Dec 152011
 

Have you ever traveled to a new city and wondered where you can grab a burger, or perhaps a beer? How about wondering if there’s a good spot to bird watch or even collect a few flies in between meetings or family functions? One of the benefits of being a biologist is traveling to new locations, either to gather new data/specimens or to talk about your work on said data/specimens. Unless you have a local source of information, be it a friend, colleague or naturalist’s forum that can point you to a good park, the amount of time you spend looking for a site may equal (or be greater than) the amount of time you actually spend in the site. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a social network that could help you find natural areas faster, and let you see ahead of time what local naturalists were finding where?

foursquare logoGood news; there IS a social network capable of all these things, it’s just that no one has begun to use it for that yet! Let me introduce you to foursquare, and explain how I think it can enhance interactions between naturalists and scientists.

foursquare is a geography-based social network, allowing you to “Check in” to locations such as restaurants, events or shops and see where nearby friends have been recently. You can also leave “Tips” on things to do at a location or what’s good on the menu, and construct to-do lists of places you’d like to visit and things you’d like to do. While check-ins are only shared with your friends, the locations and tips are public and searchable, allowing you to plan trips or discover new venues.

While the network was designed for finding restaurants and bars in big cities, you can also create venues for all types of natural habitats; city greenspaces, provincial, state, or national parks (and even areas within those parks, like specific camp grounds or trails), your local arboretum, lake, or river, etc. Combine that with the Tips function and you have a GPS-enabled network which allows you to record recent nature sightings, notes on the type and quality of habitats, or anything else which may help others get the most out of their visit. Available through your web browser or on smartphones, it’s a very simple way to keep track of what you find and where!

Unfortunately I haven’t had much time in the past few weeks to explore local parks to provide you some examples, but here is the page I made for the University of Guelph Insect Collection (did I mention foursquare is a great way to increase the exposure of your local museum or natural history collection?):

University of Guelph Insect Collection on foursquare

As you can see, I’ve left a tip with some information about our collection and encouraging people to stop in and see what we do, but this is where you can leave sightings or other observations you’ve made at a location. These tips are searchable (try searching “1863 near Guelph, On” in foursquare for example), allowing people to discover potential natural history information (imagine a tip reading “Saw a bald eagle and 3 cedar waxwings today! #nature” or “Check the pond at the northwest corner for excellent dragonfly collecting #nature”). You could even go so far as to create a public list of natural areas in your region, making it even easier for others to discover new areas to explore.

So how can foursquare help naturalists and the public connect with researchers? Obviously the more people who join and record their naturalist outings in this way, the more data and locations visiting scientists may have to play with. eBird is a similar technology (without the mobile app) where birders around the world record the birds they saw, along with when and where, and which has created a near real-time database of bird diversity, ranges and migrations that is being used by ornithologists. I think by using foursquare in a similar way, researchers studying other groups can potentially do the same. Entomologically speaking, imagine the possibilities: citizen science programs tracking monarch butterfly populations, urban insect sightings (bed bugs in hotels, roaches in restaurants, etc), or taxonomists like myself finding new localities to collect in or records of uncommon species! More importantly though, is the ways in which a researcher can give back to the naturalist community. If you visit a location frequented by a local naturalist, why not meet up with them if they’re in the area, and of course share your own favourite locations and sightings for everyone to experience! I suspect that there are ways to harvest data or create secondary applications which work in concert with foursquare, but I don’t have the programming skills to explore those avenues (if you do and are interested, let me know).

Obviously for this idea to really work it will need to be adopted by naturalist communities across North America and beyond, but I think it has a lot of potential, and I’d encourage you to give it a try (and spread the word)! I’ll be continuing to record my visits and sightings, and I’ll be sure to provide future updates on how this idea progresses!

At a time when few people seem interested in the natural world around them, social media like foursquare create opportunities for us to share nature with everyone. If even one person who wouldn’t normally take the time to venture through a city park or visit an entomological museum does so because they learned of it through foursquare, I’d consider that a success!

Dec 132011
 

Mendeley logoThe first step when starting any new research project is to become familiar with the past literature, and know who did what, and when. This is especially true for taxonomy, where each and every paper published in the past 250 years regarding the description of new species or discussion of the framework for the tree of life for any given taxon is relevant and needs to be examined. This can result in a huge library of publications to keep track of, for which there are a number of options available to the beginning biologist.

One in particular however, has something a little extra incorporated in it; a social network.

Mendeley was developed as a freely available, online, cloud-based reference manager, where individual users add citations & publications to a central repository, which in turn is accessible to all other users for building citation catalogs of their own. There are several benefits to this system, one of which is a recommendation of other publications which may be relevant to your field of research, some of which you may not have been previously aware of. The other benefit is of more use for evaluating the impact of a publication (including your own).

Mendeley Stats

User statistics for Gibson et al, 2011

Because all 1 million current users are building citation lists from the same pool, it’s possible to obtain basic demographics of the people reading your work. Take for example a recent paper I collaborated on regarding PCR primers specific for Diptera phylogenetics. 3 people (other than myself) have added the paper to their Mendeley citation list, with 2 working in the US and one in the UK. While these aren’t groundbreaking numbers, nor the stats overly informative, it’s encouraging to see researchers are noticing the work we did. I would like it if you could see who exactly was reading your papers, as I think it could be useful for finding future collaborators or potential advisors for graduate or post-doctoral work, but I’ll take the simple gratification that our work is being read by 0.0003% of the Mendeley community!

Mendeley has also incorporated several other networking tools, including profiles where you can share your CV, publications, funding sources and contact information (similar to the tools available to LinkedIn users), as well as infrastructure  for sharing publications and holding discussions specific to your field of research in both public and private groups. Being based primarily online, it’s pretty simple to add references to your library using available web browser add-ons, and there are also desktop & mobile clients available which allow you to access your reference library anywhere or while on the go, although I’ve found them both to be a little buggy and prone to crashing (on my iPhone 4S and Windows XP PC).

The central citation database built by the community of users also holds the potential for some interesting data-mining projects, like Roderic Page’s goal of linking species names with the literature containing their original description. If you’re interested in cybertaxonomy, I’d recommend checking out Rod’s blog for more information (it’s pretty cool, but a little on the technical side).

Ultimately, Mendeley is attempting to streamline the accumulation and distribution of scientific literature for researchers. If you’re looking for a reference manager, or are interested in exploring some of it’s capabilities, feel free to look me up; who knows how we might connect!

 

 

Gibson, J. F., Kelso, S., Jackson, M. D., Kits, J. H., Miranda, G. F. G., & Skevington, J. H. (2011). Diptera-Specific Polymerase Chain Reaction Amplification Primers of Use in Molecular Phylogenetic Research. Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 104(5), 976-997. Available online (OPEN ACCESS)

Dec 132011
 

Ryan FleacrestSeeing as it’s Science & Social Media week, and Klout (a metric service which aims to calculate the influence you have through social media websites) thinks I’m influential about beer, I thought I’d share with you a little about Untappd, a social network for beer enthusiasts!

Almost all the entomologists I know enjoy a nice cool beer after a day in the field or following the publication of a manuscript, and with quality microbreweries increasing their distribution distance, it’s a good time to be  a beer drinker!

Untapped LogoUntappd is really quite a simple network; you share what type of beer you’re drinking, perhaps include where you’re enjoying it or a photo, and you can provide a rating out of 5 stars and a comment, all of which can be seen by your digital drinking buddies! It’s a pretty good way to discover new beers, and of course there’s a badge system included as an incentive to try new things. This is the perfect network for all those who enjoy a little #drunksci from time to time!

I’m finding that I can find an entomologically-themed song for any topic I want to discuss, and luckily enough today is no exception! So sit back, crack a brew, and enjoy this week’s song; Hey Bartender, There’s a Bug in My Beer by Eddie Pennington & Warner Williams!

If you end up joining Untappd, be sure to save a seat for me!

This song is available on iTunes – Hey Bartender, There’s a Big Bug In My Beer – Down Home! Saturday Night

Dec 122011
 

In the past few months, the topic of scientists taking to the netwaves to broadcast their ideas, opinions and research has been a popular topic. Here’s a list of some of the different discussions that I’ve found regarding scientists participating in social media.

Christie Wilcox (Cell & Molecular Biology Grad Student)  – Science Sushi

Christie did  a series of excellent posts on the topic, explaining why she felt that all/most scientists should try and reach out in some manner.
Part 1: It’s Our Job
Part 2: You Do Have Time
Part 2.5: Breaking Stereotypes
Part 3: Win-Win

Being scientists, other bloggers had differing opinions on Christie’s series, and made interesting counterpoints.

Steven Hamblin (Evolutionary Biology Post-Doc) – A Bit of Behavioural Ecology
Science communication? I wish it were that easy…
The economics of science blogging

Kevin Zelnio (Marine Biologist) – EvoEcoLab
On Naïveté Among Scientists Who Wish to Communicate

It’s not just science bloggers expounding the need for researchers to take to social media, with two short opinion/editorial pieces recently published in Nature highlighting social media’s role in scientific discourse.

Time to Tweet – Gaston Small, Nature 479, November 2, 2011
The press under pressure – Editorial, Nature 480, December 8, 2011

My fellow insect bloggers have also chimed in of course!

Bug Girl (Internet Insect Pundit/Comedienne) – Bug Girl’s Blog
How to become an online social media goddess (and transcript)

Alex Wild (Formicidologist/Insect Photographer) – Myrmecos
So you want to be a bug blogger

The Geek in Question (Insect Ecology Grad Student) – The Bug Geek
Information exchange (and stuff, too) via social media

At the recent Entomological Society of America meeting, University of Guelph graduate student Laura Burns spoke to several entomologists interested in social media, and the video of these talks was just shared on the Entomological Society of America YouTube channel.

I’m sure that this list isn’t nearly comprehensive, so if you have written science & social media, or know of someone else who has, please let me know and I’ll update the list!

Dec 112011
 

This week I’ll be running a whole series of posts and ideas on using social media as a scientist; both for connecting with other researchers, but also as a tool to communicate with the general public. I encourage you to chime in and share some of your own ideas on how to use social media in science, either here in the comments section, on your own blog, or through any of the plentiful social network sites. If you don’t have a blog and want to expand on some ideas, contact me and we can set up a guest post here!

I’ll be using the hashtag #ScienceShare throughout the week (and beyond I hope) while discussing the topic on Twitter and Google+, so feel free to follow along across the web!

I figured I’d start the week off by sharing a talk I gave at both the Entomological Society of Ontario and Entomological Society of America meetings this past fall, which should serve as an overview of where this week may go!

If you’re interested in exploring some of the things I discussed, here’s the Prezi I gave at the ESO meeting. I’m looking forward to seeing where this week takes us! Be sure to stay tuned!

 

 
(You can move around and interact with this Prezi to explore some of the links and sources included within it)