Twitter Recommendations for Astronomy Researchers (from DotAstronomy)

At the recent dotastronomy, @drphilmarhsall and myself ran an unconference session with the aim of collecting the wisdom of dotastronomy attendees on the reasons we like Twitter (all but 3 of the attendees were signed up), why we think it's useful to our research careers and as a tool for communicating about our science.

What follows are the notes I took during that session under various categories.

Twitter 101

Twitter signup now easy and guided to find your interests.

Predictive follow suggestions will be made when you sign up. 

I have an account now what?

(Specifically for people who signed up a while ago but have never done anything with it).

Some of us use tweetdeck to filter - others don’t

Some people follow everyone

Some people follow only selected/few

It’s OK to follow/unfollow as suits your wishes

A lot of us use Twitter for work only (Facebook for friends)

Who you follow depends on your interests

Follow people you know on Twitter and the people they are following

Try things

Go at your own pace

Use conference hashtags #AAS #NAM #dotastro! To find people. 

Search on “astro” in the username to get started

Best Practices for Tweeting

Talk to people (interact)

Don’t just tweet for the sake of it…. Tweet interesting things

Guidelines for tweeting at conferences exist

Tweet things you are happy anyone reading

The press (might) read these, so tweet only things you are happy anyone reading.

I'm too Busy For Twitter

Don’t be frightened/worried

you don’t have to read everything

You don’t have to tweet every day

Using Twitter to Help in Your Research

It's a great tool for self promotion (amongst other Twitter users)

Tweet your papers

You may hearing about jobs early and/or jobs you wouldn't find otherwise

It's good for general networking – drops barrier for networking at conferences (e.g. Tweetups)

BUT – everyone could be reading what you tweet, so only tweet things you are happy anyone (research competitors?) reading.

Ideas for Tweeting about/for Research

Taking notes at seminars/meetings (you can tweet to Evernote as your note taking method)

Boiling topics down to most important 140 characters will help you understand the subject

You will be on top of breaking news in your field (telescopes, funding, politics etc)

You can find quick answers for things…. - the lazy web

Using Twitter to Communicate with the Public

When you have that conversation on the train that starts "Did you hear about….?" – now the answer is more likely to be yes, as you will be on top of trending topics in astronomy.

Conversation will be important here to actually do outreach - you want your tweets retweeted widely to reach people who don't follow you (real outreach).

Join in with popular tags 

e.g. #bbcstargazing on the night of the show was fantastic

The Demographic on Twitter

Probably narrow group of followers for many researchers - so tweeting just to your followers may not be effective outreach. 

Need to get yourself retweeted (by Dara O’Briain etc.) to reach other audiences 

General consensus about retweeting social conduct - don’t ask to be retweeted (except rarely?)

Tweet on popular hashtags to reach wider audience. 

Tools for Tweeting

A lot of us use Tweetdeck, but there were some strong anti-tweetdeck sentiment in the room. 

Tweetdeck pros and cons

• Not casual/feels like work
• Processor hog
• Can look overwhelming
• Easy to filter
• Easy to manage multiple accounts (e.g. a personal and a work one, and/or accounts for organizations).

An alternative: 

Twitter app in the corner of your screen - Not what you’re doing, it’s a sidebar

Tweeting using smart phones and/or tablets also popular for in talks etc. 

Tweeting for an Organization

Will be rules sometimes/usually.

Tweet responsibly - tweet things you are happy anyone reading.

Have your own personal account as well. 

What do we want/get out of Twitter?

Community

Education/knowledge

Stumbling on interesting things

Socially filtered information (instead of RSS?)

Get people to read your blog/website

Virtual office chatter

Convincing People to Tweet

We get things out of it
Any evidence for the benefit of the use of twitter? - Conclusion was nothing convincing, but we keep looking. 



Also since the meeting, we found links to two interesting articles in the Journal for Communication of Astronomy with the Public about the use of Twitter: 


Tweeting Space Craft: Communicating Space Science in the Age of Web 2.0, by Janet Vertesi (Princeton University) in 2010.


and 


Live Casting: Bringing Astronomy to the Masses in Real Time, by Pamela Gay, Phil Plait, Jordan Raddick, Fraiser Cain and Emily Lakdawalla in 2006. 

My DotAstronomy4

Its been well over a week since I got back from dotastronomy 4, and the time has really flown by (both at the conference and since). This blog post is mostly a collection of links and reminders for myself about what I did at dotastronomy. If you also find it interesting that's great, but it is not a comprehensive review of dotastronomy so if you want that go somewhere else. 

Other people at the conference have written blog articles about their experiences (Sarah Kendrew, Astronomyblogger, OrbitingFrog, Astropixie).

In years to come I suspect what I will remember most about dotastronomy is the journey up to the Haus de Astronomie on the furnicular railway.

The second of the two trains. 

View down the track from near the top.

I enjoyed this blurry effect as we travelled through a tunnel.

We all had to remember (and exert willpower) to not "get off at the Schloss" (beautiful castle overlooking Heidelberg). 

The food was also interesting - I didn't realise there was so much meat in German food! ;) I enjoyed the visual presentation of this desert. 

 The theme of my dotastronomy this year seems to have been learning about visualisation techniques. I particularly enjoyed Noah and Julie's talk on the subject and I was annoyed to be in a different unconference session and missed their workshop. I'm planning to put more thought into the visualisations in future papers, and especially in the public talks I use. 

For my hack day I joined the project initiated by Sarah Kendrew with the idea of making visualisations of links between terms in astronomical papers. There is a website called Brainscanr which does this for medical research, and Sarah thought it could be interesting in astronomy too. Orbitingfrog also got involved, developing the tools to download the text from the arxiv, strip it of non-astronomical terms, and properly deal with plurals etc. What I did was work out ways to visualise this. I worked with Gephi to make network diagrams of the results. Using an input .cvs file with one paper per line, and each term in each (abstract of) each paper on that line, this tool can make a network diagram like this one which shows links between terms in abstracts which contain the words "dark energy". 

I also learned about using the Javascript tools at Rickshaw to make plots live in the browser. Finally I messed around with wordls which are always fun (if of dubious use). 

The results of our hack are online here. 

While I was doing this I also learned about Culturomics which lets you make plots of the frequency of any terms you like in arxiv papers. Useful. :) 

I also participated in Amanda Bauer (astropixie)'s project to make a "Science it's a Universal Thing" video (in reponse to the "Science it's a Girl Thing" debacle).

I love the video Amanda and Nicole made, and although I'm not sure it would be ideal to interest teenagers in science, it is well deserving of it's "Best Reminder of Why We Got into this in the First Place" hack day prize. 

I was an extra in "S**t Astronomers" say too - with some stupid questions in the "talk" that was a fun few minutes!

On the last day Phil Marshall and I ran an unconference session aimed at collating the collective wisdom at dotastronomy on the most effective ways for researchers to use Twitter (both to enhance their research/networking, and for science communication). This has been done before (e.g Pamela Gay et al. as part of Live Casting: Bringing Astronomy to the Masses in Real Time in 2008, and by Janet Vertesi in Tweeting Spacecraft in 2010) but we are still thinking about plan to write up our updated collective recommendations. 

Kelle Cruz's talk on changing the culture of professional astronomy has also really stuck in my mind. I'm not sure it's possible, but it's a lovely idea, and I often wish inparticular that junior scientists could be less stressed out. We all too often focus on job insecurity instead of our love of the work itself, and it was nice to have a reminder of the fruitlessness of that. I was also reminded of the tools and tips on the Astrobetter blog, which are an absolutely fantastic resource. 

Throughout the conference I pushed a wiki to collect recommendations and links from the dotastro community - which is filling up well. I also ran on there a survey of equipment and programming tools favoured by the group, which I presented to the conference using Prezi (one of the recommendations which I had not tried before). Following that I'd recommend running surveys with a Google Form (in Google Documents).

I have vague plans to collate the recommendations and links a bit better (and perhaps submit to the Astrobetter blog), and there are also other plans to document this years dotAstronomy (and the 3 that proceeded it) a bit better, so stay tuned on that.

Dotastronomy is a great conference, and a completely unique experience. As was the case last year in Oxford, I've returned home enthused and inspired and ready to get to work (a good thing given my last week!). For me dotastronomy is a chance to update my arsenal of skills, but more importantly to reconnect with the excitement of doing and communicating astronomy with a like minded group of people. 

My dotastro Twitter Visualisations

On archivist: dotastro

Graph of people recently tweeting dotastro (not sure this is working).

Also will update with the last one (downloading and using TAGSexplorer when/if I get it working).

Instructions for doing all this: Fun with Twitter Visualizations.

Fun with Twitter Visualizations for NAM2012

I seem to be becoming an advocate of the use of Twitter for researchers (more on that after this year's dotAstro). So it might surprise you to learn I was a massive skeptic at first and only signed up under protest! ;) But the more time I spend on Twitter the more I appreciate the tool it provides to connect people (which in my case are generally astronomers).

 Anyway, one of the fun things about Twitter is the archive/visualizations you can make of a given search term. I did some of this with tweets from the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester last week, which were tweeted with the hashtag #NAM2012.

 By it's nature Twitter is transitory, so some of these visualizations won't last - for example the Graph of People Recently Tweeting #NAM2012 will be blank soon, but you can visit the link and put in the search term of your choosing.

This archive will remain, but I set it up late, so it only represents the last couple of days of NAM - and note to self, to set up such archives early for the next meeting. This service can only collect the last 500 tweets of a hashtag.

(And I should do a shoutout to Doug_Burke, a British astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics for sending me the links to these services which he has previously used to collect AAS tweets).

Because of that limitation I was tempted to get a bit more technical and tried downloading all Tweets with #NAM2012 before they disappeared. Thanks to dotastro I am confident/crazy enough to give this a go. I Googled for help, and found these instructions: Twitter: How to archive event hashtags and create an interactive visualization of the conversation which I followed to set up a Google spreadsheet collecting #NAM2012 tweets. This could get the last 1500 (which is Twitters limit, nothing to do with the code), which on Thursday meant tweets back to about Tuesday night at NAM (so not all, but most of them). I then set it up to display them in a NAM2012 visualization at TAGSexplorer. I think this will keep updating until I turn it off which I will do in a couple of days once all the NAM news stories are gone. 


 Hope you enjoy them. Try exploring the tweet timeline for a given users in the last one - hit play for a fun movie. :)

A LOFAR Pencast

Today over on the LOFAR-UK blog I posted the below pencast in which I describe the LOFAR low band antennas.

LOFAR LBA Pencast

brought to you by Livescribe

This is using the new pencast pen I bought after trying one out at dotastro. Now having gone through the whole process I'm still impressed. Watch out for more pencasts. :)

Pluto the Previous Planet

One of the outputs from dotAstronomy this year was the below music video by Amanda Bauer (@astropixie). Pluto the Previous Planet. 

Pluto, the previous planet from carolune on Vimeo.

Amanda describes where she got the idea for this song in her blog post about it: Pluto, the Previous Planet: A Song.  She's very clear, that she saw this song as a bit of fun, and has no interest in changing the IAU definition of what a planet is. I got involved as one of the "Trans Neptunian Objectors" (looking a bit lost in the chorus line), and expressed my concern over the interpretation of the second to last verse by refusing to "boo" (I really don't care if Pluto is defined as a planet or not). :)

 Actually I think Amanda and Carolina did a very nice job anyway, making a website: "Pluto the Previous Planet" to go along with the video. It gives Pluto a voice (summary - we don't need to worry, he's happy enough as a dwarf planet) and includes some educational material about the redefinition. A well deserved Hack Day Best Artistic Project Prize!

I have yet to meet an actual astronomer who cares about this issue, but obviously some people do. The comments to Amanda's blog post have gotten a little heated and Stuart Lowe has already talked about that in his blog post: Plurality of Planets. Universe Today covered the story: "New Hit Single: “Pluto the Previous Planet”, and to date it's had just over 4000 views. Hmmm.

Perhaps Markus (the director) was right, and we should have spent a bit more time practicing! All I can say is I can't wait to get the tune out of my head. I've been humming it all week:

Pluto the previous planet, had a very shiny nose....... 

no wait that's not right..... aargh!

Just noticed that one of the Pencasts was done by Amanda on the Pluto song. Check it out:

Pluto

brought to you by Livescribe

(Link to it on the Livescribe website)

(dot)Astronomers like Apples

Another quick snippet from the dotAstronomy conference. On the first day we all had a lot of trouble with the wifi network at New College. Very frustrating for a group of people who came to a conference about using the internet to learn about, do, and communicate astronomy!

Anyway on hack day (Tuesday afternoon when we were all working on various projects), Boris Haeussler went around photographing us with all our internet connected devices, and produced the below video. His final census - 40 astronomers, 86 internet devices! Comprising 38 Macbooks, 6 other laptops, 5 iPads, 2 other tablets, 22 iPhones, 9 smart phones, and 4 other phones. That's a lot of Apple products!

And I was about average - with a Macbook and an iPhone. So why do I like Apple so much..... well I find they just work, and because the OS is based on Unix I can run a lot of the astronomy related programmes I started using on a Unix desktop when I was a new graduate student natively on my laptop. No dual booting (which is what I see those with other laptops doing). I don't have a lot of time for fussing around, so I like how easy it all is. I've actually moved to using only my laptop in recent years - connected to a screen on my desk, and also connecting remotely to the big computers at work for certain things.

This site on Using OSX for Professional Astronomers, by Dr. Jane Rigby is the most useful resource I've found for Mac users who are astronomers. Jane is now writing for AstroBetter (tips and tricks for professional astronomers) which is also a great resource.

Pencasting Galaxy Zoo Science at dotastro

As any of you who are on Twitter (or elsewhere on the web) may have noticed, for most of this week I was at the dotAstronomy conference in Oxford. If you're not on Twitter yet see #dotastro and you might as well get started on Twitter by following everyone who was at the conference. That would really be a great starting point if you're interested in astronomy! (I was actually quite alarmed given the company there to be the 4th most often Tweeter at the conference.)

Anyway, dotAstronomy was an amazing conference, full of amazing people, and I've returned to Portsmouth on an awesome high, but a bit overwhelmed over where to start blogging about it. So I decided rather than try to review the whole conference, I would instead just review snippets which I thought were interesting. I started this on the Galaxy Zoo blog, by writing (a version) of this post about pencasting.

Pencasting was a totally new idea for me, and I have to say I immediately loved it and wanted to join in. So I spent a small amount of my time on the "hack day" making a "pencast" describing our most recent Galaxy Zoo science result (the observation that bars are more common in redder spiral galaxies). A pencast is a drawing that you make while describing what you're doing. The special pen and paper you use record both the drawing an audio which you can then put online for others to watch. Check it out and see what you think.

My Galaxy Zoo pencast:

(Link to this on the Livescribe website)

You can also see it along with more astronomy related pencasts see the dotAstronomy Pencast Gallery. And stay tuned. I really liked this technology, so you may be seeing more of it.