InsectaPod Blog

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.

At the Computers & Writing conference in Detroit this past spring I attended a presentation by Nicholas Behm of Arizona State University about using collaborative writing tools like Google Docs in the classrooms. Behm chose to stress that, “it’s important to remember these are political tools,” in that they are created by affluent whites and therefore may have cross-cultural accessibility issues.

I think that’s a cogent argument, but it’s not really my thing, so I didn’t think much more of it until I read this post about the social stratification between teenagers using myspace and facebook. Like most people my age I think of the two social networking sites as fairly interchangeable but a study by Danah Boyd found that they are being used by very distinct groups of teenagers. Namely, Facebook by hegemonic go-getters and MySpace by “other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.”

Which has import for an educational podcast because, while Anna and I endeavor to make InsectaPod Cast available to younger people, we haven’t put much thought into whether the tools we use to do so have more social trappings than we’d thought. Certainly, podcasting and blogging in general are more embraced (and accessible) to some groups of teenagers than others. InsectaPod Cast has a MySpace presence, but not Facebook. I know why I made that decision, but now I’ve got information that suggests eschewing Facebook might have greater ramifications than I thought.

Yesterday we met with an interviewee to rectify and earlier failed attempt to record an interview. The first interview we did was in March at an educational presentation for youth and the audio turned out to be unusable. I didn’t have a very good idea how the equipment worked and I was using the microphones built into the Zoom H4 unit exclusively, which made background and foreground noise nearly indistinguishable.

This time we used our new Electro Voice RE50, which worked great. The pops and esses that marred earlier recordings are greatly reduced with this mic, as are handling noise. There also isn’t as great a difference in volume depending on the distance of the mic from the sound source, and less general handling noise is audible on playback. The room we recorded in, a small library on the fourth floor of the Natural Science building, was also great. Very quiet and without echo, but not sterile-sounding. I’d like to do all our recording up there!

So the interview is done, and because we’ve switched up the format and will be focusing on one subject per episode, that means all field work for episode 2 is complete. I transcribed the interview before work today and I think Anna plans to start writing the script tonight. If we can get the voice-overs recorded before she leaves for a professional conference next week we should be in good shape to have episode 2 posted pretty close to the first of the month.

It started a few months ago, with the appearance of a UK newspaper article spurred by a study in Germany. The article said bees didn’t return to their hives when cell phones were present, and while some have said it misconstrued the study, the CCD cell phone connection looked too good in a headline not to spread quickly among blog, newspaper, and televised media outlets.

And then the the authors of the original study tersely disavowed that first newspaper article, and it turned out the whole thing wasn’t at all true.

What I find fascinating about the whole fiasco is that such an occurrence is really only possible in this new world of hyper fast and thoroughly globalized communications. If not for the online edition of the Independent, the UK paper that published the article, far fewer people would have read the miscontrued report on the German study, and certainly not with the speed that was possible in Spring, 2007. Similarly, without the increased ease of online publishing making it possible for more people to share ideas, the rumors wouldn’t likely have spread as fast.

I’m certainly not blaming the internet, though. In fact, online communities and tools were also at work dispelling the Independent article as soon as it appeared. This blogger didn’t fall for it, and neither did this one. YouTube has provided an outlet for some critical analysis of it. And the cell phone story couldn’t pass muster with the demanding user-editors on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia.

I think the internet afforded us the ability to spread the misguided article quickly, but it also allowed us to fact-check it and publicly question its authors. Given the choice of both those powers or neither, I’ll certainly take both. If nothing else, it gets a lot of people writing, and I like that.

On Sunday Anna and I took our new microphone to the Bug House at Michigan State University to see what kind of recordings of actual insects we could pick up. The Bug House is an outreach facility open to the public and targeting kids. They’ve got a lot of enclosed exotic bugs for kids to learn about. When Anna spends time there it’s mostly centered on gently asking youngster if they want to hold a giant centipede and reassuring moms the centipede poses no mortal risk.

I bought the microphone, an audio technica short shotgun, hoping that the high sensitvity would allow us to pick up some of the fairly soft noises made in the bug house, such as those of a scorpion scurrying across sand. This mic is similar, I think, to the one my friend Jon Slaght uses to record owls, and by my reasoning, if it’s sensitive enough to record an owl hoot at 100 meters, it should be able to get the pitter-patter of a scorpion at 2 cm. I knew it wasn’t the perfect tool for the job at hand, but I was thinking it would be a good tool to add to the collection. That may have been a naive assumption on my part, though. We managed to get some good stuff, like these Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches, and even the scurrying scorpion is audible, but most bugs didn’t make enough ruckus for the mic to pick up.

Which is too bad, the ability to record insects well was something I was banking on for InsectaPod Cast. I think the cockroaches are loud enough that we could have gotten something similar to the recording above with almost any $100 dynamic mic. I’ve spent some time looking for insect recording setups online, but haven’t found anything we can replicate. Most of the stuff google turns up is about recording loud groups of insects at a distance, such as crickets. If there’s stuff out there about capturing the tiny sounds of solitary bugs, I’d love to hear about it. At this point, it looks like the shotgun mic will be going back.

I have been thinking since we began the interviews about how the topic for each section changes as we go. I arrived at each interview with a set of questions and an outline in my head of what the podcast would cover, but the questions changed and developed as we talked with each interviewee. Upon listening to each interview, I had to re-focus the final script according to what each person we interviewed was most dynamic in discussing. For example, the segment that turned out to really be about beekeeping and managing swarming hives was initially going to be about Colony Collapse Disorder. Terry, however, was much more excited to talk about moving hives, and that is a unique thing that many people have not thought about, while there are plenty of other locations for people to find out about Colony Collapse Disorder. I think ultimately each portion is greatly improved with the focus that the people we talk with bring to it. I have been surprised by how the expertise and excitement each person we talk with brings to the interview changes the product. As a result, I now recognize each interview as something that will help the story unfold.

Anna and I were listening to an NPR report about water quality in natural public swimming areas. The report was from a river in Maryland. Listening, we noticed that the ambient sounds of people laughing and splashing and birds singing was present not just in the outdoor interview sections, but in the narrative portions, as well. It lent a cohesion to the piece, not only allowing us to more easily visualize the scene, but also tying the narrative and field reportage sections together neatly.

One of the more difficult aspects of making InsectaPod Cast is recording usable sounds other than interview and narration. It’s easy to schedule an interview with someone, and easy to stick a mic in front of them after you ask them a question, but much more difficult to ask, “what kinds of ambient sounds accompany your research?” and then get a strong, clean sample of a swarm of bees.

Those sounds lend an invaluable texture to an audio program, though. There are lots of articles on line about the importance of ambient sound in radio. Probably the best one I’ve seen is this one by Robin White published by the Association of Independents in Radio. The article makes compares an audio program without ambient sound to a magazine article without pictures, and warns that, “If you are working on a five minute story, you might want to set aside several hours just for gathering sound.” I’ve read White’s article several times now, and haven’t exhausted its worth. There’s a wealth of information great for not just getting good sound recordings, but demonstrating their importance to others.

But again, we’re left with the problem of getting these ambient sounds that will lend the depth InsectaPod Cast needs to make connections with listeners. What can we record, how can we record it, and how do we explain to interviewees that we need more time with them just to record “background noise?”

Our next scheduled interview is with Elizabeth Tibbetts, a researcher of wasps at the University of Michigan. I’m not sure what we can get for ambient sounds while we’re there. How much noise do wasps make? Maybe (probably) not enough to actually record. If that’s the case, I’m planning to ask her to talk through what she’s doing as she sets up an experiment. I think that fall-back could work well in this instance, but would get tiresome if used regularly.

I think the section in episode 1 where Klein talks in the car about gathering a swarm and then it fades to the sound of the actual swarm is the most interesting part of the episode. Those were the only two usable pieces of ambient sound we recorded for that episode. Originally we’d scripted the bed bugs section first, but moved them around so the klein-in-the-car clip could appear in the first few minutes. I’m pleased with the way that worked out, but am also hoping to have more options for ambient sound when scripting future episodes.

I’ve been aware of Bugcast, a video podcast from Iowa State University Entomologists Marlin Rice and Doug Cooper for a while now. They’ve made asian lady beetles, soybean aphids and corn root worms the subject of their bugcasts, which are always accessible, succinct and informative. In fact, one of the things I like most about Bugcast is that although it is an unscripted discussion between two scientists, it’s never plodding or pedantic. Cooper’s and Marlin’s voices display an ease and comfort I hope will be evident in future episodes of InsectaPod Cast.

I gained a deeper interest in Bugcast today, though, when I started looking behind the veil a bit. Iowa State University Extension produces a slew of both audio and video podcasts, and they’ve all got top-notch production. They have a web page listing all their extension podcasts and churn out several new episodes each week.

Here at Michigan State University, our podcasting efforts don’t have that centralization. The College of Agriculture and Natural Resources does some nice video production work for select events. The Extension page offers video and audio promos, and Turfgrass Science offers Turf Tips and Clippings. It’s interesting that there’s no online space that offers a comprehensive list of these efforts, though. Or University unit providing technical support to the people who make them. Maybe there’s a place at MSU for some growth in this area?

I think new media communications efforts can only be made stronger if there is a support structure for those interested in exploring them. Not just for funding and tech advice, but simply to instill confidence in students, faculty, and staff that podcasts and the like are worth producing.

I read an interesting podcast transcript about podcasting at universities today. James Frey, an IT guy at Rice University, touched on several of the goals of InsectPod Cast in “The Top 6 Reasons to Podcast at a University” and also outlines other applications and strengths for podcasting in a university setting.

His first reason is recruitment and enrollment. Frey points out that podcasting not only raises an institution’s profile, but also works to create a more personal communication experience for listeners. Podcast listeners are more likely to feel they’ve shared something with a university than those simply reading print recruitment materials.

Frey also argues that podcasting can improve the lines of communication between and among a university and it’s faculty, staff and students. Podcasting can be an effective outlet for students to learn creatively. One of the most impressive statements he makes, though, is the need to podcast courses.

Recording classes digitally and posting them is quite easy: I am sure your Audio Visual Technicians and IT Unit will be able to help if you desire to do this. In my research, podcasting your courses shows only positive results. Intending students can get a flavour of your classes and existing students can participate in podcast discussions thus raising their self esteem. The effectiveness of podcasted lectures is enhanced because students can rehear them; it’s simple but true.

He also speaks directly to the concern that making course materials available outside of the lecture hall will result in more empty seats (something I’ve heard from some faculty members here at MSU). In his own experience, Frey says, podcasting, “has no negative effect on attendance at lectures.”

One reason to podcast that Frey does not address is extension and outreach. This is the primary goal of InsectaPod Cast, and I’m interested to know if he overlooked extension or does not believe podcasting to be effective tool for connecting the university generated information with the general public. Clearly, I believe there is a great potential for podcasting in extension, but I can also see that it might be an even stronger tool for development and coursework.

Another thing worth mentioning about Frey is that he’s practicing what he preaches. The Podcast “The Top 6 Reasons to Podcast at a University” was part of a continuing education course he taught at Rice. The blog on which he posted the transcript was devoted to the same course, and shares information with his podcast blog, “The How and Why of Podcasting“