Book Review – Do Story: How to Tell Your Story So the World Listens by Bobette Buster

This is one of the books that I brought away with me whilst I’m out of the country exploring the concept of creative science communication. When you think about it, science communication is all about storytelling, and I figured this little book would be a quick way to get my brain into the habit of thinking about the subject without getting lost in tonnes of literature or heavy academic texts. It definitely did the job; at less than 100 pages, I read this on a flight and was ready to get talking to people about all things science storytelling. You can get your hands on Bobette Buster’s ‘Do Story: How to tell your story so the world listens’, here.

What the publisher says

Do Books provide readers with the tools and inspiration to live a fulfilled and engaged life. Whether it’s mastering a new skill, cultivating a positive mindset, or finding inspiration for a new project, these books dispense expert wisdom on subjects related to personal growth, business, and slow living. Written by the movers, shakers, and change makers who have participated in the DO Lectures in the United Kingdom and the United States, Do Books are packed with easy-to-follow exercises, bite-size tips, and striking visuals. Practical, useful, and encouraging, each book delivers trustworthy, empowering guidance so readers can succeed in whatever they choose to “do.”

Do Story teaches the art of telling powerful stories. The book includes short stories on a variety of subjects; taken together they demonstrate a range of effective narrative techniques. Vivid, enlightening, and brimming with practical tips, Do Story unlocks the secrets to becoming a captivating storyteller.

Today’s world wants to know you and the real story behind why you do what you do. Whether you have a product to sell, a company mission to share, or an audience to entertain, people are more likely to engage and connect if you deliver a well-crafted story with an emotional core.

Bobette Buster is a story consultant, lecturer and screenwriter who works with the major studios such as Pixar, Disney and Sony Animation, and in top film programs all over the world. In this, her first book, she shares the tools and principles used by some of the world’s best storytellers and helps you apply them to your own.

Find out: How to source, structure and shape your story; Ways to discover the essence of your story; Why finding the emotional connection with your audience can take a story from good to great.

So, what’s your story?

What the critics say

“Bobette is a truly fantastic teacher, a main stay in the USC Peter Stark Program where she has made such a tremendous impact on students. No one understands story better than her.” (Larry Turman, Director, USC Peter Stark Program and Producer of The Graduate)

“Does what it says on the tin. Probably the best constructed of the Do books I’ve read thus far—not surprisingly, it really benefits from the great stories peppered throughout to keep it engaging. Made me want to write stories again.” (GoodReads Reviewer)

“A truly engaging read, beautifully crafted! A small book with great momentum, compelling insights – I will keep for a lifetime.” (Amazon Reviewer)

My thoughts

I’m not sure what I expected from this book. It’s a very short book, and part of me thought it was going to be full of twee inspirational quotes that wouldn’t make any tangible difference to my ability to tell stories at all, but another part of me had built it up massively, thinking it could genuinely improve my skills. In actual fact I think it landed somewhere in the middle, probably a bit closer to the latter than the former. Overall, I enjoyed this book, but it’s definitely an introductory text that can (and probably will for me) act as a confidence boost for me to pick up more complex books on this topic.

The 10 principles of storytelling that are detailed at the end of the first chapter as really helpful – I’d heard many of the points before, but having them together in a sort of checklist format means this books is something I’ll keep and refer to when I’m writing in the future. Those 10 principles in particular really got me thinking. I read this book with the mindset of a scientist; someone looking to tell the stories of science more effectively for a public audience, but the principles to me seemed to be things that are inherently unscientific, skills that are intentionally trained out of us as scientists. Principle number 9 is ‘bring yourself: a story is as much about you as anything else’. That is not what science is, or what science is seen to be – science is seen to be this objective thing that can have a yes or no answer, but being a scientist you realise that the idea of a yes/no answer is pretty rare. To me, science is the process of acquiring knowledge, but it’s important to acknowledge that so much of that knowledge is subjective and can be interpreted in a multitude of different ways. This book reinforced that for me, and highlighted the need for scientists to let go when it comes to communicating their research.

This book is full of easy to digest tips and tricks for good storytelling, much of it feels like common sense after you’ve read it, and it has left me with lots of unanswered questions – definitely an introductory text, but one that I think more scientists (and others) should read, particularly useful for people that work in areas where they need to communicate complex subjects that can often be thought of as boring.

Would I recommend it?

Hmm. For scientists and anyone looking to communicate complex topics more effectively, yes, but it’s not really the sort of book I’d recommend people read for fun. I enjoyed it, and I’m pretty sure I’ll go back to it again and again when I’m editing text to make sure I’m using the tips and tricks that it suggests, but it’s more of a quick and dirty reference book. For experienced communicators this will be too simplistic, but this would be a brilliant gift for early career scientists and researchers that are just getting to grips with communicating their work.

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What’s My Fellowship Trying to Achieve?

In my past few posts I’ve mentioned that I’m currently in Toronto as part of my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship, but I realised I haven’t actually explained in detail what the fellowship is and why I’m here.

The title of my project is: ‘Putting pants on the truth; improving practice of UK sci-bloggers‘, and the main aims of the project are to :

• Get to grips with why scientists are blogging (funding/political climate, international vs other reach etc)
• Learn how leading communicators engage publics, measure impact, and create guides of best practice for scientists to develop and measure the success of their own strategies
• Explore creative methods (interactive arts, illustration, film etc) that scientists are using to escape echo-chambers and engage publics, generate case-studies on how these mediums can be incorporated with text-format blogging, and how blogging can go alongside these methods to maximise engagement

For clarity – by blogging I don’t just mean standard blogging like on WordPress, Medium or similar platforms, I am also interesting in so-called ‘microblogging’ platforms such as Instagram and Twitter.
When I say creative methods they are also up for discussion and I’m open to using a flexible definition or description; for me science is an inherently creative discipline (more on this in a blog post coming later this week), but the way that we report or express science as researchers is usually a process that involves pretty limited creativity – writing conference abstracts, grant proposals and journal articles usually demands a similar style of writing (though degrees of persuasiveness differ). In my experience it’s rare to include an animation, drawing or sculpture in the creation of any of those outputs.

In my opinion, science communication, and quality engagement with members of the public, relies on creativity. Members of the public (of which scientists are one group), do not want to learn about science as if they are sat at a desk in school, I’d go so far as to say that students at school don’t even want to learn about science the way that mainstream schooling is currently teaching it, but when we’re trying to communicate cutting edge scientific research this is an option for people – they have a choice whether to engage with us. We are asking people to listen/watch/read about the work that we’re doing as researchers, but people are busy – they could be spending time with their families and friends, they could be working – they have the choice to do literally anything in the world other than find out about science. It’s important that we create a hook for people; a reason for them to engage. I think that hook is creativity.

Facing the Future – Reflections from Day 2 at Engage 2018

This is the third of four blog posts that cover my attendance and learnings from the Engage conference – they can be read individually, but to get the most out of them I’d recommend reading the previous 2 (here and here) before you return to this one.

I have a lot of thoughts to squeeze into this blog post, hence why it’s taken me a few extra days to get it written and published. This post covers this ‘Facing the future’ session, which included talks from Steve West (University of the West of England), Darren Henley (Arts Council England), and Nike Jonah (Connecting Dots), and it was jam packed with really important points.

Steve West opened the session with some points that I agreed with, and some that I hope he was wrong about. Let me explain…

Points that I agreed with:

• The idea of simple checklist of things to think about when doing public engagement
  • Place
  • People
  • Potential of partnerships
  • Practical
  • Simple
• It is important that academics and public engagement professionals build meaningful networks that lead to long-standing partnerships with other organisations and individuals within the wider community (both local and global).
• Public engagement needs to be embedded into the culture of universities.

Points that I hope he was wrong about and why:

Steve explained that he thinks that we are heading for a change in the format of public engagement funding, and that funding specifically for engagement will be phased out over the coming years in favour of a model where engagement funds are built into other sources of funding (research grants for example). I really, really hope that this is not the case. I attended Engage as a researcher, and I was going there specifically to learn how to become a research that can more effectively engage with the stakeholders that surround my work. I learned a lot at Engage, and I think that’s because it’s a conference that’s designed as a place for public engagement experts to exchange ideas, learn from each other and discuss topics that might change the way they work in the future. Researchers need people that do public engagement to guide us, we need them to teach us what they know and help us to gain the skills needed to engage the public with our research. Engaging the public with our research is not the only thing that public engagement professionals do though; the scope of their talents is bigger than that, and in my opinion it’s important that we do what we can to ensure that engagement professionals are funded to do engagement – whether that’s with research or with the process and structures involved in university life more widely.

Next up was Darren Henley from the Arts Council England. Ignorantly, I didn’t think this talk would be for me – I assumed that Darren was going to talk about engagement with the type of projects that the Arts Council would fund – creative stuff that is in no way related to science. I’m happy to report I was absolutely wrong, and this was a fantastic talk that left me inspired and energised to infuse less obvious types of creativity into the science engagement that I do.

Darren encouraged us to think creatively, no matter what subject area we worked in. He explained that “a world without creativity would see no original ideas; no new inventions or advances in science or medicine; no new products or services; no new music or art; no solutions to new problems”. Whilst Darren’s talk was obviously from a perspective of someone who works in the creative industries (he’s current Chief Exec of the Arts Council, but he led Classical FM for 15 years and has a tonne of really impressive experience that is detailed in various books that have been published over the last 10 years), he did make a really good case for creativity in engagement more broadly.

I ordered his latest book, ‘Creativity: Why it Matters’ on my phone during his talk. I’m about a quarter of the way through it and so far I’m finding it fascinating – I think this will become a resource that I go back to year after year.

This session ended on a real high. My personal highlight of the entire conference was a talk by Nike Jonah from partnership enterprise Connecting Dots. Nike explained the idea of standpoint theory, which in very basic terms can encompassed by three overarching points:

1. Knowledge is socially situated.
2. Marginalised groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalised.
3. Researcher, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalised.

The way she described standpoint theory encouraged the audience to work hard to see from the perspectives of others in society to ensure that engagement activities are open and accessible to all. She talked about making engagement events accessible for those with disabilities, those who don’t speak English fluently, and those that are visually or hearing impaired.

She was asked a question by an audience member about what we can do to increase diversity in the public engagement world bearing in mind that we were sat in a room full of mostly white middle class women. Nike’s response was brilliant. She made it clear that diversity does not just encompass race, or skin colour, or gender – it refers to a million different things that include all of the various characteristics and skills that we have. She gave examples of the languages that we know, the countries that we have visited, the musical instruments that we can play, and the hobbies that we have, making it clear that each of us is a product of our experiences and therefore the diversity in the room was likely much higher than you might think at first glance.

I went to speak (read: fangirl) to Nike after the conference and she was so wonderfully humble. I’m excited to do some more research into standpoint theory, and how I can embed accessibility into the engagement, and research, that I do over the coming years, and I’m really excited to see where Nike goes from here. She’s an incredibly intelligent person with a very clear set of morals that shine through all of the work that she does – definitely someone I can see myself learning from over the course of my career!

Navigating the Changing Landscape of Public Engagement – Reflections from Day 1 at Engage 2018

Hello, hello, I’m back with more chat about the Engage conference. Just a warning, this will be ongoing for the next few blog posts. After that I’m taking a break for Christmas, and then I’ll be back to blogging as I’ll be firmly in the process of traveling adventures for my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust fellowship. Anyway, Engage. This blog post focusses on the second session from the first day of the conference; a plenary titled ‘Navigating change’, and a plenary workshop titled ‘stories of change’. The discussion here definitely followed on from the topics covered in the session before it, so head to my previous post about the Engage conference if you’d like to catch up.

Public engagement is not a new thing; for decades scientists and researchers have worked to engage the public with their work. That said, the way that we do public engagement, and the environment in which we are doing it is definitely changing. This session reflected that, with talks from Nancy Rothwell from the University of Manchester, and Jennifer Wallace from Carnegie UK Trust. Just a side note – typing ‘Nancy Rothwell’ made me realise then that the Engage conference schedule did not have titles on it, Prof Dame Nancy Rothwell is President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Manchester and a non-executive director of AstraZeneca – in summary, she’s kind of a big deal. It’s nice that Engage don’t put titles on the conference schedule though, it puts people on more of an even playing field.

Nancy’s talk looked at public engagement in sceptical times. Looking at the events of the past few years it’s pretty easy to see why we are in sceptical times; Trump, Brexit, Michael Gove declaring that ‘the people of Great Britain have had enough of experts’, and a whole host of other things that make 2016-2018 look like a particularly terrifying episode of Black Mirror.

This part of the ‘navigating change’ session left me feeling determined. Nancy explained that “it is more important now, than ever, for universities to engage widely”, what I enjoyed most about her talk though, was that she gave practical advice on how to do engagement. For many of the attendees that were public engagement professionals, this might have been old news, but as an enthusiastic researcher I found this part really useful. She discussed the need for public engagement to be thoroughly embedded into the work that we do, and then gave examples of the fantastic work that’s being done at the University of Manchester (UoM were awarded with a gold Engage Watermark at the conference too – a brilliant achievement!). I thought it was great for Engage to have a speaker from University leadership; as I said in my previous blog post, there may be some perception of a ‘them vs us’ culture with regards to public engagement and social responsibilities of higher education, and it was heartening to see Nancy talk with such passion. She reinforced the need for public engagement to be evaluated with the same level of rigour as we expect from research and teaching, and explained that Professor Brian Cox’s public engagement work earned him a 4 star REF impact case study!

Following Nancy’s talk, we heard from Jennifer Wallace – a self-proclaimed ‘non’. Jennifer is non-academic, non-government and non- many other things; one thing she is, is brilliant. She lies outside of where the power lies, and encourages the ‘blending’ of areas of expertise. I loved this idea; in health services research we talk about having multidisciplinary teams, but the word ‘blending’ seems much more cohesive, and also suggests that individuals can be bringing more than one perspective and area of expertise to a project rather than needing to have a different person for each skill or knowledge area. I found that comforting, and thought of Dr Heather Morgan as my very own role model for blended researchers – if you don’t know or follow Heather, then you are seriously missing out. She is a force to be reckoned with for all the right reasons, and I’m pretty sure that’s because of her expert blend of skills and interests.

Anyway, back to Jennifer… The thing that really stood out to me during her talk were the results of a study that had been carried out by the Carnegie UK Trust (a think tank aiming to improve the lives and wellbeing of people throughout the UK). The study found that trust in academic evidence is relatively high (63% of respondents), and 90% of people say that they evidence influences their decisions. The problem is that use of academic evidence is low (35% of respondents). This is a solvable problem, and it’s up to us (I’m speaking as an academic here) to do something about it. The process of accessing academic evidence is too convoluted right now; we need to make it easier for people to find and use the work that we are doing.

After the plenary we split up into tables to find out about stories of change.

Eileen Martin from The Science Shop, which is a joint project between Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University, was sat at our table, and she gave us a whistle-stopped tour of the life of The Science Shop since it was established in 1998. I found her experiences fascinating and wanted to share a bit about The Science Shop here too.

The Science Shop is essentially a broker that brings research needs of the local community into the university, and matches up students (usually taught MSc students) with research projects in response to those needs. The Science Shop is an international initiative, with branches all over Europe, and Eileen told us about the challenges she’d experience to get the project established in Belfast. After this session ended I had a look to see if there are any Science Shops near me, but it doesn’t look like there are any in Scotland just yet – I will definitely be keeping an eye out for new ones cropping up as they sound like fantastic ways to integrate and embed the needs of the community with what’s going on inside universities.

Changing the Way We View Public Engagement – Reflections from Day 1 at Engage 2018

This UK’s National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE)’s Engage conference is now in its 8^th year, this year it took place on Thursday 29^th and Friday 30^th November. The conference has previously taken place in NCCPE’s home city of Bristol, but this year the team ventured north, inviting an incredible line up of researchers, public engagement professionals, funders, and leaders from universities, third sector organisations and industry, from around the world to Edinburgh to discuss topics related to the theme ‘facing the future’.

Luckily for me, Edinburgh is a lot closer to home (and cheaper to get to!) than Bristol, so this year I got to go to Engage for the first time. I always find that during conferences I take lots of notes; usually coming home with pages of barely coherent scribbles linked by arrows, highlighted with stars and emphasised by varying degrees of underlining. In order to preserve at least some of the thoughts I’ve had, I like to translate those scribbles into blog posts. Selfishly, this provides my scribbles with a more structured home, meaning that I can return to them in the future, but given the topic, I figured that this time my thoughts might actually be of use to other people.

I only managed to attend the first half of day 1 and the second half of day 2 (I was rushing about flying to London and back for the Times Higher Education Awards in between), but hopefully my thoughts can still be of use to people that did not make it to Engage themselves, or people that were at the conference and fancy hearing another perspective.

This post is going to cover the first plenary of the conference, which was titled ‘Challenge to change’ – later in the week I’ll be publishing follow up posts from the conference that cover topics such as ‘navigating change’, ‘facing the future’ and ‘transforming engagement’. Normally I wouldn’t go into so much detail about specific sessions, but this conference really fits with the topic of my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship, so I need to make sure I have a decent record of what happened!

The conference opened with a thought-provoking plenary featuring talks from Ruth Gill and Xerxes Mazda from the National Museums of Scotland, and Rajesh Tandon, chair of Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), and co-UNESCO Chair for Community-based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education.

The trio of talks challenged conference attendees to think differently about engagement, with Ruth Gill and Xerxes Mazda explaining that the need to learn is no longer biological, but philosophical; ‘we learn when we feel it is relevant to us’. That feeling might be as stark as learning something that physically forces the air out of you, or it could be something that makes you smile as it triggers a memory – the semantics of the feeling are important, it’s simply about making people feel something; it’s about meaning-making.

As public engagement practitioners, it’s important that we focus our attention on tapping into emotional responses and creating a level of escapism for audiences. As a researcher, until now that has only been on the periphery of my aims for effective engagement; usually I’m all about trying to create a fun environment where people can learn, but after the plenary I realised that as a member of the public attending events, the ones I remember made me feel something. It’s weird that when I’m in researcher mode I seem to cease thinking like a normal member of the public. Glad to be made aware of that though, and hopefully keeping the emotional response in mind will help me to diversify the engagement activities I am involved with – ‘fun’ and ‘educational’ events definitely do have their place, but I’d like to create engagement opportunities that are more complex. Trials are a complex area with lots of different perspectives and challenges, and I’d like to engage people by mirroring that in my activities and events.

Rajesh Tandon then gave an inspirational and motivating talk about his experience working with PRIA to empower excluded members of the community through capacity building, knowledge building and policy advocacy. I didn’t leave Rajesh’s talk with practical tips on how to improve the way that I engage with the public; that wasn’t the purpose of the talk. I left with a refreshed sense of purpose. He made a clear link between engagement and social justice; highlighting that universities and other higher education institutions have a moral obligation to ‘step up to the plate’ to support their local communities and tackle the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. He explained that there are nearly 1 million higher education institutes globally, with 10 million teachers in them teaching 220 million full time students; and highlighted the need for us to ‘speak truth to power’.

This was a bit of a weird session for me – incredibly thought-provoking, engaging and interesting, but I am still left unsure of my own thoughts on whether I agree with what he was saying. I agree that universities and higher education institutes have a moral duty to the public; the institutions (and researchers) that are funded by public taxes should be working to engage the public with what they are going, and I think it’s important that the culture of research changes to embed public engagement (and involvement, but that’s another conversation) into every aspect of the institution. That said, I’m uncertain about the accusatory language used. This may be as a result of my inexperience and naivety, but I think that higher education institutions are generally trying to do good. Of course there are barriers and issues that may prevent things from doing good all the time, but I don’t picture there being two distinct sides at play here; one full of ‘the goodies’ – enthusiastic and engaging people wanting to invest in communities and the other full of ‘the baddies’ – leaders, people just out to make money and tear society apart in the process. Fundamentally, I think it’s very easy for those of us not in high powered leadership positions to think that universities could do more; but we can never know the whole story, and I would like to think that there are people at universities (at least in Aberdeen!) that are pushing to engage with local communities to share the important work that is being done within them.

On that rather serious note, I’m going to leave things here. My head is still buzzing with ideas from Engage, and I’ll be back later this week with details of brilliant public engagement practices where people are navigating change like experts, and sharing their experience to help the rest of us do the same.

Explorathon – Aberdeen 2018

Day 2 of Blogtober and I’m still going strong.. today’s post is all about Explorathon, and my experiences of the event this year in Aberdeen.

Explorathon is also known as European Researchers’ Night, and it’s a European Commission initiative aiming to encourage researchers to step away from the university to engage with the public and talk about the research that they do. Usually Explorathon is one night, but Aberdeen’s events this year spanned 3 days from Thursday 27th to Saturday 29th September 2018. I attended one event, and then took part in the presentation of one event, more details below.

PechaKucha

On Friday 28th I attended my first PechaKucha event because my friend and colleague, Beatriz Goulao, was speaking at the event. I’d never been to a PechaKucha event before, and it was brilliant! A PechaKucha talk is made up of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds, whilst the speakers gives their talk. The scary part is that the images advance automatically – the speaker can’t stop them! For more information on the format of PechaKucha talks, take a look here.

Beatriz’s talk focussed on health research and how people can use research evidence to help them to make decisions about the healthcare that they receive. It was absolutely brilliant, and lovely to see a friend and colleague sharing work from our field with such passion!

Wonderful talk from our @hsru_aberdeen @beagoulao about using evidence to make informed public health decisions – randomised controlled trials, evidence synthesis, methodological innovations, quality improvement & stakeholder engagement all in 6 minutes 40 seconds! #EXPLORATHON18 pic.twitter.com/jsKKmQziiK

— Heidi Gardner (@heidirgardner) September 28, 2018

Other PechaKucha highlights included Hilary Nicholl, who talked about Aberdeen’s Look Again Festival, Emma Beaton, who explained her research in the Falkland Islands, and Sol Milne, who talked about his work using drones and citizen science to survey orangutan nests in Borneo.

Explorathon in the City Centre

On Saturday 29th I took part in Explorathon along with colleagues from HSRU’s Public Engagement Group, we ran an event similar to the one we held at May Festival and TechFest last year – a simulated trial using sweets as our ‘interventions’.

It was a brilliant day, exhausting (10-4pm standing in the Aberdonian streets leaves you pretty cold!), but I had a really good time speaking to people about the work that we do at the Health Services Research Unit.

The thing that struck me was that I learn something each time I do face to face public engagement – people always have different ways of interpreting and understanding what we’re talking to them about, so there’s no ‘right’ way to phrase things. At Explorathon I felt much more confident than I had at previous events, and managed to get into some really rich discussions with the public. People were open-minded and eager to learn more about what we do, and when I said that I had just finished my PhD there were people I’d never even met before congratulating me – that felt lovely, and as usual I came away from a full day of public engagement feeling all warm and fuzzy.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again for those that missed it – every single researcher should be doing public engagement. Whether you are an early career researcher, or you’ve been leading your own group for years; every event is different, each audience member is unique, and you learn quickly how to talk about your field of interest.

Soapbox Science – Aberdeen Event, 26th May 2018

Last week I wrote a blog post about what it’s like to organise a Soapbox Science event. Today was the day of that event, and honestly, this morning I was a pretty big ball of stress, anxiety (what if none of the speakers showed up? what if it rained? what if we didn’t have an audience?!), and lots of nervous excitement. Much of that stress was likely due to the fact that jet lag meant I was wide awake at 4am panicking about being wide awake at 4am.

Anyway, today was the day of Aberdeen’s first Soapbox Science event, and I’m pleased to report that it was a great success! I’m going to keep this blog post short and sweet; really I just wanted to post some photographs of the event and reflect a bit on how brilliant our speakers and volunteers were on the day.

Each and every one of our speakers carefully and thoughtfully engaged the public with their research – from star formation to the make up of cancerous tumors, wound healing using worms as inspiration, and work that’s aiming understand the experience of being ‘missing’ from the perspective of people with dementia and their carers. Our speakers covered lots of different topics, and used chocolate, hula hoops, pipe-cleaners, sponges and fake finger prints to bring their research to life. They did a fantastic job, and I’m so happy with how the event went! I haven’t had chance to look through the evaluation forms yet, but initial counts suggest that we managed to engage with over 800 people over the course of the event’s 3-hour duration – not bad at all!

Again, thank you to our wonderful speakers that made this event such a success, and of course thank you to the huge team of volunteers that showed up on the day to ensure everything went smoothly – we couldn’t have done it without you 🙂

Soapbox Science Aberdeen 2018 speakers.

 

Veronika Sabolová (Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, University of Dundee) giving her talk “Deep layer of skin – is it useful for identification purposes?”.

 

Dr Donna MacCallum (MRC Centre for Medical Mycology, University of Aberdeen) giving her talk “Fungal Foes – find out more!”.

 

Dr Ann M Rajnicek (School of Medicine, Medical Sciences and Nutrition, University of Aberdeen) giving her talk “Electrical healing: lessons from worms”.

 

Beatriz Goulao (Health Services Research Unit, University of Aberdeen) giving her talk “Stats is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get”.

Top Picks from Aberdeen’s May Festival

The May Festival is one of the Aberdeen Festivals that takes place each year. Locally known as May Fest, this one is my favourite of them all. The University opens its doors and showcases the best research across every discipline you can imagine, there are always brilliant guest speakers and events, and it never fails to bring in huge crowds. Last year’s May Fest brought 14,000 people to the University’s campus, and with this year’s line up looking bigger and better than ever, I’m sure we’ll see even bigger numbers this year.

A few weeks ago the May Fest brochure landed on my door mat, and I was genuinely a bit overwhelmed by just how many events are scheduled for between Friday 25th and Sunday 27th May. I’ve had some time to dig through it, and thought it might be useful to put together a list of the events I’m most looking forward to – read on to get a super condensed version of the May Fest programme with a feminist, science-loving slant 🙂 most of the events I’ve picked are free too, which is always a bonus.

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Friday 25th May

Aberdeen (Uni’s) Got Talent
11am-12pm
Free/booking required
Linklater Rooms, University of Aberdeen
I’m gutted that I won’t be able to attend this one (I’ll have just landed back in the city after my Oregon trip, and I’m 100% sure that Friday is going to be a jet-lag-fuelled nightmare) – but hoping that there will be some good coverage on Twitter that I can catch up on once my brain wakes up.
This brilliant event is the local final for the Three Minute Thesis competition, where PhD students are challenged to communicate their research in just 3 minutes, and with only one PowerPoint slide (no animations, no music). There are a few fellow PhD students I know that are taking part, and I think their presentations will be great – keep an eye out for Alastair Irvine from the Health Economics Research Unit, and Shifa Sarica from the Epidemiology group.

Book Launch of Another Dose of Verbal Remedies
4.30pm-5.30pm
Free/booking required
Linklater Rooms, University of Aberdeen
This event is organised by the WORD Centre in partnership with University of Aberdeen School of Medicine, and it sounds brilliant. I think this type of event has been at the May Festival before, but this is the first time that it’s caught my attention. This is the launch of a book made of up snippets of creative writing from medical students, selected and edited by Helen Lynch – take a look at a previous edition here. At the launch, contributing writers will read from their work, and talk about the experience and benefits of writing from a medical point of view. Hoping that I can get out of my jet-lag-induced slumber for this one, it sounds right up my street and I’m glad to see medical students showcasing the need for creativity and writing to benefit their medical practice.

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Saturday 26th May

Global Women’s Health
10am-11am
Free/booking required
Regent Lecture Theatre, University of Aberdeen
I’m really hoping that I can get to this event in the morning before Soapbox Science kicks off – it sounds like something that would build on the book ‘Doing Harm’ that I reviewed a few weeks ago. This event combines research from the Universities of Aberdeen and Cape Town, who will take us through the day of two women – one in Grampian, and one in South Africa – so that we can better understand the different challenges that women face in these environments, and how research is working to transform the lives of women for the better.

Scientists on the Spot
10.30am-11.30am
Free/booking required
New King’s 14, University of Aberdeen
Finally, an event I’ve booked! Saying that, I am going to have to dip out early because of Soapbox Science commitments, but I’m looking forward to it anyway. Scientists will be facing tricky questions from the shmu fm Youth Media Team, and we’ll also get the chance to see a short film made my the Youth Media Team about what science means to them.

Soapbox Science
12-3pm
Free/no booking required
King’s Lawn, University of Aberdeen
I’m obviously biased, but it would have been weird not to include Soapbox Science on this list – I’m going to keep this brief, but please come down and hear our brilliant line up of women in science talk about their research!

100 Years of Women’s Suffrage; Women Everyone Should Know About with Hannah Jewell
3.30pm-4.30pm
£3/booking required
Linklater Rooms, University of Aberdeen
(There is also a book signing with Hannah Jewell at 4.30pm in the May Tent, King’s Lawn)
I was first introduced to Hannah Jewell through Buzzfeed – she written some brilliant pieces that have had huge numbers of hits, and she’s since moved on to The Washington Post. I then listened to a podcast that she did with Emma Gannon (listen to the Ctrl Alt Delete episode here), and quickly became a fan. She writes in an accessible, funny and intelligent way with a sprinkling of sweary sarcasm; absolutely up my street . This is a brilliant booking from the May Festival team, and I’m so excited to hear Hannah talk about her book, ‘100 Nasty Women of History’ (left), and the remarkable women she researched for it. In true fan-girl style I’ll also be taking my copy of the book to be signed afterwards. No shame.

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Sunday 27th May

Walk With Ease: From the US to the UK

12.30pm-1.30pm
Free/booking required
Regent Lecture Theatre, University of Aberdeen
(There is also a half hour Walk With Ease walking tour after this event, meeting at the Foyer of Regent Building at 1.30pm)
The Walk With Ease study is an American walking programme for people with arthritis – this talk details the process of implementing the programme in Scotland, and some early results from the study will be shared too. I share an office with the Walk With Ease team, so I’ve seen how hard they’ve worked on it – looking forward to seeing the results and finding out how we can all get a bit more active in Aberdeen!

Doing Science with Metaphors
3pm-4pm
Free/booking required
Regent Lecture Theatre, University of Aberdeen
From the May Fest brochure: ‘Surely science should avoid metaphors?! Not so, according to new historical and philosophical research. Dr Ulrich Stegmann will discuss how the ‘genetic code’ metaphor helped scientists like Francis Crick to think about a biological mechanism that nobody had encountered before.’
I’m really interested in this event because of the potential learnings and links with science communication and public engagement. For me, story telling is a really cool way to make science accessible, understandable, and ultimately more personal for non-scientific audiences. A lot of the time we as scientists from is difficult to let go of the tiny details that make up our work, and ultimately that can complicate the messages we’re giving out to the public, so it’ll be cool to hear about research that suggests the use of metaphors might actually benefit scientists’ understanding of their own research too.

I also have to give a little shout out to one particular event in the May Festival School’s Programme – ‘A Trial at Sea! How to Find out Which Medicines Work Best’. The Public Engagement group at the Health Services Research Unit are behind this one, our first foray into the May Festival School’s events calendar after 2 years of contributing events for the main May Fest weekend programme. I haven’t had much involvement with the development of this activity because I’ve been too busy with thesis writing/Soapbox Science organising/planning for Oregon etc, but I’m so excited to hear all about how this event has gone! The team have worked super hard to develop this new event from scratch specifically for classes of school children to come and find out all about James Lind’s pioneering clinical trial that ultimately found the cure for scurvy, and how we are still using parts of James Lind’s trial methods to find new medicines today.

You can find the full May Festival programme here, head along to the University of Aberdeen’s Old Aberdeen campus from Friday 25th to Sunday 27th May to get involved and attend some of these brilliant events!

What It’s like to Organise a Soapbox Science Event

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know that I was a speaker at last year’s Soapbox Science event in Edinburgh – if you haven’t, then read the blog post here to find out how the event went, and what my experiences of talking about clinical trials on The Mound in the pouring rain involved.

Anyway, after that event I was thinking about the representation of people there, and how brilliant it was that there were scientists from lots of different institutions. The only thing that irked me a little was that they were mostly from Edinburgh (obviously they were, that’s where the event was…). That year it was the only Scottish Soapbox Science event, so I knew that there were many more brilliant, inspiring female scientists working away on super interesting pieces of research all over the country, and they were not on their soapboxes as I was. Maybe they didn’t know the Soapbox Science event was being held, maybe they were busy that weekend, or maybe they couldn’t make it to Edinburgh; contrary to popular belief, there is a lot more to Scotland than Edinburgh and Glasgow.
A few weeks after the event I was still thinking about it, and I decided I wanted to bring Soapbox Science to Aberdeen.

Now, this was the end of last year, and I knew that my PhD thesis would be due at some point in June/July this year. Still – I figured that I could get things moving, and how hard could organising a Soapbox Science event be, right? 🤷🏼‍♀️

Soapbox Science Aberdeen is happening on Saturday 26th May 2018, as part of the University of Aberdeen’s May Festival. It’s happening, and my thesis is going to be handed in on June 29th. I also start a new job on June 1st. The point of me telling you this isn’t to brag or do that really annoying ‘oh my God look how hard I’m working, look how exhausted I am’ thing – that’s not cool. What I want to do with this blog post is encourage other people to set up Soapbox Science events in their cities, and have a bit of forewarning on what the planning process might entail – it’s totally doable, enjoyable, and incredibly rewarding. Also, I’m currently on a flight to Oregon for the Society of Clinical Trials annual meeting (and a few days of exploring) and I really want an excuse to use the iPad keyboard I got for Christmas, so this seemed like a decent use of time.

There were a few main things that took time; getting word out that Soapbox Science was coming to Aberdeen, and drumming up interest in the form of speakers, and finding money to pay for various parts of the event
That said, neither of those things caused me to doubt the fact that my thesis will be handed in on time. Most of the work could be done providing I had WiFi and a list of email addresses, so I could easily get draft emails put together whilst watching episodes of Friends or listening to podcasts after work or at the weekend. I just made sure I had a list and everything went on it, meaning eventually everything would be completed and ticked off it.

The time investment needed to get people onboard was crucial, and I spent a lot of time taking various people at the University for coffee and convincing them to plaster their office doors with posters, and to get involved in the event themselves/get their PhD students involved/get their MSc and undergraduate students to volunteer to help out on the day. That was fun though, I got to catch up with some of the lecturers I knew from my undergrad, and it was really lovely to see people getting excited about an event that I’m passionate about. In the end, we’ve ended up with a fantastic line up of inspiring women in a diverse range of scientific disciplines, and I’m so excited for people to hear them talk! The speakers have all been wonderful to work with, and I’ve enjoyed making connections with scientists outside of my own discipline – seriously, these people are doing stuff that makes my head explode; figuring out how the city of Aberdeen was made, how we might be able to use the deeper layers of skin to identify people, and how we can learn lessons from flat worms that might one day be able to help humans re-grow limbs. Science fries my head sometimes. The full list of speakers is listed below – for the titles of their talks, head to the Soapbox Science website.

The most stressful part of the entire organisation process was money. I knew right from the beginning that I would need to find grant funding to enable the event to go ahead, and at the time that the call for Aberdeen’s speakers went out, we had no money and therefore no guarantee of an event at all. I applied for 4 different public engagement grants and 2 local community funding initiatives, none of them worked out. We needed about £1500 for everything – the Edinburgh group had very kindly offered to lend us their soapboxes for the event (their event isn’t until June 2nd – if you’re nearby then do head to The Mound and give them a visit!), but we wanted our own because we knew we’d just end up in the same situation hunting for funds to support Soapbox Science Aberdeen 2019.

I applied to the University of Aberdeen’s Public Engagement with Research Enabling Fund, which limits awards to £500. I knew we’d need additional funds on top, but this was a good starting point. We got the funding, which contributed to one soapbox, paid for lab coats and printing, bought badges for the event, and paid for us to print the speaker’s signs that will go on the box on the day. So I knew that in the worst case we’d be able to borrow boxes from Edinburgh and our event would definitely be going ahead – a huge weight lifted off my shoulders – and thank you to PERU for their support. PERU is a huge asset to university, and if you’re reading this and based at the University of Aberdeen (note: they work with researchers from all fields, not just science!), do get in touch with them. They’re a brilliant group of people, super easy to work with and really enthusiastic about the weird and wonderful ideas that researchers come up with to share their work with the world.

We managed to raise the additional funds needed to pay for all 4 of the soapboxes needed for the event with the support of the Health Services Research Unit (where I’m based along with one of our speakers, Beatriz Goulao), the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology (where speakers Dr Donna MacCallum and Dr Delma Childers are based), the May Festival team, the Aberdeen branch of the British Science Association, and the Wellcome Trust’s Institutional Strategic Support Fund. Boxes are all ordered, paid for, and currently getting their final coats of varnish in the workshop of Donnie Fleury from Wood DR (pictured left).

I want to finish this blog post by saying a big thank you to everyone that has helped with the organisation of Soapbox Science Aberdeen – particularly Dr Heather Morgan and Dr Heather Doran who did not laugh in my face when I told them I wanted to bring the event to Aberdeen, and who have both been massive sources of support over the last few months (let it be known that Soapbox Science Aberdeen wouldn’t be happening without late night Twitter DMs, early morning Instagram DMs, and the following emojis: ☺️🤞🏼🎉). Donnie and Linda Fleury at Wood DR have been brilliant to work with from the first phone call when I asked them to make me 4 soapboxes that would be completely weather-proof, and sturdy enough to support the weight of an enthusiastic scientist, through to my brutal honesty about the sheer lack of funds I had to support this odd request. Unrelated – when my boyfriend and I first moved into our flat 3 years, Donnie fitted our bathroom and it was the only thing that went smoothly throughout the entire move, so if you’re Aberdeen based and need literally anything doing in your house (or public engagement event as it seems..), then he’s your man. A cheeky plug for Wood DR; find them on Facebook here, and their own website has photographs of past work too.

For now I will sign off (there’s a rumour that we’re getting pizza and ice cream as the next in-flight meal and I don’t want to risk missing out). If you’re in Aberdeen on Saturday 26th May come and pay us a visit! We’ll be on the Elphinstone lawn at Old Aberdeen between 12 and 3pm; if you’re not based in Aberdeen then head to the Soapbox Science website to find out where your closest event is, show up and support them. You’ll make the hard work of the organisers completely worth it, you’ll remind the speakers why they do what they do, and you likely find out about some cool science that you didn’t know was happening around you too!

Learnings From #uwescu17 #2: Evaluating Science Communication

Last month I attended the UWE Science Communication Masterclass, and I promised that I’d come back and write a few blog posts on the topics that we covered. This is the second of these blog posts – you can find the first one, which focussed on face to face communication methods, here.

Dr Margarido Sarda (left)’s ‘Evaluation’ session was the part of the course that I was most intrigued by. Evaluating science communication is something I feel (or felt before Margarida’s talk!) completely out of my depth with, so I entered the session with my notebook and pen in hand ready to absorb as much information as possible.

With the public engagement events I’ve been involved in so far we have tried to build in some evaluative component, but I wasn’t sure if it was working/what we could do to improve things, and what others were doing in this area. This session was brilliant, and gave me the most ideas for what to change and implement in my own practice. The points raised in this session, both by Margarida, and in the discussions with other attendees, could make a huge difference to the quality of science communication and public engagement activities – so I figured an overview of the session would be helpful for those that couldn’t make it.

Why do we evaluate?

Often, evaluation is the thing that’s missed out of the public engagement/science communication planning process – in my experience anyway. It’s very easy to focus your time on refining and developing ideas for activities, but base this development on your own thoughts and conversations with other members of your team, rather than a cohesive process of evaluation. So, if we’re developing activities anyway, then why should we be making evaluation a more structured aspect of our practice?

For ourselves

• If we make things more structured, we can disseminate those experiences and findings more easily, publicising our achievements and mistakes so that others can learn from them – and vice versa
• Being able to prove, and improve, what we’re doing means it’s easier to get funding now, but it’ll also be easier to sustain that funding for future projects
• Reflective practice is central to the process of communication – if we don’t learn from what we do, then we’re very likely to continue to repeat those mistakes and reduce the utility of our activities

For participants/the public

• Evaluation can become an integral part of the activity you’re running – it extends participation and can ensure that members of the public feel their voices are being heard and included within the conversation
• Showing that we do evaluation can also be a really important point for participants; we’re increasing transparency of our processes, and hopefully increasing trust too
• The most important thing for participants – enjoyment. If we run an event and don’t know that people are finding it patronising/confusing/annoying etc, then we’re doing our participants a disservice

Without evaluation, how can we possibly say which part (or parts) of an activity are making a difference?

Types of evaluation

After Margarida covered the various reasons why evaluation is so important, she then got to the exciting bit – the methods used to do that evaluation. There are so many different ways to do evaluation, and each of them have their own advantages and disadvantages. A few ideas below:

Traditional methods

• Quantitative
  • Questionnaires
  • Structured interviews
  • Observations (e.g. how many people were at the event, what age were they etc)
• Qualitative
  • Semi-structured interviews
  • Focus groups
  • Observations (e.g. facial expressions of people attending, how people interacted with the event etc)

Non-traditional methods

• Snapshot interviews
  Face-to-face, short (90 seconds to 2 minutes) snappy interviews, structured schedule made up of questions that are clear and require quick answers.
• Graffiti walls
  Wall or big piece of paper that the audience can draw or write on – they can leave thoughts, experiences, doodles etc that you can analyse later.
• Feedback boards
  Similar to graffiti walls, but with a central question (or sometimes more than 1 question) that you’re asking participants to answer – e.g. ‘what would you improve about this event?’ ‘what did you like best?’ etc.

  

  An example of a feedback board, from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Open Day.

• Visitors’ book
  A good way of capturing the impressions and recommendations of audience members at a less interactive event – e.g. a show, play or exhibition. A more creative way of doing this could include a photo booth style format with speech balloons and props that can be shared on social media sites with a hashtag linked to your event.

Points to take away

Creativity is key – A big part of Margarida’s session was interactive group work, which was a really good way to bounce ideas off each other – the main takeaway from these activities was that creativity is key. The process of evaluating science communication activities is still a relatively new field, so injecting your own creative ideas and sharing your experiences can be a brilliant way to develop new techniques.

Evaluation shouldn’t just be done at the end of a project – We should be doing evaluation right from the beginning of any science communication activity. That could mean assessing past events before tackling a new one, running pilot events in order to effectively develop your idea, and then working in evaluation at the event itself too.
As well as this, it’s key that we don’t just position our evaluation activities at participants; it’s important to learn what scientists, researchers and science communicators have taken away from the event too. If the person running the event feels uncomfortable, it’s likely that the publics they’re speaking to will sense this and feel a bit on edge too.

Evaluation is a key component in science communication, and it’s really important that we work to implement it routinely – it shouldn’t be an addition to a project, it should be a given.

I hope this summary of the session has been useful to those of you thinking of getting involved with science communication, and for those of you who are already involved with engagement activities that maybe aren’t embedding evaluation so much (yet!). Be sure to check back over the next few weeks for updates of other sessions that made up this year’s UWE Science Communication Masterclass. A huge thanks to Dr Margarida Sardo from UWE for such a thought-provoking session!