In the second session I attended at Science Online ‘09, Moshe Pritsker and Apryl Bailey discussed the use of video, images, and sound in the production of peer-reviewed (and non-peer-reviewed) literature in the sciences. The essential concept is the age-old exhortation to writers everywhere: show, don’t tell*. In other words, instead of a beautifully assembled collection of jargon (or shall we say, “terms of the art”) and complex written instructions, why not make a movie? Two services — JoVE (the Journal of Visualized Experiments) and Scivee.tv — approach the idea from different angles.
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Science Online '09
experiments, JoVE, scio09, Scivee, video
Installment One in a barrage of posts on Science Online ‘09–
Okay, “barrage” is probably the wrong word. I don’t plan a Time-on-Target setup here. Let’s call it a series of posts, instead.
The premise of the session was to explore the use of science fiction in science blogs (hence the title), and it was coordinated by Stephanie Zvan. Stephanie kicked off the discussion (this is an unconference, remember!) by simply throwing out to the audience the question “so…what do you think of it? Using science fiction in your blog?”
The discussion freewheeled almost immediately, delving into such varied issue as how the change of one element of science - essentially creating an innovation via author fiat - is the key to exploring how a character develops, to the fact that much scifi that doesn’t actually have any structure, plot, or characterization, to the question of why it’s always gotta be space dolphins (or space cetaceans)*.
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Science Online '09
science fiction, scifi, scio09