InsectaPod Blog

This blog isn’t super buggy, but its accompanying podcast sure is. As a result I’m always interested in finding other people who are discussing entomology online, especially through blogs. I’be been reading Bug Girl’s blog regularly for over a year now, and I was disappointed yesterday when she posted that she’ll taking a sabbatical in response to someone “outing” her (she’s been blogging anonymously). So I went searching for some more stuff to fill the void. What I found is listed below.

1. The Ant Room. Kari Wilkie writes about ants. Lots of stuff about ants.
2. NC State University Insect Museum. I think departmental blogs are a great idea, I’d like to see the folks in Anna’s laboratory maintain one.
3. Bugs for Thugs. I’m not sure what’s thuggish about this one, but the photos are great.
4. The Myrmecos Blog. More ants, and I learned a new latin word today.

And, finally, just a weird thing that came up in this search. I read a post on Kari Wilkie’s blog in which she quoted a physicist saying that other branches of science are “just stamp collecting.” After that, I was searching google for entomology blogs and came up with this one from Jean-Michel Maes, an entomologist in Nicaragua. The linked post gave me a laugh, because I don’t need to speak Spanish to know that “Sociedad Filatelica de Nicaragua” means stamp collecting.

Just learned that the delicious pun baked right into InsectaPodcast is a hand-me-down. Jason Robertshaw of Sarasota Florida runs Cephalopodcast.com, a great blog and podcast about like-minded (to me) marine issues. The blog is updated pretty regularly, and the podcast a little less so. But the audio quality of the podcast is great and the elements Robertshaw employs in the blog are social-network-friendly (flickr, twitter, etc.).

Interesting science presented with style. I like it.

We are working on writing episode 5 right now. The content we gathered is a little different from what we’ve done in the past, and we have to approach the task from a different angle if we’re going to put everything into a coherent structure. the material isn’t bad, it’s just different, and that means the writing habits and techniques that have helped Anna write previous podcast scripts aren’t working this time around.

Usually, we interview someone, pull out a few choice quotes, and then fill in the gaps in the conversation with Anna’s narration. This time, though, we spoke with an amateur insect enthusiast, and Anna plays the role of bug expert more than that of interviewer. All of our recordings are more field-oriented than interview-oriented, and even the one 12 minute interview segment we recorded is actually more a recording of a discussion that Anna and the subject engaged in equally.

The process by which the two of us each realized we were trying to tame a different beast this time around is interesting. I listened to the recordings last wee, looking for sounds we could pull out for non-interview “actualities” and, unlike most months, found a great wealth of usable stuff. Yesterday Anna sat down to write the script, which usually takes an hour or so. A few hours later she was frustrated because she was having trouble identifying enough of the formal interview quotes that are the framework around which she usually writes the script.

We had to sit down, figure out what was differnt about the way we’d gathered recordings for this episode, and then develop a strategy for how to handle them. In the end I think there’s a lot of potential for this to bring some variety to the series, and the make us better at thinking about how we’ll use recordings when we’re out getting them. If we think critically about these things ahead of time, it shouldstrengthen our repertoire of techniques and themes. Right now, though, we’ve still got to get the thing written.

Recently, while serving in my agricultural editor capacity, I received an email about a new online extension effort. Extension.org is using syndication feeds to create a continually updated and entirely comprehensive resource. My participation, as the editor the Michigan Dairy Review, involves writing and updating an ATOM feed (something I should have been doing anyway). Extension.org then uses my ATOM feed, along with every other dairy-minded extension feed they can get their hands on, to create a massive clearing house of information. I think this is great, as in super neat.

Chuck Zimmerman recently wrote a post on Agwired about another online agriculture communications initiative recently. He says this one uses “Web 2.0 strategies for agricultural communications…that would be blogging and podcasting.” While I’m not sure blogging and podcasting meet the criteria of “Web 2.0″ on their own (E-agriculture has forums and communities, too) I think it’s great to see these efforts moving agricultural communications forward. Around my water-cooler, digital modes are often discussed with skepticism. The only way to change that is to jump in and show the luddites what’s possible.

Putting together a podcast about insects is easy… packaging it as a narrative is difficult. The people we interview most often keep the subject matter at a comfortably academic distance, and there’s little chance of actually grabbing the insect’s side of the story, which might be a bit more emotionally. And this is a problem, because, as Jack Shafer points out in a Slate article today, “Show me a narrative that’s free of bruises and psychic contusions, and I’ll show you a slumbering reader.”

That writer is speaking about travel writing in the New York Times, and the soporific effect of articles that “float on a mattress of comfort and cheer.” The result of such writing, he says, is that three pieces about Michigan’s magical Leelenau peninsula can be run in seven weeks because the vapidity and formulaity of the stories makes the subject matter inconsequential.

I think those dangers are all the more threatening in an audio format, where listeners expect and even more sensatory relationship with the material. Finding the conflict in a bug story is tough because lot’s of times there isn’t one. But finding something exciting, or unique isn’t so difficult. We’ve found some people who can speak excitedly about the world of insects and the environment, and those interviews do a lot to strengthen an InsectaPod Cast episode. We can’t always find “bruises and psychic contusions,” but we make do with what we have.

We recently learned about an interesting project at University of Arizona called Tree of Life. It offers a taxonomic record, podcasts, k-12 learning and more. There’s lots of good insect content, but it’s not limited to bugs. Tree of Life endeavors to do something much loftier: a user contributed web page for every species on the planet. Check it out, in their words:

The Tree of Life Web Project is a collection of information about biodiversity compiled collaboratively by hundreds of expert and amateur contributors. Its goal is to contain a page with pictures, text, and other information for every species and for each group of organisms, living or extinct. Connections between Tree of Life web pages follow phylogenetic branching patterns between groups of organisms, so visitors can browse the hierarchy of life and learn about phylogeny and evolution as well as the characteristics of individual groups.

Included in the Tree of Life Initiative is some podcasting. They’ve got a bunch of video podcasts available, including several about bugs. It’s the podcasts that I turned to first, but the more I explore the site, the more impressed I am by the overall effort. Tree of Life is a great example of using online tools to do unique and meaningful communicating. They package podcasts with learning materials for k-12 educators (something we’d talked about doing with InsectaPod Cast but don’t have the resources for), post podcasts on YouTube, and the website is top notch (they even lay out their information architecture and content management strategies).

Thanks to Bug Girl for bringing Tree of Life to our attention.

It’s always nice to see some evidence that people are actually using the internet to get entomology information. Recently I realized that What’s That Bug is a clearly doing something right. I’ve been aware of the site, which taps users to identify the insects depicted in pictures fellow users submit, for a while. I recently was looking through my del.icio.us links and saw that while most of the web-based entomology communications efforts had been tagged by just a handful of fellow del.icio.us users, 695 had tagged What’s That Bug. That’s less than ebay’s 8000 tags, but a lot more than the 1 InsectaPod Cast can claim (what stings isn’t that we’ve only got 1, it’s that I’m it).

So that would suggest that there’s a core group of people that are using What’s the Bug regularly, submitting photos and offering identifications. It’s a nice example of letting users create content and stands as proof that people aren’t just shopping and griping online. Further, it’s popularity among del.icio.us users has me wondering how useful del.icio.us could be as a source of traffic and popularity statistics.

Another entomology-minded podcast is the Invasive Species Weblog Podcasts, made by Jennifer Forman Orth, a post-doc researcher at the Univeristy of Massachussets in Boston. She’s made two episodes and the bug content plays pretty heavy in both. It’s essentially a summary of Invasives in the news, but sometimes Forman Orth delves out of the media and into the real world. In the inaugural episode, she talks about a trip made to a zoo to show a visiting scientist the prevalence of Japanese Knotweed in Massachussetts. Listening to her retell what she learned from zoo officials about the feeding of Japanese knotweed to animals was the most interesting part of the podcast (a similar story from Chicago, about zoo animals being fed cicadas, will likely play a role in an upcoming InsectaPod Cast episode). I learned as a journalist that access, more than writing skill, makes a good news story. Forman Orth had access to zoo officials, and sharing the fruits of that access with listeners made for a good podcast.

Forman Orth isn’t new to science communication, she’s been maintaining the Invasive Species Weblog for years now. It’s regularly updated, comfortably written, and seems to recognize our state of Michigan as a hotbed of invasive species action. Great Lakes, great times.

Sometimes it seems there isn’t much writing be done at the intersection of science and digital communications, but then a great piece comes along, like this one about Web 2.0 and science writing from the blog Scientific Curiosity.

It starts out by illustrating the outdated nature of the classic “lab coat and clipboard” scientist, and the need for scientists to embrace new communications methods. The potential for the internet to be a valuable tool in communicating about science is increasing, and I hope InsectaPod Cast eventually proves illustrative of that new potential. The Scientific Curiosity post deals more closely with emerging methods of online editing and publication of academic work, but it also asserts that the willingness of scientists to embrace communication techniques that are at first unfamiliar is a prereq for the success of those techniques.

That’s a formidable challenge, especially when also trying to create media that can be appreciated by the lay listener. It’s something we’ll have to remain aware of.