forward. These scientists, generally graduate students and new post-docs, have grown up with cyberinfrastructure as a part of their daily lives, not just a specialized aspect of their profession. They have a natural ability to do science in an electronic environment without the need for printed publications or static documents and, in fact, can feel quite limited by the traditional format of a publication. Perhaps most importantly, they appreciate that the sheer amount of data and the number of publications is prohibitive to the traditional methods of keeping current with the literature.

Question: Do science bloggers today believe this is true and if so, how do science bloggers see the progression happening in good and/or bad ways on science video sites like SciVee?

2) Statement: Peer-reviewed publications have long been the currency of scientific research as they are the fundamental unit through which scientists communicate and evaluate each other. However, in striking contrast to the data they describe, publications have yet to benefit from the opportunities offered by cyberinfrastructure and Web 2.0 applications. Publishers have done well using cyberinfrastructure to distribute publications, but have not fully explored the range of possibilities. Fortunately, with the growing movement of open access literature, we now have new ways in which to disseminate scientific publications.

Question: How could science video sites like SciVee better support scientific blogging and communication in general?

3) Statement: At scientific conferences, poster sessions are a popular venue where current scientific research endeavors and results are presented for often the first time. The researchers who stand alongside their paper poster and explain their work in short verbal presentations answer any questions posed by interested conference attendees. This transient information that is shared live, or

This session is moderated by Matt Ford and Jonathan Gitlin:

How to run a blog for your science organization. Or write blog-like pieces in a different platform. This would be about the possibilities involved in blog-like writing for commercial ventures

FriendFeed Room

Twitter

Flickr

Flickr Slideshow

Facebook

Video live-stream came from Cameron Neylon via Mogulus

This session is moderated by Christina Pikas and John Dupuis:

There are so many nifty tricks and strategies for searching the literature that an average scientist is not aware of. So: Ask the experts

This how-to session is led by Tatjana Jovanovic-Grove and Glendon Mellow:

Tatjana and Glendon would like to thank everyone for an interesting session! Post-conference notes below!

Take this workshop by a couple of professional artists and get started on illustrating your blog with your own art. Bring questions! Bring images! Bring tips!
(Thanks to Jessica Palmer for many of the notes below and her help with the direction of this workshop! We miss you!)

Discuss:

Visuals in any media are important, and can enhance a blog and hook the reader. We invite attendees to bring artwork or photo jpeg files we can work with, and questions about images online!

You don’t have to be a professionally trained artist to generate clear, information-rich images on a science blog. For example, take a look at the excellent, lucid illustrations done by two science bloggers who have never had formal artistic training at When Pigs Fly Returns and The Disillusioned Taxonomist. Dive in! Find a medium you are comfortable in, and make your blog pop.

Illustrating, painting or adding photos to a blog or website also doesn’t have to be a heavy investment in computer software and equipment. Before purchasing an amazing program like Adobe Photoshop (Glendon goes on and on), why not get your feet wet? Many free imaging resources exist online, such as Gimp, Fast Stone and Easy Graphic Converter.

We’d like to focus on how to best display art on your blog or website. Points may include:

Generating digital art
-scan actual artwork (dealing with large size, texture, etc)
-fix minor defects (in Photoshop, etc.)
-edit (in Photoshop, etc.)
-add text (in Photoshop, etc)
-use layers to merge images (in Photoshop, etc) – useful for watermarks, signatures, etc.
-tweak contrast, color
-resize to web-appropriate size (the importance of pixels)
-save for web, the most important tool you can use, at least in Glendon’s opinion!

Blogger-specific issues
-how do you work images into your blog – sidebar, header?
-structure a post around an image/how to let your image anchor your post
-using images to hook a reader – the importance of surprise and humor!
-Creative Commons Licences – what are they for?
-deal with copyright and rights; cite images you are using, and what constitutes fair use?

Working with scientific data
-designing an artwork to convey an idea vs. designing a straight up table or graph
-how to enhance your data visually – without crapifying it with extraneous garbage
-being smart about fonts/labels/legends – size, readability, pixellation, color, design elements
-giving your data a visual context so people can understand it
-etc. (think Edward Tufte type points)

Turning scientific data into images or figures palatable for the nonspecialist, with a dash of creativity!

Post-Conference Notes

Thanks everyone!

We’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to email Glendon questions at theflyingtrilobite (@) gmail (dot) com. Keep an eye on The Flying Trilobite for more tips post-conference. (Safe-for-work tips.)

Discuss:

Kevin~
Do you have a small bookmark icon/code that we can use to add to all the video pages on SciVee? I know you mentioned this, and I looked on your site but the one I found was a larger icon that will not fit. We need one of the mini icons like the ones we have available on the general tab of all video pages.
~Apryl