CTSA 2013 Annual Face to Face: The Power of Storytelling

April 9, 2013 by Leave a comment

Hosted by: University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center (HSC) in cooperation with UNM’s Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC)

This year’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) communications key function committee (CKFC) Annual Face to Face  focused on the critical role of storytelling to lift research of out its silos to a wider audience.

Richard Larson, MD, PhD, UNM HSC Vice Chancellor for Research compared communicators to ambassadors of information – after all, “research ignored is research wasted.”

Purpose/Objectives of the Annual F2F:

  • Increase understanding and support of NCATS and NIH priorities
  • Improve awareness of CTSA value, dissemination of key information, and collaboration among key stakeholders across the consortium
  • Inspire CKFC members through new connections, skill building, clear direction, and storytelling

Here’s a selection of tweets by CTSA communicators during the two-day conference:

https://twitter.com/UChicagoITM/status/319819234475659264

https://twitter.com/UM_MICHR/status/319846414224068608

https://twitter.com/CTSIatUCSF/status/319831016518848512

https://twitter.com/CTSIatUCSF/status/319844614490173440

https://twitter.com/UM_MICHR/status/319845192242978816

https://twitter.com/CTSIatUCSF/status/319861291940462592

https://twitter.com/lifesciwriter/status/319956821639057408

https://twitter.com/lifesciwriter/status/319912641642516480

Learn more about the 2013 CTSA cKFC annual meeting:
Day 1 video & presentations
Day 2 video & presentations

Filed under Communications, CTSI at UCSF, Print Media, Public Outreach, Research, Research Impact, Social Media, Twitter, Upcoming Conference, Video on the Web, Visualizations

How Mailchimp uses network analysis

December 3, 2012 by Leave a comment

An example of Mailchimp mailing list clustering by readership overlap — “Fantasy sports! Guns! And flowers, for what I can only assume are apologies for doing something stupid with the first two.”

I sometimes forget what a powerful tool network analysis is. Mailchimp, a popular email newsletter provider, used several standard network analysis tools to look at subscribers to mailing lists using their platform, to calculate similarities between both subscribers and lists.

Read more:

Filed under Research Networking, Social Networking, Visualizations

Measuring federal social media interaction rates—and how UCSF fares

April 16, 2012 by 1 Comment

I love Expert Labs‘ new Federal Social Media Index, a unified dashboard of Twitter interaction stats for 125 different federal agencies. The effort itself is quite impressive, but the stats are even better.

Most agencies have a large number of followers, but a minuscule number of people actually responding to queries. If the point of social media is to be social, agencies are doing a fairly poor job.

How are UCSF Twitter accounts faring? I tried searching Twitter for replies to queries from several UCSF accounts from the morning of April 10 to the morning of April 14 (this excludes retweets and mentions).

The results?

  • @ucsf: 0 replies
  • @ctsiatucsf: 1 reply (a thank you from the UCSF library)
  • @gladstonelabs: 1 reply (a thank you from Bay Area Malaria)
  • @ucsf_library: 0 replies
  • @ucsfdentistry: 0 replies
  • @ucsfmedicine: 0 replies

For better or for worse, we’re doing about as well as the federal government.

Read more:

Filed under Communications, Social Media, Twitter, Visualizations

“Visible Tweets”: A Free Animation Tool To Display Twitter Messages In Public Spaces

March 26, 2012 by 2 Comments

CTSI’s visibility on Twitter is growing – thanks to the tweets from CTSI programs and people like Anirvan (see his latest post AMIA 2012 Joint Summit: a report back in tweets).

But how can we leverage and highlight this activity, for example at upcoming events (retreats, conferences, symposia, etc.)? “Visible Tweets” is a great tool to do just that. Type in a search term, for example @CTSIatUCSF, and go…

Try it!

Tweets fly in and out… Here is an example.

Filed under Communications, Twitter, Visualizations Tagged with , ,

Surprise: Twitter unpopular with scholars

October 18, 2011 by 3 Comments

Jason Priem, Kaitlin Costello, and Tyler Dzuba, graduate students from UNC, examined Twitter usage for over 8000 scholars from five American and British universities.

The results? Sorry Twitter. Scholars are just not that into you.

Read more:

Filed under Twitter, Visualizations

Take Advantage of Web-Based Tools to Present Complex Data

September 14, 2011 by

Research to Action published a great overview article that highlights an “ever-growing open-data source for development statistics in the fields of economics, healthcare, education, social science, technology,” and more.

Including data and statistics within research findings can enhance their impact, however, large tables or spreadsheets of numbers take time to decipher and sometimes the true meaning behind the data itself can be misinterpreted.

Here are some of the tools that the article points out:

  • StatPlanet: browser-based interactive data visualization and mapping application to create a wide range of visualizations, from simple Flash maps to more advanced infogrpahics.
  • Xtimeline:  to create your own timelines of data.
  • Gap Minder: to upload data and create an interactive motion charts and graphs.
  • Creately:  to use Online Diagramming software – purpose built for team collaboration.
  • Google Chart Tools: lets you include constantly changing research data sourced online. Google has also released Fusion Tables where you can share, discuss and track your charts and graphs with specific people online.
  • Tagcrowd: to upload texts and highlight the most common concepts. The clouds can be exported as images and inserted in a website or power point presentation.
  • Wordle: similar to tagcloud; lets you create images out of key phrases and words relevant to your research, great for using in PowerPoint presentations.
  • Tableau: a free Windows-only software for creating colourful data visualisations.

View all and read the original article

Filed under Communications, Open Science, Research Tools, Visualizations

Cigarette warning labels around the world

June 23, 2011 by

The FDA’s new cigarette warning labels have been getting a lot of buzz, underscoring the role of design in public health communication. The new designs take up half the cigarette pack, and 20% of the size of ads. According to the Wall Street Journal, the FDA estimates that the design will reduce the number of smokers by over 200,000 in the first year after launch, based on the impact of new warning labels in Canada.

Cigarette Health Warning ImagesCigarette Health Warning ImagesCigarette Health Warning ImagesCigarette Health Warning Images

There are a variety of approaches to tobacco packaging warnings, but bold graphic warnings are clearly the emerging international consensus. Here are some examples from around the world:

Brazil:
Cigarette warning labels

Thailand:
Gruesome

Click to see more…

Filed under Communications, Print Media, Public Outreach, Visualizations

Compelling Video Describes New Visualization Tool “Many Eyes”

May 11, 2011 by

It can be challenging to create animated video that conveys a complex message. Here is a great example that shows it’s doable – mind you, without a single spoken word.

A 60 second social story about developing and refining ideas, gaining insight and sharing through community; all based on the premise that many sets of eyes are better than one!

Take a look and let me know what you think. – Btw, the visualization tool “Many Eyes“, developed by IBM, is worth a look as well.

Filed under Collaboration Tools, Communications, Crowdsourcing, Video on the Web, Visualizations

Interactive Biomedical Data Visualization

April 15, 2011 by

TripleMap

Continuing our theme of visualization, it looks like some pretty interesting tools are continuing to be developed.  One example is called TripleMap:

TripleMap is a data-driven software framework which gives biomedical research scientists access to massive interconnected networks of life science data. Using TripleMap you can analyze, visualize and share this information by creating “maps” of associated data which are relevant to your research.

…

Using a proprietary algorithm called Inferential Connectivity Analysis (ICA), TripleMap can identify connections for you between any two entities in its network. Want to know about potential connections between a protein and a disease? Want to know about potential connections between a compound and a cellular pathway? With ICA, TripleMap can perform a comprehensive, “deep” traversal of the entire TripleMap data network and identify any connecting entities. How powerful is identification of novel connections? It can be the difference between success and failure, novel insight and (less than) blissful ignorance.

Although they’re still in a closed “alpha” mode, the developer told me that they will be integrating the MedDRA ontology into it over the weekend, and he’ll send me a trial code early next week.  I’ll post a follow-up after I give it a try.

Filed under Research Tools, Visualizations

visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks

April 14, 2011 by 1 Comment

visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks.

I found an interesting site for interesting visualizations of networks… here’s their description of what this site is about:

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Filed under Research Networking, Visualizations

Visualizations vary

February 25, 2011 by

Visualizations aren’t set in stone. Five network visualization developers recently did a cook-off at University College Dublin’s Visual Analysis of Complex Networks workshop, each using his or her own tools to represent a large dataset of college Facebook friendship data.

The results and conclusions are wildly different, reflecting the art and science of extracting and visualizing meaning.

Link

Filed under Visualizations

Scientific collaboration, visualized

February 11, 2011 by 1 Comment

Olivier H. Beauchesne from Science-Metrix designed a lovely map visualization of intra-institutional collaborations, as measured by publication data from sources like Scopus and Web of Science. Read Olivier’s blog post about the data and his methods or view a zoomable map.

Global

Europe

India

USA

Link

Filed under Research Networking, Visualizations

A Tool to See How Others View our Website

January 7, 2010 by

Last month we launched our new home page. We pondered about what content should be above the fold, and how the new design will play out using different browsers. At that time, I did not know about the new tool Browser Size launched by Googlelabs. Browser Size makes it possible to test how others view our page, taking in account different sizes of monitors, browsers that are not always full screen and toolbars. It looks like a helful tool to save time during testing across browsers.

Here is how it works according to the creators: “Special code collects data on the height and width of the browser for a sample of users. For a given point in the browser, the tool will tell you what percentage of users can see it. For example, if an important button is in the 80% region it means that 20% of users have to scroll in order to see it.”

Keep reading at Introducing Google Browser Size

Filed under Visualizations, Web Analytics, Web Design

The North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute Launches Website

July 6, 2009 by 2 Comments

I think this is an interesting example for a CTSI website.  Several graphical elements are used on the site.

I like the Research Services Page that includes a graphical element guiding to “Contact an Expert”. I also find the Find a Collaborator Page useful. Take a look!

Filed under Communications, Visualizations, Web Design

Text Miners: The “Power of Semantic Enhancement”

May 5, 2009 by

I find this an excellent example how a basic review article originally published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases can be enriched in its content. Even though this might be more relevant to general knowledge management, I would be interested in exploring whether we could apply some of these tools to the Virtual Home portal.

Computational biologists used tagged terms such as disease names, institutions, places, people, organisms, which can be turned off and on. If you click on document summary you will find not only a study summary, but also a tag cloud of highlighted terms, tag trees of individual semantic classes of highlighted terms, ontology terms, document statistics, and a citation analysis.

As Evie Browne, Publication Manager, PLoS Computational Biology writes: “With a single click you can re-arrange the reference list by number of times each paper is cited, or add in the authors’ analysis of how the reference is used in the paper (obtains background from, confirms, extends, shares authors with, uses method in). The group has also provided interactive versions of some of the figures: compare the original, static Figure 3 to the moveable, overlaying, enhanced version.”

More information about semantic publishing is available in the original article.

Filed under Visualizations

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