#figshare

I‘ve always believed one must try to do the walk, not just the talk. Or as we used to say back in the prehistoric days, we need hacking, not just yacking. My module’s coursework requires creating a zine, so I made a quick how-to zine for my students. I made this quick-and-dirty zine to show students that creating a zine is indeed possible. You can make it with very basic resources. This may be…

Several key words used in beekeeping are racially charged: in order to make beekeeping and ecology more inclusive, we need to replace them. Several words used to describe honey bees directly reference the traumatic history of slavery in the United States. It is important to consider alternatives to these loaded and painful terms to make careers in the bee world more welcoming to people of color and to reach a broader audience as we communicate ideas about ecology and beekeeping. We borrow the concept of social reflection from the field of Environmental Sociology to explain how terms that humans use to describe nature often reflect the implicitly racist society in which they were developed (in the United States). This begins to explain how ecologists and beekeepers may use words that reinforce white supremacy without harboring racist intentions. We focused on one: calling hybrids of the sub-species Apis m. scutellata “Africanized”. Scholars and the general public describe Africanized "killer bees" as “more violent” than European bees, and beekeepers “worry” that these Africanized bees will mate with their European queens. This description is dangerously similar to stereotypes against African Americans that white people have long used to justify racial oppression.

Hello It’s been a little while since I last updated the blog. In fact, I think it’s been a lot of a while since I spoke to the community at all! Sorry about that. Since my last update on what we’re going with ErrantScience things have been very, very busy. In the interest of keeping this update short and punchy, here are the highlights of what I’ve been up to: drew lots of cartoon commissions,…

'The Power of Sharing': a comic resulting from the collaboration between @figshare, @SymbolaComics, and @CrisDuranLaGRUA

  I am happy to announce that today we published ‘The Power of Sharing‘, a comic resulting from the collaboration between figshare, Symbola Comics, and LaGrúa Estudio.

You can view the comic, download it, cite it, comment and share it from

https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5993392.v1

Concept and story by Francisco De La Mora & Ernesto Priego

Art by Cristina Durán La Grúa Estudio

Design by…

Over the weekend Bethany Brookshire (aka SciCurious) posted “Why Won’t You Pay To Read” an extremely articulate commentary on the economics of science journalism and communication. If you haven’t already, I urge you to give it a read and then join the ongoing conversation on social media. 

There are very few financial costs of creating Bold Signals. Except for the hosting costs over at SoundCloud, the podcast is essentially built on a patchwork of free platforms and MacGyvered hardware. This is not to say it’s all free. Believe it or not, each episode requires a huge investment of time and energy to put together. Though it varies depending on the length of the interview and the ambition put into the intro and outro segments, an average episode can take 20 hours or more to put together. A recent episode actually took at least twice that long times because of various technical difficulties.

Here’s the first open secret of Bold Signals, it’s all done by one person.

I do all the writing, editing, producing, and recording myself. The first person to download and listen to a new episode is very likely the second person to ever hear it. I like to joke that Bold Signals is a small-batch science podcast, but it’s really more sketchy corner bodega than artisonal fromagerie. I am consistently amazed by the quality of the guests I get and proud of the work I put in, but I constantly wish the production were better.

Here’s the second open secret of Bold Signals, it’s about professional development.

As I've discussed elsewhere, the podcast initially grew out of my desire to communicate the lived experience of doing science. Looking over the science-related podcast landscape at the time, I saw lots of good stuff discussing the results of scientific investigation but significantly less about the people who call themselves scientists. After looking around for a podcast about the experience and craft of being a scientist, I decided to just make one myself.

If that sounds a little ostentatious, that’s because it was. Prior to starting Bold Signals I had never done any kind of interviewing or audio production. Listen to the earliest episodes and this will be glaringly obvious. Producing the podcast over the last year has been an exercise in fretting over grammar and syntax, learning the ins and outs of GarageBand, and scrambling to keep to a regular release schedule while working full time. While the desire to fill a gap in the science communication landscape continues to be the principle driving force behind Bold Signals and while I greatly enjoy making the podcast, I do have to justify its costs to both myself and the podcast’s guests. 

For myself, especially when I’m struggling with a particularly difficult episode, I frame the time and effort that goes into the podcast as the cost of developing a particular set of skills. Hopefully, if you listen to the first and then the most recent episodes, you’ll notice some improvement in both my interviewing and the overall production. As someone with a professional interest in science and science communication, these are skills I’m very keen to develop and it works out nicely that I can do so while making Bold Signals.

A few months ago I started using Figshare to assign DOI numbers to each episode. I did this for two reasons.  First, I had just interviewed a fellow science informationist and thought it would be an interesting way to leverage a data management platform. Second, I wanted to provide podcast guests with a simple and stable way to cite their participation under “Outreach” on their resumes or CVs.

10 steps to open access success #OAweek #MyOAstory

It’s Open Access Week! For a lot of people, ‘open access’ (OA) is a synonym for ‘more work’. Advocates often don’t appreciate that this is a genuine concern. There’s also a lack of appreciation for the perceived risks of sticking your neck out with an OOIDH (open or it didn’t happen) position.

So here is some advice – based on my own experience – on what you as an individual should do to become…