Career Talk

1. Communicating Your Work in Academia and Beyond
William Gunn, Ph.D.
Head of Academic Outreach
Mendeley
william.gunn@mendeley.com
twitter: @mrgunn

2. How many of you currently have working outside of academia as your top choice?

3. Communicating your work
•Content
•Medium
•Channel
•Audience

4. My story

6. The advice I got
•Good: Pick a stable, well-funded lab where people graduate on time
•Good: Diversify project risk
•Bad: Keep your head down, work hard, and it’ll all work out

7. 1.Seek advice from the people who can give it
Lessons

8. The first transition: Grad school to Biotech

9. I was part of something!

10. It was a little isolating

12. 1.Seek advice from the people who can give it
2.Know Thyself
Lessons

13. The second transition: Biotech to tech startup

14. Early Adopter

15. ...helps
researchers work smarter
...makes science more collaborative and transparent
…has created an open research database
Tools of scientific discovery
Mendeley..

16. Achievements
•OA policy advocacy successes
•A tool that doesn’t suck
•Altmetrics (Draft NISO standard)
•Reproducibility ($1.3M funding and partnership with Center for Open Science)

17. 1.Seek advice from the people who can give it
2.Know Thyself
3.Look Beyond the Surface
Lessons

19. Stay
•What do you want to do?
•Will you find "Flow"?
•Realistic impression?
•Supportive network?
•Are you young?

20. Go
•Frustrated by lack of impact?
•Like to write?
•Want to influence policy?
•Are you too charismatic?

21. Csikszentmihalyi, M. Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. (1991)

22. MAKING THE TRANSITION
Team vs. solo

23. Communicating your work
•Content
•Medium – written, spoken, visual
•Channel
•Audience

24. Communicating your work
•Content
•Medium – written, spoken, visual
•Channel
•Audience

25. Data viz has a long history
John Snow’s cholera map helped communicate the idea that cholera was a water-borne disease.

26. Florence Nightingale used dataviz

27. Modernization of dataviz

28. Chart junk: good, bad, and ugly
Which presentation is better?

30. It can be elegant…

32. Tufte

33. Tufte

34. How our eyes and brain perceive
It takes 200 ms to initiate an eye movement, but the red dot can be found in 100 ms or less. This is due to pre-attentive processing.

35. Shape is a little slower than color!

36. Pre-attentive processing fails!

37. There are many “primitive” properties which we perceive
•Length
•Width
•Size
•Density
•Hue
•Color intensity
•Depth
•3-D orientation

38. Length

39. Width

40. Density

41. Hue

42. Color Intensity

43. Depth

44. 3D orientation

46. Types of color schemes
•Sequential – suited for ordered data that progress from low to high. Use light colors for low values and dark colors for higher.
•Diverging – uses hue to show the breakpoint and intensity to show divergent extremes.
•Qualitative – uses different colors to represent different categories. Beware of using hue/saturation to highlight unimportant categories.

47. Sequential
http://colorbrewer2.org/

48. Diverging

49. Qualitative

50. Tips for maps
•Keep it to 5-7 data classes
•~8% of men are red-green colorblind
•Diverging schemes don’t do well when printed or photocopied
•Colors will often render differently on different screens, especially low-end LCD screens
•http://colorbrewer2.org

51. Communicating your work
•Content
•Medium – written, spoken, visual
•Channel
•Audience

52. Adams, Jonathan. "Collaborations: the fourth age of research." Nature 497.7451 (2013): 557-560.

53. King, Christopher (2012) Thomson Reuters Annual Report
http://ar.thomsonreuters.com/_files/pdf/MultiauthorPapers_ChrisKing.pdf

54. Social Networks
Opportunities for discovery
Opportunities for building relationships

55. Scholars on Twitter
In a 2010 survey of ~1,400 higher-ed professionals,
1 of 3 used Twitter (http://scr.bi/9BfKTr)
intro

56. Prevalence of Twitter citations
results

57. Speed (1)
If I find an interesting reference in the literature, people will only know about it after one year, maybe, after I have actually published it. However if I tweet it people will know about it immediately, as soon as possible.
results
- 'Tyrone'

58. Speed (2)
Twitter citations quickly follow article publication:
results
Priem, J. and Costello, K. L. (2010), How and why scholars cite on Twitter. Proc. Am. Soc. Info. Sci. Tech., 47: 1–4. doi: 10.1002/meet.14504701201

59. 2.7M researchers

60. www.mendeley.com