The Power(ful)point of Media
What a difference a powerpoint makes. I spent last week with two other members of my Board of Longitude project at the 3 Societies meeting in Philadelphia, PA. Alexi and Becky have written bits and pieces about our panel over on the Longitude blog. It was a great conference and Robert Hicks of the Mütter Museum did us proud as a chair. I learnt a lot and met some fascinating people. But what I really came away with is a new found respect for digital media, and those of you who catch my regular ‘Spoons’ will know I’m a pretty keen fan already. Three things struck me:
The simplest was how important a powerpoint show is to an engaging presentation these days. Even those speakers who weren’t dealing specifically with visual culture had made a real effort to pull together catchy and integral images to add to their talks. I’ve always remembered reading an article by Dorinda Outram complaining that historians, and even art historians, often use images merely illustratively and don’t analyse them. Well, I think, at least in the history of science, that practice is on the way out, and I enjoyed some stimulating papers on visual scientific practices. Although, from various discussions I did leave with the same feeling expressed at the 'Curiously Drawn' conference at the Royal Society last month, that we need more art historians in the room (as I discussed then).
The second was inspired largely by the very first session of the conference, which considered ‘Science in Public Culture’ and questioned how we can make academic history of science more accessible to a wider public, and help ourselves to communicate in the right ways. The answers were, of course, mostly a mixture of social media and museums. We need to make more of our work accessible, both practically and linguistically, to a ‘lay’ readership, and we need to embrace ‘lay’ knowledge and skills in the museum setting. Largely a call to arms from Simon Chaplin of the Wellcome Library, these questions also came up in the closing discussion on ‘the future of the profession’ to which I made a modest contribution.
What brought all of this home to me was a new conference experience: that of live tweeting. Followers of my twitter account will have seen that I tweeted a little from the ‘Origins of Science’ conference, but also that I really embraced the idea at #3soc (see what I did there?). I found it put a whole new angle on the conference. Not only could I follow papers in other sessions through other attendees’ tweets, and discuss common themes during sessions (as well as some inevitable joking back chat), but I found the act of tweeting a productive way of engaging with and thinking about the papers. Even within the walls of our small academic community this is a new way of engaging with each other and bringing our research and activities to a new audience. Next up, an exhibition by tweet?