Lights, Camera, Experiment!

theodp writes: The New Yorker's Jamie Holmes takes a look at How Methods Videos Are Making Science Smarter, helping scientists replicate elaborate experiments in a way that the text format of traditional journals simply can't. The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE), for instance, is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that now has a database of more than four thousand videos that are usually between ten and fifteen minutes long, ranging in subject from biology and chemistry to neuroscience and medicine. "Complexity was always an issue," JOVE co-founder, Moshe Pritsker explains. "Even when biology was a much smaller enterprise, it relied on a degree of specialized craft in the laboratory. But, since the end of the nineties, we've seen a huge influx of new technologies into biology: genomics, proteomics, technologies like microarrays, complex genetic methods, and sophisticated microscopy and imaging techniques." And, as the popularity of the decidedly non-peer reviewed Crazy Russian Hacker's YouTube videos shows, methods videos aren't just for research scientists.

Comments

Is literacy a problem in science, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mistakes and entertainment notwithstanding, I'm saddened by the dumbing down of the written language through the introduction of video. On the other hand, some people are just bad writers. More labs should employ technical writers, just as the employ illustrators and other specialists.

Re:Is literacy a problem in science, too?

[Calydor]

Text has its place. Video has its place.

For a lot of things, especially where you need to be able to search for something, text is far superior. For stuff like this, I would really hope they maintain text as the main focus, with videos to show proof-of-concept for lack of a better term. Details are much easier seen than imagined, after all.

Re:Is literacy a problem in science, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

"More labs should employ technical writers, just as the employ illustrators and other specialists."

What labs employ technical writers or illustrators? I've been doing science for 20 years and have yet to encounter anyone who has used a technical writer or illustrator.

Re:Is literacy a problem in science, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

we have illustrators at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They're wonderful.

realistically speaking, I suspect that large companies have these things. Why should I, who am a terrible artist, struggle with ppt or visio or whatever, for hours and hours, when someone who actually knows what they are doing can do it in an hour. I can do the sketch on the whiteboard, sit with the artist for a few minutes to explain, and in a couple days, have something that really explains what I was trying to say.

Likewise, large companies have people who do budgets and schedules. Sure, I can use MS project and such, but that's not an efficient use of my time. I have domain specific knowledge that is useful, and spending my hours doing things which someone else can do doesn't leave me as much time to do what only *I* can do.

It's hard, very hard, to learn how to use such resources. The tendency is "It would take me less time to do it myself, than to explain to X what I need done". But that philosophy is inherently limiting. "I'd rather carve stone blocks and pile them myself, because I know where they go" will never build a pyramid.

Fine if you're making limited scope software for yourself on your own schedule, but knowing how to effectively distribute the work to other specialists is where it's at.

Re:Is literacy a problem in science, too?

[oheso]

They're particularly addressing reproducibility and demonstrating new lab techniques. Sometimes it's far easier to demonstrate something than to describe it in ways that are not susceptible to misinterpretation.

Re:Is literacy a problem in science, too?

[turbidostato]

"we have illustrators at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They're wonderful."

Not because of the sci part but because of the PR one, so they don't count.

Re:Is literacy a problem in science, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

> just as the employ illustrators and other specialists

*they

Re:Is literacy a problem in science, too?

[Teleshop]

its really difficult to understands http://www.stepupheightincreas...

And in other breaking news...

[Anonymous Coward]

YouTube videos help me fix my car and household appliances! This is a seachange in home repair technology. The revolution is upon us.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

[LifesABeach]

Maybe one day JOVE will consider Home Depot, and Ikea? After that, I believe they will need more servers.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

I declined their invitation to do a video of my "methods" as I just see it as a remonitization of already available content. The context in which the methods are published matters as well. And finally: if it is not open access then go shove off. People have already paid for it and I do not need another 'copyright' holder for it.

Re: Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar experience and thought it was kind of scammy. It was also obscenely expensive and at the researchers' expense. I'm talking thousands of dollars...

Handy

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, video disseminations of experiments seem like an obvious next step. They make it easier to reproduce the experiment, or at least to understand why the original experimenter had differenty results, or to analyse and possibly scrutinize these results. Something similar thing happens in my own field (digital signal processing), where authors are starting to publish the code needed to reproduce computer simulations. Having code available increases the incentive to try to reproduce the author's results. I expect the same thing from videos.

I have always treated JoVE as a scam journal

[students]

The reason is they are among the many low quality journals which send me spam asking me to submit papers. Admittedly, their spam is better written than most I get.