Getting interactive

Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016

Getting interactive

Rose Eveleth

Many people take up science blogging because they love words. But on the Internet, words aren’t everything. Rose Eveleth, freelance writer and producer, explains how interactive elements can bring your simple blogging up a notch.

You’ve had to write things down for most of your life. You’ve been evaluated based on your writing for probably as long as you can remember—from spelling tests to cover letters to lab reports to grants. And you’re probably interested in blogging because you actually like writing. You like words. Words are your escape, your weapons against the straight lines of test tubes and board meetings in the fight for sanity. So when it comes time to blog, your words probably come out first in the form of, well, words. Text on a glowing screen. Pretty, isn’t it? Blogging for most people is simply a new kind of writing. But it can be more. Creating and using nonword elements in your blog will help you make your point, engage readers, and have even more fun.

Now let me do the very odd thing of describing to you, in words, why, how, and when you might want to not use words. Here goes nothing.

Why should i care?

Let’s start with why. Why not just say what you mean? Why not just write it all out? Don’t get me wrong, words are awesome. Rudyard Kipling once wrote (in words), “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” But let’s imagine something else for a second.

Let’s say you’re really into speed skating. Speed skating is this incredible sport where people put on spandex and strap giant metal blades to their feet and whip themselves around a track covered in ice. And I mean whip—these people are going incredibly quickly. In the 2010 Winter Olympics, Christine Nesbitt of Canada won gold by skating a thousand meters in 1:16.56. That’s one minute, sixteen seconds, and some change. That change matters here, though, because right on her tail was Annette Gerritsen, the silver medalist who crossed the finish line at 1:16.58. The difference between gold and silver was .02 seconds. How fast is that? In words, that’s faster than it takes for a hummingbird to flap its wings. But do you really know how fast that is? Can you imagine, in your head, a hummingbird? Are you counting its imaginary wing beats and looking at your imaginary watch?

What if we tried to explain that story in another way, a nonwordy way. That’s what Amanda Cox at the New York Times did. She represented each of those finishes with a little ping.1 When you play the finish back and hear those two little pings so, so close to one another, you really, truly understand what it means to finish .02 seconds behind the gold medalist.

In 2010, Radiolab producer Jad Abumrad got up on stage at PopTech and played a sound.2 It was the sound of his printer freaking out. It sounds kind of like “click srrrrrr schhhhhhh beep eeeee srrrr schhhh ft ft ft ft ee ee ee ee.” Except it doesn’t really sound like that at all, because I’ve just given you a bunch of letters smushed together in a feeble attempt to re-create a sound. Abumrad was talking about the sound of failure, of things breaking, of the world around you suddenly jolting to a halt, breaking a nice, pretty flow that we’ve designed for ourselves. He could have said, “One time, my printer made a really weird noise.” He could have even shown you a bunch of smooshed up letters like I did. But instead he gave us that real sound, the sound of gears and belts and whatever else is in a printer that usually co-operates harmoniously.

Or maybe you’re covering climate change and you want to discuss how the environment has changed over time. You could say “the Gangotri glacier has receded 850 meters” or you could stitch together several images from NASA into a GIF to show exactly what that looks like. I have another speed skating example, but I think by now you get what I’m writing about so I’ll spare you.

All of these examples show that sometimes the best way to tell a story involves more than just words. But if you’re the kind of person who measures self-worth in social media data, think of it this way. By some measures, tweets with images in them get twice the amount of engagement as those without. Posts with pictures on Facebook get 53 percent more likes than posts without. Videos go viral far more frequently than long strings of text. The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger video—a film I consider to be a totally legitimate form of science communication—has nearly 70 million views. People like pretty pictures, things they can click on, and stuff that bounces around in front of them. Just don’t make it autoplay, for the love of all things science.

Which shiny internet things should i try?

If you keep thinking to yourself “You keep saying that I should include sounds and video and infographics, but how do I make this stuff?” then this is your section. This is the part where I’ll list some—but certainly not all—of the various media and tools you can use to play with your content.

But before I do that, I’m going to give you the One True Rule of making things: make them. I know it sounds dumb, but you’re never going to make anything until you actually make something. The first things you make will probably be bad. That’s okay. How many times did the Wright brothers crash their weird wing contraptions before they made a plane? A lot. Had they been on the Internet there might have even been a lot of mean-spirited people making fun of them about it. But I’m editing this chapter on a plane that has an upstairs, so you and I both know who had the last laugh there.

Okay, now that you know the One True Rule of making things, here are some (but not all) of the things you could consider making.

Images

These are easy, you know about them, and there are other chapters in this book that will tell you all about them. Just remember to credit your photographers and artists. It matters.

Gifs

Beyond just the silly “cat dressed as a shark riding a Roomba chasing a duckling” GIFs (yes, that exists), these little movies can be really useful to explain things or illustrate points.3 You can make a GIF by stitching literally any images together, including ones you’ve drawn yourself. Are you discussing a live map that updates every few minutes? Make a GIF of a few seconds of that map moving about. Are you describing how awesome solar flares are? Include a GIF of a solar flare erupting! Explaining how sperm swim? Sperm GIF! Speed skating? GIF away, my friends! You get the idea. There are a lot of ways to make GIFs, including Photoshop and a variety of websites like http://makeagif.com.

Sounds

You can find all sorts of sound on the Internet, at free sound archives like Free Sound, the Free Music Archive, and the British Library’s sound collection (http://sounds.bl.uk). Or you can record your own and upload them to one of the multitude of sound-hosting websites.

Animations or videos

Animations might seem daunting to make, and they definitely take time, but they can also be quick and easy. Take Vine, for example. Move a few things around in front of your cell phone’s camera and you’ve got an animation. Want to show how cells divide, how molecules move, or how far away the moon is from the Earth? Try delivering the scale and motion visually with an animation or video.4

Timelines

There are all sorts of online tools that you can use to create a nice, visual, interactive timeline to depict the course of events.5 Maybe you’re covering something with a long history or something that happened very quickly, and you want to break down the different events. Using a timeline rather than describing the series of events in words can help readers visualize the sequence—whether that’s the sequence of the Ebola outbreak or the chain of events that led to the Arab Spring uprising.6

These are just a few things on the endless list of things you can do that aren’t text based. You could include quizzes, discussions, tweet chats, infographics, podcasts, and more. It all just depends on what you’re trying to do.

When should i use a shiny internet thing?

A recent Onion headline read “Internet Users Demand Less Interactivity.” “Speaking with reporters, web users expressed a near unanimous desire to visit a website and simply look at it, for once, without having every aspect of the user interface tailored to a set of demographic information culled from their previous browsing history. In addition, citizens overwhelmingly voiced their wish for a straightforward one-way conduit of information, and specifically one that did not require any kind of participation on their part,” the authors wrote. And it’s true, sometimes you don’t want a million GIFs to just hear about some new study that really has nothing to do with that GIF of a cat trying to jump off the couch and failing.

As Uncle Ben tells Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Just because you can make your blog the most sparkly sound- and video-filled thing around doesn’t mean you should.

“But Rose,” you’re thinking, “I thought the One True Rule was to make things!”

Yes, it is. But making and publishing aren’t always the same. If you make something, and realize that it’s not helping, it’s confusing, or it’s simply embarrassing, you haven’t wasted your time. You’ve still learned how to make something. You’ve learned how to use a particular piece of software or an app. That something might not be right for the project you’re working on at that moment, but chances are it—or something like it—will be useful to you in the future. At the very least you’ve forced your brain to come up with something it wouldn’t have normally come up with. Such as a unique perspective on speed skating.

Just like most things in the world, it comes down to discretion. And you already probably have pretty good discretion to begin with. You’re a writer, remember? You’re good at telling stories with words. This really isn’t so different. Think of your visual elements as being like examples in your story. Does the example support the point you’re trying to make? Does it add something new that other examples failed to provide? Is it interesting? Are people going to remember it? Does it require a ton of extra explanation to set up?

These are all questions you’d ask of any written example in a blog post or story. Those that make sense, fit nicely into your story, and add value for your readers get to stay and hang out. Those that require lots of explanation, that are confusing, or that don’t add much are banished to the trash.

But wait! Before you trash it, think again about how to fix it. Why isn’t it working? What’s the confusing part? Okay, sometimes you have to just trash it. But that’s all right. Remember, you lose 100 percent of the speed skating races you don’t enter. Trying and failing sometimes is never as bad as not trying at all.

Listen, making stuff for the Internet—words or otherwise—is hard. A lot of what you make is probably going to be mediocre. Some of it might even be bad. But some of it will be good and all of it will be useful—at least to yourself as a way to learn how. Try using sound to illustrate your point. Try putting some images together into a comic form or a timeline or a quick animation. Try a podcast in which you interview yourself. Try everything. I’ll write that again, because it’s important. Perhaps the most important. Try everything. Remember the One True Rule? Good, now go make stuff.

Rose Eveleth is a freelance producer, designer, writer, and animator. She has written and produced for the Atlantic, BBC Future, Nautilus Magazine, NOVA, and others. She is also the founder of Science Studio, a place for science multimedia, and an editor at Story Collider, a science podcast.

Rose is based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Find her on her website, http://www.roseveleth.com, or follow her on Twitter, @roseveleth.

Notes

1. Amanda Cox, “Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical,” New York Times, February 26, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/26/sports/olympics/20100226-olysymphony.html.

2. Jad Abumrad, “Sound and Science with Jad Abumrad,” filmed 2010, PopTech video, http://poptech.org/popcasts/sound_and_science_with_jad_abumrad.

3. Orbitn, post on Imgur, http://imgur.com/gallery/Ig0bS4F.

4. “The Animated Life of A. R. Wallace (Director’s Cut),” Vimeo video, 7:55, posted by “Sweet Fern Productions,” 2014, http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/ch14/ch14_sec280.html.

5. “Timeline,” Northwestern University Knight Lab, 2013, http://timeline.knightlab.com.

6. Garry Blight, Sheila Pulham, and Paul Torpey, “Arab Spring: An Interactive Timeline of Middle East Protests,” The Guardian, January 5, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/middle-east-protest-interactive-timeline.