Tag Archives: nature

Domino Theory

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As I’ve been trying to emphasize in past posts, visual story-telling using a good dramatic question can be a powerful way to spread sound science ideas to a diverse audience.  Here’s a video that is highly effective in getting across the concept of the “domino effect in nature”.  It was made by graduate student, Megan Callahan, who used simple props (dominoes) to create a compelling video:

The video was made during a workshop held by Randy Olson, scientist turned filmmaker (more about the workshop here).  Let’s apply my features of a good video and see how this one does:

1. The video is short.  Imagine a scientist getting across an abstract concept….by talking.  This video does it in one minute, with minimal talking.

2. The information is presented visually as well as verbally.  Yes.  Even without the beginning dialog between the two women, the point of the video is clear.

3. The video keeps adding information at a steady but rapid pace.  Yes.  In this case, the video uses falling dominoes in different habitats to move the story forward.

4. There is constant motion going on throughout the video. Yes, the falling dominoes and cuts from one scene to the next create the impression of constant motion.

5. Colors are intense and dramatic.  Not so obvious because the colors are those of nature.  The video could have used a few close-ups of the images on the dominoes with dramatic colors (of a butterfly or flower, for example).

6. The text is minimal; only what is essential to understanding the message.  Yes, a brief text segment at the end poses the key questions.

7. There is a dream-like quality about the video.  No.

8. The video elicits an emotional reaction in the viewer, largely driven by the music, which  is compelling and carefully keyed to the visual shifts.  The music (mostly bongos) adds to the feeling of movement or motion, which along with the sounds of the falling dominoes, creates a mood.

9. All visual and audio components are rendered to the highest quality possible.  Yes.

10. The video has people, animals, or cartoon characters that are doing something interesting, unusual, or surprising.  In this case, the falling dominoes with attached images representing species are a surprising element.

11. There is an element of suspense.  Yes.  Where will the dominoes end up?

12. There is no traditional beginning, middle, and end.  In this case, there is:  the opening scene with the two women, the falling dominoes, the ending text sequence.  However, it’s not really that obvious.

So this video clearly adheres to most of the elements I’ve identified as being important to creating an effective message.  Let me hasten to add that these are not the only features that characterize an effective video.  There may be some that break the rules (and these, I’m guessing, will be highly effective).  The point is that there are some common attributes that the scientist videographer can keep in mind when planning a video project.

Use your imagination, as Megan did, and create something memorable.  In this case, she took the name of the scientific idea (domino effect) and used it to develop a visual aid that reinforced the concept.  She went a step further and attached pictures of organisms to the dominoes, which drove home the point that each domino represented a species.  By putting the questioning woman’s picture on the last domino, Megan emphasized that humans are part of nature’s interconnectedness.

Many other scientific concepts lend themselves to such visual storytelling.  We just have to be creative in finding ways to tell those stories.

A final point about Megan’s video:  it did not require an expensive film crew, elaborate stage settings, exotic shooting locations, or a huge budget to create.  The students had NO prior experience with film making.  I’m not sure what equipment they used to capture the footage, but it would have been possible to shoot it with a smartphone.  The students did their own acting.  The only prop was a package of dominoes.  Their “shooting locations” for nature scenes were different habitats in their region, apparently close by and easily accessible.  This is a great example of how someone using minimal equipment and visual aids can create a compelling audiovisual message.

Use Video to Augment Your Scholarly Pubs

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In recent posts, I’ve been providing reasons why scientists might want to use videography to draw attention to their scholarly articles and to meet funding requirements.

I pointed out how the National Science Foundation and other science funding agencies expect scientists to develop outreach products and activities that inform a wider audience about the value of their science and to generally increase the public’s understanding of science (the Broader Impacts criterion).  I also showed how videos and images can put your scholarly article at the top of a Google search page, when your text-based document is buried on page 43.

Journals are also increasingly using video to illustrate methods or to visually show the results of a study they’ve published.  Such videos, which are often included in the supplementary online material, are linked to your published article on the journal webpage where specialists in your field will see it. Videos can also make your article and work more visible to students and others who may be searching for information on the topic using Google or other search engines. If you have the only video on the Web on your topic, it is going to be ranked high on the Google search page (see this post for an example of how this works).

In the current post, I provide an example of a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was accompanied by supplemental online material, including three videos illustrating their results.  The paper is titled, “3D Imaging and Mechanical Modeling of Helical Buckling in Medicago truncatula Plant Roots“.  The authors conducted a study of how the roots of the plant behave when they encounter a layer that is more resistant to penetration, a common occurrence in some soils.  They were able to view the change in root growth pattern by using a clear gel as a growth medium. Two gel layers were created, the lower one being of a stiffer consistency than the upper one.  The roots grew normally, that is, straight down, when in the upper layer.  However, when the plant roots encountered the more resistant gel layer, they began to curl and form into a helical shape.  This “helical buckling” provided more force at the root tip, which helped it penetrate the more resistant material.  Their modeling of the mechanics of root growth patterns predicted this greater force when roots grew in this helical manner.

This work showing how plant roots manage to grow through tough layers of material was illustrated using 3D imaging.  Below is a 3D, time-lapse video of the growth of a root through the upper, less resistant layer and then through the lower layer that caused the root to buckle and curl into a helical shape.

And here’s another example of a video done to accompany a paper published in the journal, Coral Reefs:

The paper that the above video illustrates is titled “The Use of Tools by Wrasses (Labridae)“.  The video shows a fish cracking open a bivalve by throwing it against a large coral head.  Although the video needed some close-up views of the action, it does get across the idea in a short visual clip (2 minutes).  On YouTube, the video has been viewed over 40,000 times.

Both of these examples illustrate how you can use video to augment your journal articles as supplementary online material on the journal website or on your own website.

Some journal publishers are now able to accept video embedded into the online article in a similar manner as photos, graphs, or tables.  Here is a link to an article in the journal, Cell, that has embedded video in the online version of the paper.

Having a video available to illustrate your research can often get your paper highlighted in the news section of the online journal.  For example, here is a link to a video reconstruction of the skull of Australopithecus sebida.  There is also a podcast with the author on the same webpage.

By having audio-visual components associated with your print or online articles, your work will be more visible to search engines, and journals are more likely to select your article to highlight on their webpage.

References:

Bernardi, G.  2012.  The use of tools by wrasses (Labridae).  Coral Reefs 31 (1): 39. DOI: 10.1007/s00338-011-0823-6

Nonaka, S. et al.  1998.  Randomization of lef-right asymmetry due to loss of nodal cilia generating leftward flow of extraembryonic fluid in mice lacking KIF3B motor protein.  Cell 95 (6): 829-837.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81705-5

Silverberg, J.L. et al.  2012.  3D imaging and mechanical modeling of helical buckling in Medicago truncatula plant roots. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online (before print). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1209287109

Are Your Science Videos Understandable by a Diverse Audience?

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Scientists sometimes have difficulty explaining their work in everyday language that most people can understand.  How do you know if the language you are using in your videos or other science communication products are comprehensible by a 10th grader, for example?

Most word processing programs have an option that allows an assessment of the “readability” of the text in a document.  The science videographer can make use of this tool to check and modify the language you plan to use in your video project….essentially tailor it to a target audience.  This tutorial shows how to turn this option on and how to use it to revise a technical explanation so that it is understandable by a broader audience (for best viewing, select the HD version and full-screen options (see menu bar at bottom of player window):

View or download the entire script for the video here (click the arrow at the top of the document window for full page view):

Download (PDF, 32KB)

How to Capture Your Video Audience’s Attention

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When designing your video and developing your storyboard, you want to ensure that it will ultimately attract attention.  Here are a number of ways to capture and keep your viewer’s attention, starting with the one I described in the previous post (be sure to select the HD version and the full screen option for best viewing):

View or download the transcript for this video:

Download (PDF, 23KB)

How to Increase Citations of Your Research Articles with Videos

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In the previous post, I described why citations are important to a scientist and how the development of non-technical products such as fact sheets or research briefs can lead people (students or scientists outside your field) to your technical publications.  The more people who are aware of your work, the more likely it is to be cited. I provided some examples, using the Google search engine to demonstrate how such outreach products are more likely to be found and accessed by others.

In this post, I’m going to show how videos and images that you create and post on the internet will dramatically raise your visibility.

If we conduct a search on the terms, global change and mangrove, we get a list of links to various sources of information, including a link to a USGS fact sheet I published a few years ago.  Let’s take a closer look at what else appears in a Google search.  If we select “Video” instead of “Web” in the left-hand navigator bar on the search page, we get a list of available videos on the topic.  Check out what video is at the top of the list (see screenshot below).

example of a google search for videos about mangroves and global change

The video at the top of the list is one of mine, as is the third one on the list.  And if someone plays my videos, they will see in the closing credits, several references to my scholarly papers.

Let’s also quickly look at another popular search option on Google:  images.  If we select the “Image” option in the navigator bar, we are presented with dozens of images of mangroves:

example of a google search for images about mangroves and global change

The first two are photographs I took and that are posted on the web in association with descriptions of my work. Clicking on either one takes the viewer to the fact sheet I talked about in the previous post, again leading them to my scholarly work.  The third image is interesting because it is a screenshot of the first page of a book chapter I authored; it’s on the publisher’s (Springer) website.  When you select the image, you are taken to that website, which features our chapter.  There is an abstract for the chapter, describing what it is about.  There is also a citation download for the chapter, which the viewer can import into any major bibliographic application (Procite, Endnote, etc.).  The viewer can “look inside” the document and view the first page and another sample page.  There is also an email link, allowing the viewer to contact me or my coauthors directly for a copy of this work.

This example is just one I picked at random to illustrate how a science communication product aimed at a general audience can lead students and other scientists to your scholarly work and important people (policy-makers, philanthropists) to you.  Just about any search of the science topics for which I’ve produced a non-technical audiovisual product will put one of my products on the first page of a Google search and usually near the top of the page.  In a number of cases, when my text-based work does not make it onto the first page of the Web search, the Image or Video option will list one of my non-technical science products near the top.

Videos and images are more likely to lead people to your work because that is what people are attracted to, compared to text only information.  Even if they are looking for scholarly texts about a topic, an interesting image or video will almost certainly be investigated out of curiosity.  An important point about videos is that Google often suggests a video on the Web search page.  If you’ve done a video relating to the search topic, it is likely to be highlighted.  That has been my experience, at least.  For example, someone searching for information on the Mississippi River Delta and “sea level rise” will get the following search page:

example of a google search for sea level rise and mississippi river delta

One of my USGS videos is listed on the first search page. My science video on the topic is what puts me on the first search page, and the video image is much more noticeable and likely to attract people than the text-based links. Note also that the first two images for “sea level rise” and “Mississippi River Delta” are the thumbnails for two of my videos.

Very few scientists (at least the ones I know) recognize how important video is in directing traffic on the internet to their websites and ultimately to their scholarly work.  Also, as I described in an earlier post, you are usually prohibited by copyright from posting pdfs of your technical papers on your website (remember, you signed over the copyright to the publisher).  However, you can legally post a summary of that work, either a text-based document, such as a fact sheet, or a video, which as I’ve tried to illustrate in this post, is a sure-fire way to get your work noticed by search engines.