Category Archives: Communicating with scientists

Add Captions to Your Videos to Increase Your Audience Reach

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I’ve given many presentations at international conferences as well as seminars at foreign research institutions and departments. One thing I learned from these experiences was that non-native English speakers appreciated it when I made an effort to aid their comprehension of my language. In addition to speaking slowly, I would add a single sentence on each slide that summarized what I was describing on that slide. This approach helps because people often can read English better than they understand the spoken language–especially if the speaker has a strong accent. I know that adding extra text to slides is often discouraged by presentation gurus, because the audience’s attention is split between reading the slide text and listening to what the speaker is saying. However, the advice not to add extra text to slides falls down when your audience is struggling to understand your spoken words. You have to balance the design of your slides with your audience’s needs.

That experience in giving presentations to international audiences made me acutely aware of how captions can increase an audience’s comprehension of my material. In this blog post, I’d like to talk a bit about why and how you should add captions to your videos.

When people first start making videos, they often focus on the audiovisual aspects of the project and don’t think much (if at all) about providing closed captioning text. It’s an extra step that many video makers avoid because it takes time and because they haven’t thought about the makeup of their potential audience. People typically think about closed captioning as mainly helping viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. However, there are probably many more people who simply can’t understand the language being spoken in the video but whose comprehension would be improved enormously by captions.

If you post your videos on a media-sharing site such as YouTube, your potential audience is the entire globe, where many people may not speak your language. For example, about half of the viewers of my videos on The Scientist Videographer YouTube channel reside in countries in which English is not the primary language. YouTube uses speech recognition technology to produce an automatic transcript for each uploaded video. It’s not perfect, but is pretty good; the few mistakes can be easily corrected. You can alternatively upload a text transcript, and YouTube will synchronize the text with the audio. Then, all a viewer needs do is click the “CC” button to turn on closed captioning.

Captions help viewers who struggle to understand your spoken language but can read it. Another reason to include captions is because YouTube provides the option to translate the captions into more than 60 languages; however, this works only if the video creator provides captions. This means that those viewers who don’t speak or read your language can also watch and understand your video. A final reason is that a text transcript contributes to Search Engine Optimization by providing information to Google and YouTube that allows more efficient indexing of your videos. By ensuring your videos are discoverable by search engines, you will reach a much larger audience.

Adding captions to your videos thus increases your global audience as well as the discoverability of your science videos.

So part of my workflow in making a video includes preparing a word-for-word transcript of everything audible in the video. Because I often develop a script prior to filming, I usually can use that text file and only have to revise it a bit to reflect minor changes in the final film. That transcript file is uploaded, along with the video, to my channel, and YouTube then automatically aligns the text with the audio. When the video plays and the viewer enables the closed captioning (cc button), the text then appears on screen and is timed to match the audio.

Creating and adding closed captions to a video is relatively easy and painless–if you know how. In the following video tutorial, I walk through the steps needed to add closed captions to a video:

How to Edit an iPhone Video to Create an Eye-Catching Tweet

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I recently taught a workshop on science videography at a science society conference and wanted to post a few Tweets to let society members know about it and to attract additional participants. My plan was to post daily Tweets during the week prior to the workshop. My problem was how to make my Tweets noticeable among the many other Tweets being posted by conference goers. So, instead of attaching photos to the Tweets, I decided to create a series of brief video bulletins to make my Tweets more eye-catching and to emphasize the topic of the workshop.

However, I did not want to spend a lot of time on this, as I had my hands full preparing for the workshop. After a bit of experimentation, I discovered that it was easy to take short (10 second) video clips and use the editing option in the iPhone camera app to add a bit of text describing the workshop. Then it was an easy task to compose a Tweet on my phone and attach the video bulletin, a different one each day. A bunch of people viewed the Tweets, and I attracted several additional participants for my workshop. See below for an example:

Someone who saw my Tweets asked me how I created them. So, this week I put together a tutorial to show how to quickly turn a video clip stored in an iPhone camera roll into an eye-catching bulletin to announce an upcoming event or publication. The resultant video announcement can be exported and posted on a website, on a Facebook page, on a LinkedIn profile, or in a Tweet.

CERF Workshop a Big Success

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This past week I taught a one-day workshop (Beginning Videography for Science Professionals) at the biennial conference of the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation in Portland, Oregon. I got a lot of great feedback from workshop participants who spent the day learning how to plan, shoot, and edit a video to deliver a science message. Each participant worked on an individual video project as we went through the practice exercises. At the end of the day, we watched everyone’s “rough cuts”, although some were not that “rough”. I had a wonderful time seeing participants get excited about the possibilities of using video in their research and outreach activities. Also, I’ve already been approached by CERF organizers to teach the workshop again.

Here are a few scenes from the workshop:

 

Use Video to Enhance Class Lectures

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Video is a fantastic way to augment class lectures and let students see examples of habitats, organisms, and various physical/chemical/biological phenomena. Instead of just listening to a lecture about mangrove forests, students can go on a virtual field trip by watching a video. Quite a few educators are now using videos routinely to illustrate scientific concepts. The number of videos suitable to accompany science lectures is growing (here is a great list of videos for teaching ecology). Many of these are produced by professional filmmakers, but some are created by science practitioners and students.

Ecologists who work in different types of ecosystems and study various processes can make an important contribution to science education by making short documentaries (three to five minutes) focused on a particular topic. You may be doing research in an alpine forest, a grassland, or a coral reef. Or, you may teach a field course in a tropical rainforest or a desert. By shooting some footage and putting it together with a brief explanation, you can provide a unique insight into that ecosystem. If you get into the habit of creating short videos during such excursions, you will eventually build up a library of footage to augment class lectures. Students who take field courses or who are conducting field research can also produce informative videos in which they share their experiences and insights with other students or the general public.

I recently visited a unique ecosystem in southern Japan and decided to make a short video about it. I spent about two hours at the site shooting footage with my iPhone (attached to a monopod). I would have spent that much time anyway taking photos and just exploring the site. I additionally spent about five hours over the subsequent three days editing the clips (with iMovie) and incorporating information from the literature. Whenever I had a few minutes during my travels (waiting for a plane or bus), I trimmed the footage or searched the internet for information to include in the video. I did most of the initial editing on my iPhone, but finished the video on my computer using the desktop version of iMovie.

The resultant 4.5-minute video would be suitable to show in a lecture about climate controls on plant distributions or a more specialized lecture about mangrove ecosystems.

Now, some of you may be hesitant to make such a video, thinking that it will take a lot of time or will never be as good as professional science documentaries. Well, your videos don’t have to be of BBC quality to be effective. Also, you don’t need fancy equipment or a film studio to produce an informative and high-quality video. I used an iPhone 6 to film this video, which was rendered in high definition (1080p). As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the iPhone is easy to use to capture video, especially if you know a few basics. Movie-editing is also quite easy with applications such as iMovie. Video-sharing sites allow creators to easily upload their videos online where they are readily shared with others.

The main point here is that with a little effort, I was able to create a mini-documentary about a topic of interest to students and researchers studying mangrove forests. Students may read about the distributional limits of mangroves, but text descriptions are dry and often not very interesting. A video, on the other hand, takes the viewer across oceans to a remote site they will likely never have the opportunity to visit and creates a memorable example of mangroves growing near their northernmost limit. The video is also understandable by non-specialists who might travel to southern Japan and want more information about unique coastal vegetation found there.

Blocked

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The_Great_Wall_of_China_at_Jinshanling-edit“If you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in.” That was a favorite saying of Deng Xiaoping, who was referring to China’s economic reform that would ultimately transform the country. China’s decision to open its doors to foreign investment and western knowledge also let in the Internet and foreign ideologies. To keep those “flies” away, the Chinese government has implemented The Great Firewall of China—an Internet censorship and surveillance program.

I’m currently in China where access to social media (Twitter, Facebook), YouTube, Google, and many other sites is blocked. A number of media sites such as CNN and the New York Times are also blocked (you can test whether a website is blocked by using https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedinchina/ Update 5/25/16: if previous site is unavailable, try this one https://www.vpnmentor.com/test-the-great-china-firewall/). Not only that, the government surveillance encourages self censorship because Internet users believe they are being watched and could potentially suffer legal and economic consequences if they do not adhere to the government policy. The blockage of sites I take for granted at home means I cannot (easily) get to my g-mail, Twitter, and YouTube accounts. In addition to the inconvenience, such censorship is quite disturbing to someone accustomed to Western freedoms and beliefs.

The irony is that it’s possible to jump over the Great Firewall, and many people here do. How that’s accomplished requires an understanding of how the Great Firewall works, which is technically quite interesting. There are three main ways Internet access to certain sites is blocked. The first is IP Blocking, which works by blocking all access to a known IP address. For example, www.facebook.com (a domain) maps to a known IP address; any attempt at connection is immediately disconnected (I would get messages saying that the server was unavailable, or the connection attempt would time out). The second way is called IP Address Misdirection, which does exactly what the name suggests. You might type in a url, www.lsu.edu, but the Firewall will send you to a fake address, www.misdirected.lsu.clone.edu. The final method is called Data Filtering, in which an Internet search involving certain keywords (e.g., Tiananmen Square) will be intercepted and the content of the resulting URLs examined. If the URL is on the censored list, then access to that site is blocked.

Through the use of VPNs (virtual private networks) and other proxies, Chinese citizens and visitors like me can circumvent the firewall. These work by routing information through a server located elsewhere, for example, California. Your IP address is thus changed so that it appears you are located in the US, and your web activity is also encrypted. This change bypasses the various blocking procedures described above. However, Chinese authorities have begun identifying and blocking some of the more popular VPNs, making it a bit more difficult for the average person to jump the firewall. I found one that is currently working and is allowing me to (so far) post things on banned sites such as Twitter.

I knew about the firewall prior to this trip (having visited China before) and had assumed that Chinese viewers were unable to see my YouTube videos. Chinese colleagues also had mentioned to me that YouTube was not accessible in China. I now know that is not entirely true. In fact, a friend who is from China but lives in the US said that her friends back home told her about “The Scientist Videographer” and video tutorials. They were talking about using a GoPro to capture video, and her friends mentioned a tutorial showing how to shoot and edit a slow-motion video, which showed a hummingbird. After a moment’s confusion, she realized they were talking about someone she knew—me and my YouTube tutorials.

There is much, much more to this topic (see this NY Times article for an in-depth description) than I could cover in a brief post.

Image Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0, uploaded by Brandmeister