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

#CTSAs coming together to reduce complexity of Byzantine research with communications plan #ckfc2013—
  (@SCTRinstitute) April 04, 2013

See slide by Awareness Wking Grp: Data Collection – How do you learn about #CTSA successes? #cKFC2013 http://t.co/gI2CEsJhkD—
CTSI at UCSF (@CTSIatUCSF) April 04, 2013

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

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

#cKFC2013 Day 2: Community Engagement / PI storytelling w/ @UNMhsc CTSC Dr. Nina Wallerstein, Dr. Deborah helitzer http://t.co/Dy09IUV5Fg—
CTSI at UCSF (@CTSIatUCSF) April 05, 2013

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

At the @AMIAinformatics #TBICRI13 conference? Learn how to improve @VIVOcollab & Profiles during the Infrastructure 1 session from 1:30-3:00—
CTSI at UCSF (@CTSIatUCSF) March 21, 2013

#LinkedData in #tbicri13 – Open Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG)—
Ali Anıl Sınacı (@aasinaci) March 21, 2013

Meeks: Facebook wins consumer space, so OpenSocial moves to enterprise #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Meeks: ORNG is combination of VIVO data standard with the OpenSocial application standard #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Meeks: “now researchers *might* have friends…” #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Meeks: See ORNG apps online at orng.info #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Meeks: Converting VIVO RDF to JSON to make it accessible by HTML/JS apps for research networking #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Check Eric Hand's Live Long & Prosper gestures. That right hand is clearly Vulcan!! #tbicri13—
tideliar (@Tideliar) March 21, 2013

Meeks’ wall of smiley faces explain what research networking is #TBICRI13 http://t.co/O07URBS3PA—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Meeks: In-context Lindsay Lohan reference. First at #TBICRI13?—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

#tbicri13 Meeks just reffed Nature Network hahaha, i used towrite there. MT4for the #fail #RIP—
tideliar (@Tideliar) March 21, 2013

Meeks: Researchers’ data is all over the web. ORNG can aggregate and present data from multiple data sources. #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Meeks: examples of ORNG apps, pulling in Twitter, YouTube, personalized context, and ORNG relevancy engine #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

@ORNGinfo I'm trying not to confuse oranges. orange.biolab.si #tbicri13 #datamining #socialmedia—
John (@nocx) March 21, 2013

Meeks: ORNG is combination of VIVO data standard with the OpenSocial application standard #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Meeks: ORNG allows online collaboration between Profiles/@VIVOcollab with enterprise tools, eg UCSF’s Salesforce Chatter instance #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Audience question: Can anyone write a gadget? Meeks: Yes, even a business school student can do it. #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Meeks: Easy to embed external widgets into Profiles and @VIVOcollab with ORNG. #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

Totally inspired by informatics I session at #tbicri13!! Tonight's plan = find Wifi, get hacking, have fun, #mfj—
tideliar (@Tideliar) March 21, 2013

Thanks for great questions! Learn how to add apps to Profiles/VIVO w/ORNG: orng.info or Eric.Meeks at ucsf dot edu #TBICRI13—
ORNG (@ORNGinfo) March 21, 2013

It made me think about how we communicate with people interested in accelerating biomedical research – do we employ a unique language pattern? On the flip side: How should our language change when trying to reach a wider audience (outside our social network), engage new communities and partners?

EPJ Abstract
Background: Language has functions that transcend the transmission of information and varies with social context. To find out how language and social network structure interlink, we studied communication on Twitter, a broadly-used online messaging service.

Results: We show that the network emerging from user communication can be structured into a hierarchy of communities, and that the frequencies of words used within those communities closely replicate this pattern. Consequently, communities can be characterised by their most significantly used words. The words used by an individual user, in turn, can be used to predict the community of which that user is a member.

Conclusions: This indicates a relationship between human language and social networks, and suggests that the study of online communication offers vast potential for understanding the fabric of human society. Our approach can be used for enriching community detection with word analysis, which provides the ability to automate the classification of communities in social networks and identify emerging social groups.

People can get pretty addicted to computer games. By some estimates, residents of planet Earth spend 3 billion hours per week playing them. Now some scientists are hoping to make use of all that human capital and harness it for a good cause. Read more…

The Center has already launched a signature project—the Open Science Framework, allowing scientists to store and share all aspects of their work.

A news story at NationalGeographic.com notes: “failed experiments, the minutiae of methods, the genesis of ideas… these are often omitted from published papers or left to languish in personal file drawers. That creates strong biases in the literature, and makes it harder for people to check and reproduce each other’s work.”

It adds that the Center is “less about doing great science than about making science greater. It will try to foster a new approach to research that will produce more reliable results.”

Via telegraph.co.uk

Scientists have recorded data including Shakespearean sonnets and an MP3 file on strands of DNA, in a breakthrough which could see millions of records stored on a handful of molecules rather than computer drives. Read more

via http://blog.visual.ly/ (hat tip Leslie Yuan)

2012 has been a great year for all kinds of data visualizations. Data owners are realizing that the best way to communicate the insights buried in their data is by visualizing it. This means there have been tons of great static infographics, motion graphics, and interactive visualizations created this year. Here’s a roundup of some of the best.

Imagine trying to learn biology without ever using the word “organism.” Or studying to become a botanist when the only way of referring to photosynthesis is to spell the word out, letter by painstaking letter.

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:

• Digging Deeper into Wavelength and EGP Data: Finding Interest Clusters in MailChimp’s Network

CTSI at UCSF has invested in increasing the usage and usability of UCSF Profiles, our research networking system. Based on our presentation at the 2012 IKFC meeting, here are our top 5 technical tips on how to increase the impact of your institution’s investment in research networking platforms, based on our past three years of work.

1. Measure

You can’t understand how you’re doing without measuring usage.

• Install Google Analytics, then learn how to use this incredibly powerful tool (make sure to segment on-campus vs. off-campus traffic by setting up advanced segments based on service provider)
• Register your site on Google Webmaster Tools to understand how search engines see your data

2. Optimize for search engines

UCSF Profiles gets over 50,000 visits a month. 72% of that traffic comes from search engines, primarily Google. Here’s how to increase traffic from search engines:

• Implement a sitemap containing links to all your people profile pages, and make sure Google sees it using Google Webmaster Tools
• Add a readable meta description (e.g. “Jane Doe’s profile, publications, research topics, and co-authors”) to your profile pages so they look better in search engine results
• Add Schema.org data about your people on people profile pages
• Advanced: use rel=canonical to prevent different versions of the same content from being indexed

3. Build inbound links

Linking is a critical way to both increase site traffic, and to signal importance to search engines.

• Get websites large and small at your institution to link to your site (two years after launch, there are over 100 websites at UCSF that link to one or more pages on Profiles)
• Encourage heavy linking to individual profile pages, e.g. from the campus directory, news articles, departmental profiles

4. Reuse data

Your research profiling system comes with APIs. Encouraging campus-wide reuse of this data can increase the impact of your investment. See opendata.profiles.ucsf.edu to see how UCSF is marketing this data.

• Learn how to use your system’s APIs, so you can share that experience with others
• Publicly document how the APIs work, and include sample source code
• Reach out to campus technologists and webmasters to demonstrate how easy it is for them to reuse your data (e.g. the inclusion of Profiles data in UCSF’s mobile app was the result of technologist outreach)
• Reach out to campus leaders to show them what kind of efficiencies they can gain by reusing your data (e.g. the inclusion of links to researcher profiles on the UCSF Directory was the result of a strategic partnership)

5. Extend with ORNG (advanced)

ORNG (OpenSocial Research Networking Gadgets) is a plugin system that allows you to add new apps into instances of Profiles or VIVO. Apps are written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and are easy to share and reuse.

• Install ORNG (OpenSocial) into your copy of Profiles or VIVO
  
• Add new apps from the ORNG library of free apps
• Write your own apps — most JavaScript programmers can get started in hours

Good luck! Feel free to leave comments and questions on this post—we’re happy to share what we know.

P.S. Thinking about how to make your campus equipment/services more discoverable? Try UCSF’s Plumage, the open source platform behind UCSF Cores Search.

Photo credit: digitonin via photopin cc