June 08, 2008
Cool interactive graphic assembling all the exit poll data from the dem primaries.
It's a top-notch infographic so it's from the NYT, natch. It's disappointing that the larger scientific community hasn't embraced information design and online communication the way, for example, those who study politics or baseball have.
Very few groups keep up-to-date webpages, put the data from their papers on those webpages, put their papers on the webpages, or are introduced to even the rudiments of information design in their training.
Better tools are part of the problem, and there's a budget discrepancy of course between a research group and the NYT. But I don't think the $$$ difference is large if you a) aggregate it across the university and b) make it a priority. There may be central resources @ the university to assist with this, but if there are no one knows about them -- a complaint against the administrative side.
The larger problem is still that most scientists don't care and don't know they should care. Open communication is at the moral and scientific core of our mission as scientists, and we're neglecting it.
A note of a more practical nature: no one is going to put up research-in-progress on their website because the idea will be stolen (trust me, this lab knows from experience exactly how that goes). So you end up having to wait for it to be published. However, by the time that happens a year has gone by and often the lead researcher has graduated and left it behind or moved on to the next publication. So whose job is it to organize and put it out there? The answer is it isn't specifically anybody's job and that's why it doesn't get done.
I know -- what I'm suggesting is that the university provide a central resource to help do this stuff, and that scientists exert some pressure (and divert some money) to make that happen. I think you'd post data at the beginning or middle of the preprint stage -- it's certainly reasonable that data go live with the publishing of any peer-reviewed paper.
We have centralized resources for machining, procurement, IT, public relations, intellectual property, ... But we *don't* have a centralized resource to that helps groups share the knowledge discovered here with the world. The WWW was founded by physicists and science at large is well behind the pack and not gaining ground. [if it's not clear: 50 rated blogs on physics, 1167 on recipes, and 55 on conspiracy theories. An extremely imperfect measure but telling.]
Asking a grad student to set up a webpage, etc is foolish. Hiring a pair of workstudy undergrads for the summer to freshen webpages for a departments' research groups is reasonable.
Its not quite the same, but the discussion reminds me of one of my moms older writer friends. He was an english major, but he had a really good grasp of technical/scientific/engineering type things. One of his first jobs was with IBM, where he basically listened to the engineers and translated what they were working on into somthing that the business managers could read and understand.
one of the third years knows a creationist geologist.
« Older It has nothing to do with whether witches float. | Guess he didn't get W's change of address form? Newer »
To post comments to a thread you must login or create a profile.
Every day spent designing a fancy-pants data visualization website is a day that I don't spend doing actual science. It's not even a simple question of tools because no matter how simple the tool you still need to invest time figuring out how it works and the priority is just too low (ask sG how many days of his life he has sunk into playing around with all the new features of every Mac program he has downloaded, no offense to sG because I do it too).
The reason the NYT can afford to do this is because after 100 days of reporting "Clinton vs. Obama" every day you are clawing to find a fresh angle. I'll admit the visualization is top notch and very nice and the 3 minutes I spent looking at it gave me a lot of knowledge. However, there is no way to justify making such an involved database of my own research so that 1000 people can look at it for 5 minutes each.
On the extreme other side, my lab group has no webpage at all which is completely inexcusable and I can guarantee that it hinders our recruitment efforts. The truth is that various people have started working on it but it requires too much cooperation from the other members of the lab to write up the content and it never gets done. AND THUS IT SHALL STAY.
posted by natedogg at 03:33PM CST on June 08