Julia Strand 0:02 Hello, and welcome to the juice and the squeeze. I'm Julia Strand here, as always with my co host, Jonathan Peelle. Hey Jonathan. Jonathan Peelle 0:09 Hi, Julia! Julia Strand 0:10 We've got something a little bit special for you this week, dear listeners. Jonathan and I recently participated in presentation "at" (with air quotes around it) virtually at the University of Connecticut, in a with a group, a training grant called the science of learning and the art of communication. And we were presenting on our own experiences with science communication, doing, among other things, this podcast, and we recorded that session, which includes us talking a little bit about the podcast, and and answering questions and other forms of science communication. So for our episode, this week, we are going to air that conversation. Jonathan Peelle 0:52 And away we go. Jonathan Peelle 0:55 Thank you so much, we are really happy to be here, we're excited to get the invitation and very eager to hear from you and share our experiences. So to kick us off, I want to tell about the first experience that I had of really thinking about communicating science to people who no different than different different things than than I do about it. Julia Strand 1:17 So I, my PhD is in cognitive psychology, but I ended up in a postdoc in biomedical engineering. And so I was entering this field that I had basically no background, and I had never taken an engineering class. And and I was kind of out of my depth in that regard. So that the research project that I was working on, was looking at, Julia Strand 1:40 it was a project looking at how people perceive speech, and using nursing neuroimaging. And the project was done with me, a cognitive psychologist, a biomedical engineer, and a brain surgeon. And it's like a joke grant, a cognitive psychologist and a brain surgeon and a biomedical engineer walk into a bar and try to have a conversation. And we were talking about, we're working on a project looking at how, how information about word frequency is represented in the brain. And when I say word frequency, what I was talking about was the frequency with which words occur in the language like how common words are. The biomedical engineer thought when I said frequency, I meant like the pitch like, are they high frequency or low frequency, and the brain surgeon thought I was talking about like, like brain oscillations that frequency. And so we were all very confused for a while, until we realized that we didn't have shared vocabulary. And we had to explain things to one another. in ways that didn't involve jargon, right, we had a shared interest, but no shared background. Julia Strand 2:46 And this was a really interesting experience for me to think about, taking what I know, making it accessible to someone else, who is smart and thoughtful, but just knows different stuff. And it was particularly interesting, because this wasn't a case of trying to convey science to someone who knows less about it than I do. Right. It's, it's to convey it to someone who knows different about it than I do. And I think that's a very nice way of thinking about science communication, generally right? To avoid kind of having feeling like you're dumbing things down. But instead of being like, this person knows something different. How am I going to get from from here to there. Um, so now I teach at a small liberal arts college. And because I'm at an institution that really prioritizes teaching, and my research team consists of undergraduates who have never had any research experience before coming to me, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to explain big and complicated ideas to people who have less experience thinking with them. So I think being kind of coming from an interdisciplinary perspective, and then working with you know, in some cases, the 18 year olds who are fresh out of high school and trying to teach them how to be thoughtful, rigorous scientists, really has has kind of formed how I think about these issues. I've also volunteered with science outreach and science advocacy organizations. So when I was in grad school I worked with at the St. Louis Academy of Science in the St. Louis Science Center, or thinking about how to make science accessible to the general public. And these days, most of the work that I do with science communication is not about, Hey, I did this cool study, let me tell you about it, but rather, is focused on communicating information about the process of science and the structure of academia more meta science issues, and I'm making techniques that I use both in research and in teaching accessible to make it easier for other people to use those. So that's a bit of the background about me and kind of what where I am coming to to this point in my career in terms of science communication. Jonathan Peelle 4:55 Alright, so. So it's my turn and I have a confession to make, which is: if you asked me to describe myself, you know sort of vocationally or job wise, science communicator would not be near the top of the list. In fact, I don't think I would, until recently have put it on the list at all. So please don't uninvite me from this session on science communication. I have headphones and a microphone. And so clearly I know what I'm doing. That's a joke. Thank you. So, you know, but my point is that a lot of my entry into science communication has been sort of unintentional. And I've gradually gotten more intentional as I've progressed in my career. And I think one point that, you know, if you only take one point away from from what we say today, maybe it could be that we're all science communicators, whether we admit it or not, or whether we write it down or not, because we're all scientists, we're doing work. we're communicating it through publishing and conferences, and whether we choose to communicate that other ways, too, is sort of sort of up to us. So So looking back in my PhD, so I started my PhD in 2000. So actually, I've been communicating science for 20 years, which makes me feel old, but it's true. Jonathan Peelle 6:16 And in my PhD lab, we studied cognitive aging, and we recruited healthy, older adults from the community who would come in for our projects. And one of the things that we were really intentional about was to try to communicate our research results back to our participants. And this was sort of, you know, there were a couple of motivations for this one was sort of morally, we wanted to tell them what we found because of their volunteering. But we also found that kind of practically, people were much more interested in coming in and recruiting their friends if they felt more part of what we were doing. And they were sort of partnering and in the process. So as part of my PhD lab, we had an annual newsletter that we summarized research findings from the lab. And we also had an annual open house where we invited our research participants in for a day or half a day. And we had a series of talks by the graduate students and the P eyes of the lab to talk about various studies. And in a way, so I thought it was great. And I really liked that approach. It was a little bit unfair, because because that was my PhD lab, and I was so impressionable. It didn't seem like anything unusual, right? So it wasn't like someone put a headline of you will now be a science communicator. And we did that stuff. It was just part of how we how we did things. So I think that was formative. But also, I almost sort of took it for granted. And so later in my career, I've had to be more intentional about it. Fast forward a few years. So I joined, I will not bore you with the story. And it's really it's not very interesting at all. But if you look on my Twitter profile, I joined in something like 2006, which is early in Twitter days, for reasons unrelated to science. I was like interested in web design and like geeky web stuff. And so I joined Twitter, and I never did much with it. During a postdoc, I decided that I should be more intentional about meeting other scientists. Some people call it networking, Julia hates the word networking. So I try not to use it. But But you all know what I mean. So connecting with other people doing similar research. And so as a postdoc, I started being much more intentional about connecting with other scientists through Twitter. And maybe a little bit later, we'll talk about how that has changed over the years. And so that was one avenue. Once I started my own lab, I had a webpage. And I also did a little bit of blogging, that which I enjoyed, because I enjoy writing that's fallen off since we've had children, I feel like I've had less time. And that's sort of one of the things I've cut out. But that was another sort of way I tried to help communicate with a broader audience. And then for the last year and a half or so Julia and I have been doing a podcast together, the juices have squeezed, which is sort of our kind of probably where I put most of my, my current efforts at communication. Julia Strand 9:14 I'm happy to answer the question in the chat about why I dislike the word "networking", I don't like it because it has that kind of like, smarmy business speak of like, like this, this is a thing that you have to do because it will because it's going to benefit your career. And like the context that people often talk about it in is like networking is important for success. And you know that it's like a thing you have to it's like on your checklist of like I must write this paper I must get a grant I must network. And what what networking is to me and we have a podcast episode about this is just making friends with people who have shared interests, right. And so if you're at a conference I really like making friends with people who are interested in speech perception, because then we can talk about speech perception together. And it may end up that then they are a useful person to know because, you know, we can write a paper together or submit a grant together or something. But the motivation is that it's fun to have friends who have shared interests. And I think going into it with that attitude makes it less scary, and more familiar, right? we all we all, you know, have experience making friends in other less intimidating contexts. Julia Strand 10:31 Which brings us to the podcast Yes. So the, our podcasts which you can find more information about at juiceandsqueeze.net. We started in order to try and make information about academia, that is often hard to get or inaccessible, more broadly accessible. So, um, there's, there's a lot of information that we convey to our students, because they come into our office and they say, I'm struggling with this thing. Can you help explain to me why I have imposter syndrome, or how I should apply to graduate school, or how I should keep myself organized? Or how I should outline a writing project? And you know, and so all of us who supervise students regularly have these conversations with students. And at some point, you know, I realized that the only students who are getting that information from me are the ones who happened to be at Carleton happened to be in psychology, happened to be taking my classes, and happened to have like, the confidence in social capital to knock on my door or make an appointment and ask me these questions. And so so I was kind of eager to share that more widely. And it kind of been like floating around in the back of my head. And I had thought about doing a blog, but you know, busy and all of that. And then and then Jonathan sent a message and said, I think we should do a podcast. And I said, Yes, this is perfect like this is this is a great opportunity for kind of breaking down some of the barriers to accessing information in academia. So so much of what we do in academia, and so much of what we learn as an undergrad in graduate school, and postdocs and faculty positions are like the unwritten rules, right, and like the kind of secret behind the scenes stuff that is just whispered down through the generations. But anything that is whisper down through the generations is going to inevitably be whispered in systematic ways that are not necessarily inclusive, right, that are prioritizing the people who are already in power, and so are our topics. we've, we've varied a lot in the topics that we've covered, but the kind of underlying goal is just opening up the doors and giving access to information more broadly. What have I forgotten, Jonathan? Jonathan Peelle 12:58 No, I think that's good. I mean, you know, and so one of the things he wanted to talk about is sort of like, the pros and cons of different methods of communication, and maybe why, why we've chosen some, some methods over others. And so maybe I'll just talk a little bit about, like, why we started, or why I was interested in doing a podcast, I think it kind of has broader implications. So it's not a very deep reason, it's that I was listening to a lot of podcasts, and I was enjoying listening to them. And I enjoyed, I often walk to work. And so I'd have, you know, 20 to 40 minutes of time while I'm walking. And sometimes I like to think and other times, I like to listen to a podcast. And so, you know, day after day, I'm listening to other people talk about stuff, and I'm thinking, you know what, I like that, but I wish there was something that would apply it more to, you know, to my job, or to my life. So this is a very selfish motivation. And so I also, you know, Julia and I also like the idea of bringing together multiple perspectives, because we're at different institutions and different types of institutions. And we have overlap in our research, but we also sort of, you know, don't do exactly the same thing, and we don't want to have as the same way, so. So we thought it would be kind of a natural way of getting to know how each other do things, but also just share that with with a broader audience. So my point is, it came out of our own existing interest in podcasts, sort of like as consumers, and kind of appreciating the the medium, and then then kind of changing to, to being a producer of it. And so I think that, you know, being a being a consumer, maybe consumers like not the right word here, but being a listener of a podcast, I sort of knew what I liked and knew what I didn't like. And so then when, when, when I'm talking to Julia, about what we should do, I have like opinions about it. Whereas for example, oh, what's a good medium that I know absolutely about.. TikTok! There are a lot of really great science communicators on TikTok, and I don't spend time on TikTok. So if I was going to do that, like, I would probably not jump in day one, make a whole bunch of TikToks and share them with the world because I have no idea, like how the community works and what people like and what people don't like, and, and do I use subtitles or emoji or whatever, I have no idea. So that wouldn't be a good way to jump in, I think it's good to jump into something that you already have a connection to and can understand the, you know, the culture and the community a little bit. Julia Strand 15:36 One of the other things that that has been fun about doing this podcast with Jonathan is that before we started, we didn't know each other very well, like we knew each other professionally a bit and like, liked and respected each other enough to know that we would want to do this kind of project but hadn't had very much just one on one time together. And that that's has been really useful. Because when I say hey, Jonathan, what do you think about this? I actually don't know. So so it's not this kind of scripted like, well, now for some debate about Julia thinks this, Jonathan thinks this, we're actually kind of discovering it together, which is, which is fun too, Jonathan Peelle 16:10 And every once in a while, we actually disagree about things that we don't anticipate. So I'll, I'm going to make this up, right, I'll make a profound statement about something. And there's a pause. And Julia says, actually, I think about it completely the opposite way, which which, of course is fine, because we're, we're friends, and we're respectful to each other. But that's actually that's always kind of fun, when that happens. Julia Strand 16:33 It's also I'm much more comfortable doing doing a podcast where I say what I think about the structure of academia with with somebody else there. Because if I say something that's totally out of line, I know that Jonathan will call me on it. And I don't have to worry as much about just, you know, putting something out into the world that has something egregious that I haven't thought of, it's it, you know, at least been peer reviewed by one person who I trust. And so I think that's, that can kind of be a way of like lowering a barrier to entry in terms of doing science communication, is to not feel like you're doing it all by yourself, which I think can it can be scary. One of the other perks of a podcast is I think that everyone is understanding that it is not intended to be like a polished reference for other people to refer to, right, it's casual, it's unscripted, it's off the cuff. And so I feel like people are less likely to be extremely critical to be extremely critical of something that you have said, when you're kind of working it out in a conversation, then if you have, like, you know, written an essay, declaring it. I think the other thing that is nice about doing a podcast for science communication, is sometimes people write write essays, papers, tweets, whatever, put them online, and get a lot of heat from the community about them. Right, like get criticized, you've made a terrible point, blah, blah, blah. It's somewhat harder to do that with podcasts because you actually have to listen to it. Right? Like, it's just the barrier to entry is just slightly higher, so that it's harder for people to skim, get mad about one thing you said out of context and blow up about it. And so I think I see that happen less for podcasts, maybe people are more measured in their claims on podcasts. But I think it's also it's just, if you're going to take the time to listen to it, you have to typically listen to it in context, Jonathan Peelle 18:29 right? If you hate it, you can turn it off, and then you probably not going to complain about it. I do wonder—So there are some barriers to entry for podcasts. And so even if you love listening to them, and you like are super excited, you know, there's a certain amount of like technical infrastructure, for lack of a better word that you need to put together. And there's like, a million ways of doing it. And if anyone's interested, we're happy to chat with you like offline about that. But I would say I mean, it's not it's not insurmountable, but they're there. You know, there's some stuff there, and you have to find someone to host it. And anyway, there's, there's a bit of a commitment there. So I think we should turn to Twitter, which you know, has a lot less— Julia Strand 19:16 If you're concerned about the technical stuff, what you should do is just get a co-host who's really interested in the technical stuff, and then you don't have to worry about that. Jonathan Peelle 19:23 Yeah. So actually, I'm actually a bad person to ask about technical stuff. Because I tend to overthink things and over over plan, and my dad is actually a former audio engineer. So when I asked someone for advice, it's him. And and you'll be shocked to know that he does not give me like the simplest and least expensive solution. Anyway, so I'm happy to always chat, but yes, just get a co host who does all that for you? Who isn't me, and then and you'll be fine. Let's see. Jonathan Peelle 19:56 So, let's talk a little bit about Twitter because I know many of you are on Twitter, at least in theory, because I recognize your names. And that was really my first foray into like more public engagement on a regular basis. So I'll share about my experience. And Julia, you can maybe share about yours a bit, too. But I think that's a pretty low bar to entry. One thing, so you know, that take all this with a grain of salt, I'm sharing kind of what I did, and not so much prescriptively as to what you should do, but just how I experienced it. When I first started being more proactive, to try to engage with scientists on Twitter, I did a lot of what's often called lurking in online communities. So lurking is where you just sort of you're on there, you can see what people do, but you're not participating. And that's totally fine. The advantage of that is you can learn things. So if if Julia tweets a link to a really interesting paper, I can benefit from that information, I don't have to respond at all. And so it's sort of a very low bar to engaging and it's maybe it's not engaging, because you're not contributing, but you're benefiting from the community. And to me, the big advantage of that is you get a sense of the community norms and standards. And so if Julia tweets it, let's pretend Julia tweets a paper, it's my first day on Twitter. And I, you know, on page 34, I don't really agree with their statistics, and I write like a huge rant about it yelling about what a bad paper it is, that would probably not come across very well, because most people don't do that. And so you kind of get a sense of what's, what's normal, and what's not, and so on. You can also sort of, kind of curate the people that you interact with. So there are, you know, I, I think we won't spend a lot of time on, there are corners of Twitter that are really combative, and, and toxic, depend. And some of that depends on the subfield some of that depends on specific people, I'll say, I've been very lucky to not really have that be part of my online experience. And I think part of it is luck. And part of it is I just don't follow those people, right. So if I see lots of stuff that's stressing me out, or that I think is unhealthy, or toxic, I will just not not follow those people and hang out with the people who are orphaned and supportive and, and smart. And so you can have a sense a chance to curate your own community to some degree. And so again, by sort of, you know, lurking a little bit to start with, you can do that. And then you can also take little baby steps. So you can sort of, you don't have to write an essay To start with, you can respond to Julia's tweet and say, hey, that's a great paper. Well, that's not the most profound comment that anyone's made on Twitter, but you're starting to engage with people, people get to know your name. And Julia, then might so might recognize my name, the next time I comment, oh, that Jonathan, fellow comments on a lot of my tweets, maybe I'll follow Him, or maybe I'll see what what kind of research he does, and so on. So I think just as Julia, you know, is not a fan of the term networking, or conference things. I think the same goes on Twitter that you sort of get to know people by interacting and sort of, you don't have to be super strategic. But if you never comment on anything, and never post your own tweets about anything, people aren't going to get to know you. So So just like a real in person conversation or relationship, though some interaction I think is really important. Jonathan Peelle 23:30 One thing that's interesting, and I'm curious to hear how it's been for you, Julia, that, so when I started on Twitter, I was a just finished my PhD or whatever, and then more intentional through postdocs, and now I'm a tenured associate professor. And so on one hand to me, I don't really, you know, just between us, I don't really feel like I've changed that much in the last 15 years, a little less hair. But other than that, I kind of feel like the same person. But sort of, empirically, objectively, I I'm in a much more senior position, and in the field, I have a lot more power, whether or not I acknowledge it. And so I think my interactions on Twitter have become a little bit more measured. I think I still try to say some, anyway, I try to say sarcastic things and whatever. But I I'm very aware that I try to always be kind to people, for the most part, other researchers and so on. So I try not to make negative comments about research studies, because I know that those can be perceived in a in a, perhaps within a harshness, I don't mean, so all of which is to say, I think my experience at the community has changed as my career has progressed. And they're kind of pros and cons to that. But I'm very aware of that, in a way that 10 years ago, I wasn't aware of my influence on anyone. I was just on there to tweet about papers. Julia Strand 24:56 Yeah, so I had a pretty had a pretty similar experience. I wouldn't say that if I had to point to a single decision that has had the most positive impact on my career In, like literally the last decade, it would be joining Twitter. And that is a ridiculous thing to say. But but that's, that's actually true. I mean, that's how I met Jonathan. It's how I got involved in everything to do with the Open Science movement and the replication crisis, I now have research collaborators that I found through that. And so it has really opened, opened the world to me, in a way that kind of nothing else comes close. So for those of you who are kind of thinking about using Twitter as a way to get get involved with with science communication, I really like the point that Jonathan made that we are all science communicators, and Twitter is a really easy way to just have those little baby steps of doing a little more more and more communication. So it is useful both for the, hey, I wrote a paper, here's a little summary of it, and you can, you know, more people will read the tweet summary, then we'll read the actual paper. It's so it's a way of kind of advertising or drumming up interest for for papers. And I know some of you I've seen, I've seen Sahil do this, of just like, here's a paper, it's long, it's a little out of my exact research area, I might not read the whole thing. But I mean, I was reuse, I feel I would, but you know that in general. But if you have a great summary of it, we include the figures, you get the gist of it. And so later on something jogs my memory, and I think, Oh, yes, I have had a paper about that, let me find the tweet, let me find the paper, you know, it's just a way of making your work. more accessible with with relatively little work, I mean, less than, for instance, trying to write an article in Scientific American or something that describes it. Um, it's also really useful for listening, right, I think an important part of communicating science is listening to how other people do it to contextualize your work to inspire your work. And so it's not just, it's not just an output source, it's also you know, really, really valuable for your input. Yeah, Jonathan Peelle 27:15 I was just gonna point out, I mean, this is probably obvious to people, but, um, you know, for listening, we, so we solicited emails and comments on the podcast, but it's sort of the ratio of how much we put out to what we get back is very much on the end of, we're putting a whole bunch out and don't get a lot back. So the podcast, I think, has not been, there's not a lot, there's less listening going on, although we're open to it, but the format doesn't really lend itself so much to listening. Whereas on Twitter, I think, at least for me, most of the time, I'm gaining a lot more from listening than I am from producing. And I think increasingly, I've been trying to be intentional about sort of following and interacting with people who are, you know, from diverse backgrounds that aren't my own. So I've learned probably the most about issues of gender equity, racial equity, and open science. And not that not to equate those but just three communities that I don't really get much from in my own school and department, or at least not the what I want. I've really learned most of what I know from from Twitter, and the resources that I followed on there. So that's been really informative, I would say from a, from an extra science or meta science perspective, even apart from specific content. Julia Strand 28:37 So perks of Twitter relative to podcasts are it's cheaper, easier, lower barrier to entry. You don't have to commit to doing it regularly, you get more feedback. And so I think it's much easier kind of way to start then something like a podcast. So I just wanted to touch on a couple of other ways that I have tried to send my work out into the public sphere more broadly. The first is, as Rachel mentioned, is sharing teaching materials. So the class I teach on the replication crisis and credibility revolution, and open science generally, is fully publicly accessible. And I did that because I had borrowed very heavily from other people's classes, who had made their classes publicly accessible. And so I felt like I, you know, needed to give back. I also wanted to make it easy for other people to teach this stuff. So I care a lot about open science practices. And I regularly hear from people who are saying, I want to teach something about open science, but I don't quite know what I should read or how to slot it in. And so making all of those materials accessible, just makes it much easier for other people to do it. So it's my way of like, indirectly proselytizing by just saying, Well, here's the stuff now it's easy. Um, so that's so that's, that's one way is making making course materials accessible. Julia Strand 30:00 Another kind of big piece of sci comm that I've done recently is, so I wrote an essay in medium. last, last winter, that described the process of finding a mistake in a published paper of mine. So we wrote a paper, it was beautiful data were gorgeous. Later on, we were trying to replicate it, couldn't replicate it, and found that I made a programming mistake that was completely responsible for the observed effect. So, you know, I contacted the journal to initiate retraction and went through Emily cam, we should we should talk. And it was a terrible process, you know, it was just gut wrenching, and embarrassing and frustrating. And the thing that was one of the hardest parts about it is that I hadn't ever heard of anyone who had gone through a similar situation. So I didn't know what was gonna happen to me, I didn't know if the NIH was going to yank my funding, I didn't know if I was going to get denied tenure. And so it was a really, it was a tough experience, in part, because I've never heard anybody talk about it before. And so I wrote this essay, describing the process of going through it, so that later on when someone else finds a mistake in their published work, someone like, you know, that that person would would like have a point of reference, you know, be like, Oh, yeah, Julia did this, you know, and, and since this has happened, I have had multiple conversations over email and over the phone with other people who have been in similar situations. And so this has been a really positive experience for me in terms of science communication, because I know that sharing that story publicly, even though it sucked, right, even though it was like embarrassing to tell people about it just was a drag. But sharing that publicly is likely to have the consequence of making other people likely to also share it when it when it happens to them, which is, you know, what we need for science to be self correcting. And another kind of benefit of this is that so the the original paper that I wrote, which was a very nice little paper published in PNR, and I'm sure that the people who saw this economic bulletin and review, the people who are interested in that kind of stuff would have read it. But But, but 50,000 people have read my essay, and over a half a million have read, you know, like the tweet summary of it. And I'm not sure what pvns readership is, but like, there's no way that that original paper would have had the same kind of reach. Right. And so, obviously, I would rather not have made a mistake, and published a mistake, but but you know, in thinking about, like the reach that our work can have, and the kind of impact we can have on our field, it is often the case that the science communication we do is going to reach a way broader audience than our actual academic work. Um, but I don't recommend that as a place to start with science communication. Jonathan Peelle 33:00 Can I just break in for one minute here? Because I think there's a question in the chat and two, and one also that someone submitted that sort of get get to the idea of some of these extra things that we do. So for example, our podcast, you know, takes a lot of time and effort, and sort of, you know, what, why do it? And so one of the content but so, so two specific questions, and then I'll have a question for you, Julia. One was, did we ever plan some kind of like crowdfunding like Patreon? We tried that for a while, I think, for this podcast, in particular, we felt like because one of our goals as being accessible that that felt a little bit didn't quite jive with our overall, you know, goal for the podcast. And so we sort of abandoned that. But I think most academics are also like not getting rich off podcast. So it's great to have the support. And you know, we would appreciate it, but it's sort of more a labor of love. But to get to the what I wanted to put this in now, because I think one of the things that Julia and I have both seen is that we're able to reach a different and perhaps a bigger audience, definitely a different audience with our podcast and some of our Twitter interactions than we do with our published on paper. And so, so yeah, there's only a certain number of hours in the day, but I think these extra efforts have given us sort of a broader reach and about a different topic than we would have have otherwise. I I'm curious, Julia, so I can speak for myself. I don't think anyone in my department or anyone who evaluates me cares that I do this stuff. I mean, maybe in their heart, they do, but I don't really think it helps my career. I don't think it's a negative. I think people just ignore it and look at the kind of standard metrics I don't know. If you feel like you get any professional recognition for it. Julia Strand 34:53 I mean, I don't think like when my Dean is doing my annual review, she's gonna say, Oh, we just got a podcast. That's I mean, she might say Good for her in her mind, but like, I don't think it's actually contributing to, you know, promotion or advancement within my department. But I feel like one of the, one of the great joys of tenure is getting to be really mindful about the legacy that you want to have any impact that you want to have on the field. And I, I love doing research, and I love publishing, and I love teaching students how to do research and publish. But if this year, I publish one fewer paper, but I inspire a lot of other people to try to adopt Open Science practices, or make information about academia more accessible, that's a trade off, I'm fine with even if I'm not getting credit for it. So I think of it kind of as, as a kind of service, that that I, of course, it'd be great if we get credit for it, because then more people will do it. And the incentives influence a lot of our behavior. And I guess I feel lucky, at least to be at a point in my career where i'm not i'm not worrying about that. I'm going to do it anyway. It would be it would be nice to get you have to get credit. Jonathan Peelle 36:14 Yeah, I think I think in a way, it's sort of trying to balance, you know, where can we do the most good and, and maybe, I mean, speaking for myself, but maybe for Julia too. Well, you know, one more paper on on the cognitive costs of listening to speech and noise is fine. But we already have some papers on that. And so this is a thing that wouldn't exist if we didn't do it. And we're hoping that that is kind of useful to the, to the field and to the universe in a way that we might not be able to quantify. But that hopefully is, is helpful. Julia, why don't I in the unless you have a last thing, I'm going to suggest that we wrap up our kind of, quote unquote, presentation part. And then we can we can open it up to more questions, because there are a few questions we haven't gotten to, and there might be some more, it'd be great to hear from everyone. Okay, so I have, I have a couple of summary slides, which I'll get ready. Julia Strand 37:10 I want to there was one question from Jim, that we didn't quite get to, uh, do we read books or listen to podcasts about how to podcast or learn on the job. I read a couple of like, articles on the internet about how to podcast, many of them are the technical stuff. You know, how to host and things which as I said, You know, I got a guy for that I don't have to worry about, I mean, I have a person who helps me do that talk to worry about that. Thanks, Jonathan. And internet, the things that I was particularly concerned about are audio quality, I find listening to podcasts with bad audio quality, really distracting. And I think that because both Jonathan and I already do auditory research, you know, we have thought a lot, you know, we like have microphones and things like that. So mostly it was, these are the features of podcasts that I like, so let's try to emulate those. And, and the technical stuff. There are apparently like courses you can take about how to podcast and there's lots of resources out there, though, if you if you want to know more information getting into it. Jonathan Peelle 38:10 I listen to the only thing I may have read a couple articles. So Dan Benjamin is like one of my podcast heroes. And Dan has a podcast called The Podcast Method, which I think is not current. But there's like a whole bunch of archived episodes, I listen to a bunch of those, some of them are more relevant than, than others. But, but that was, that was encouraging. Honestly, like a lot of things. I mean, I think I learned the most when we just started doing it. And so you can prepare for months and do test recordings for months. But then all of a sudden, when you have to do it for real, like the learning curve goes way up by necessity. And that's just the best way to learn. Julia Strand 38:47 I also am thrown in the chat, a great resource called Twitter for scientists by Dan Quintana. And he has just a lovely list of suggestions and pieces of advice and kind of philosophy about how to use Twitter for science that that I think is really great. Jonathan Peelle 39:02 Great. Okay. So, Julia, do you want to make fun of the word "rules" now, or later? Julia Strand 39:11 You don't know me, um, a big asterisk air quotes. These aren't rules. These are things that we have thought about suggestions, guidelines, Jonathan Peelle 39:22 Three takeaway points that might be useful that we put together yesterday. Yeah, okay. Okay, so the first one, if you're a scientist, you do science communication, whether you know it or not. And whether that's through your, you know, scientific publications and conference posters, or talking to your colleagues or whatever, we're all talking about science all the time. And so that kind of leads into the second rule that it's not like, you're not, I think if we're honest with ourselves, all of us are not making the decision to be a science communicator. Yes or No, it's Yes, for all of us here. But the question is, well, how much are Are you going to be intentional and what media Do you want to use, and not everyone has to do a podcast but but we can all think intentionally about how we communicate. So given that we're all science communicators, one piece of advice is to find people to help you become a better communicator. And so many of us are kind of clued into this about, for example, manuscript writing that like if you have an advisor or a colleague, who you who can help you be a better writer, that's great. But there might be other methods, too. We also note, by the way, our whole talk was not designed to advertise our podcast, but we do have podcasts about mentors and people you can rely on who aren't mentors. So I won't kind of repeat all that here. But we all need people to help us do it. Julia and I frequently tell each other, that we learn a lot from each other. And so doing this as a joint effort, instead of either one of us doing it alone has been really a key part of it, I don't think we would still I don't think I would still be doing it. If I was doing it on my own, I would have stopped a long time ago. So there's accountability and also learning from each other. Julia Strand 41:05 And if I can jump in there, the finding people to help you doesn't have to be like, I'm gonna find somebody that I talk to once a week about this, you know, that can be noting who's communicating their science on Twitter well, and and, and following them and thinking about it. So so this doesn't have these, these don't have to be like friendships, these can be I'm paying attention to someone who I think is doing doing things well, and trying to emulate what they're doing. Jonathan Peelle 41:30 Right? or it doesn't have to be someone who, who. So for Julia and I, and our specific podcast instance, we're meeting together regularly and actually doing the podcast together. But maybe for you, it's every six months, you go out for a cup of coffee, there's someone who you want to talk to about science, Twitter, or whatever, right? They're just different ways to engage with, with other people who care about this Julia Strand 41:52 A person that you have made friends with? Because you have a shared interest. Jonathan Peelle 41:55 Yeah, cuz you've been networking (!). Exactly. Yeah. And then, you know, this is I like, I always like thinking about our audience. And for me, this, this kind of perspective comes up a lot with manuscripts and grant writing. And I think also kind of science communication more broadly. So knowing your audience is super important, because how are you going to effectively communicate if you don't know who you're talking to, but then also listening to them. And I think there's a lot of ways you can interpret that one is learning from their experiences and their perspectives. And another is sort of to evaluate sort of how effective your communication has been. So if you have ways of getting feedback, whether that is the comments people make on your tweet, or emails they send you about your podcast, or whatever, but trying to to thoughtfully incorporate what you're hearing from your audience, I think is really important. Julia, do you want to add anything to my non rules? Julia Strand 42:54 Those are really good rules. Yep. Jonathan Peelle 42:56 Okay. So I've just because we're at the end of our sort of, like, presentation part, we want to thank you, thank all of you for inviting us and for for listening, and for your questions. And we're not done, we're gonna keep talking about questions, but But thanks for that. We're both on Twitter, if you haven't figured that out already. We also have our podcast juice in the squeeze. I have a new podcast coming soon, the brain made plain without Julia. So So she's gonna yell at me about that. Sorry. And that's going to be more interviewing cognitive neuroscientists about their work, which was sort of inspired by the cognitive neuroscience class, I teach and trying to connect a face and a name, or at least a voice and a name with the research papers we're reading. So that was partly selfish, because it will help me in my teaching and partly, hopefully useful to the community. So we have questions that you've submitted, and we can go through those, but maybe, does anyone have anything they want to ask us live? Julia Strand 44:01 Feel free to put things in the chat or use the raise hand function if you like, or jump in. We'll give it a shot. Give it a minute, and then we can ask the ones that we've already gotten. Unknown Speaker 44:13 I have a question. Um, and pardon me, my imposter syndrome is going to be showing here for a moment. But do you have any advice about I don't know maybe like damage control one to one. So I'd say one of my biggest barriers to entry on Twitter under my actual name, because I've been running the NBL Twitter account for a few years, which is easy for me because I just get to be a cheerleader for the great you know, trainees in our community there. That's really easy. But I i've been concerned about, you know, based on things interactions I've seen in Twitter, even among scientists on Twitter, about just stepping in it, you know, saying something that I didn't intent, you know, that's taken out of context or not my intent, not knowing how to correct it. And I think kind of the concern of messing up on Twitter has really made me be more of a listener as opposed to, you know, a speaker, what are your thoughts on best practice for avoiding that? And then maybe recovering from the inevitable, you know, mess up at some point given the medium? Julia Strand 45:27 Yeah, that's, that's a great question, I think a common concern. So so the first thing that I would say is, if you are concerned about that, it is it is easy to avoid contentious issues, right? Like you can, you can kind of ease into it by weighing in on, you know, saying nice things about paper, or someone's bread or their cats or whatever. And then, if something does go a mess, and you do say something that you realize could have been taken in a different way, or makes people mad in a way that you didn't anticipate, I regularly see people tweet. I've deleted that last tweet, because I wasn't thinking, I didn't realize how it could be construed in this way. And that's me, and and I'm sorry. And it seems like in general, at least in the circles that I move in, when people do that, they always get lots of positive feedback of Hey, thanks for being, you know, so conscious of that appreciate you responding to it. And so I think the only time that I see people like really get a lot of heat, and get in trouble is when they say something that is very controversial. And when other people point out the reasons it's controversial, they disregard those viewpoints and just dig in and say it louder. So I think generally, people are forgiving. If if, you know, also, in general, you seem kind of like you're not trying to pick fights. I typically, it seems like people are pretty understanding Jonathan Peelle 46:53 of that. I think I that's been my experience to Julia. I think one potential exception is um, there are, you know, certain topics that where if you if you invoke the ire of a certain group of people, you can get mobs descend on you, for no good reason. And, and because of what I study and post about, I have not had that. But there are people who study, you know, issues related to gender, for example, gender identity, that, that if they that sometimes get mobbed, because of people, people being jerks on the internet, through no fault of their own, they didn't say anything wrong, but for some reason, they get caught up in it. And so, I do think so we had a specific question about how do you handle, you know, specific issues? If you study an area that can be more contentious? You know, rightfully or not? I do think you have to be a little bit extra aware of that. And sort of there are there are guides out there for how to handle being attacked by a Twitter mob. And I don't really, I don't I don't have an experience at that. But I mean, there are, there are strategies, and you have to probably have a little bit of a thick skin. If you're going to wade into that, what I would say is, I think it's totally fine to to pick your battles. And and perhaps especially if you're more junior, and feel more vulnerable in a career or professional sense, is to perhaps not wade into some of the more contentious discussions and you can save that for, for later. If you feel really called to be more proactive, then you can also consider having like a anonymous account. And there are ways to do that it, you can get found out so you have to be a little bit careful. I'm happy to talk to anyone kind of offline about what I think would be the best way to have like a really safe anonymous account, but nothing's 100% safe. So anyway, so I guess I would maybe not as being as brave as some of you I would tend to avoid those contentious issues early on in my experience and save them for later. And then for like normal sane Twitter interaction, everything Julia said I think is perfect advice. Julia Strand 49:08 If people are, yeah, Twitter mobbing or being disrespectful, there's always blocking and muting and reporting. The question about balancing damage control with using your power to advocate about important concerns, I think is a really nice point, you know, is silence as damning as as a bad tweet. And I think that that can differ from from person to person. So some people use Twitter both for talking about science and for talking about political issues and for posting pictures of their bread. And some people only use it for talking about science. And so if there is some kind of political thing that's happening in the world, and I and I don't see someone tweeting about it, that to me doesn't say that they don't care about that issue, or they don't think that that issue is important, but maybe they have a different platform for talking about that and they want to you know, keep keep those worlds separate. But I do think that when given the opportunities, you know, when there are situations where weighing in can be useful for communicating or for the public good more generally, that that is, you know, a balance, you have to strike personally based on the things you are comfortable sharing publicly and what you aren't and people who are lucky to have more stability and power and comfort, you know, have can have greater opportunities for doing that. So it's a, it's a tricky issue. Jonathan Peelle 50:27 Yeah, I would say personally, that I felt more, more responsibility to be vocal about things as I've gotten more advanced in my career as a tenured Associate Professor, I think it's important that I say Black Lives Matter. And I say it publicly and on Twitter, and I support people who say that and retweet people talking about it. Because, because I can, and if it happened, no one has yelled at me about that. But if they did, I would I would do it. I like to think I would do it anyway. But there's a whole spectrum of, of issues. And I think, you know, it's sometimes it is even, it's still tricky to, to decide how much to engage and how much to advocate. I also say, I don't have a lot of students on Twitter, in my classes, I have a few, the ones that I have have appreciated me speaking up of the ones, the ones that have talked to me about it. So I do you know, I think I think people are junior colleagues, whether they're students or trainees or whatever, I've definitely noticed that and so I think that encourages me to keep doing it. I'm gonna come back to you because it's been, I don't want to forget, Unknown Speaker 51:35 oh, no problem, I want to say Firstly, thank you very much all information that you've given us so far, it's super helpful and things like had in the back of my head, but never really acknowledged or knew how to act upon. Um, but I guess I'm kind of coming at a point. I'm someone who, especially in this pandemic, I've gotten super overwhelmed mental screen time I've had, I'm trying to be more aware and conscious of what I'm taking in and how much I'm contributing to that. It just will foster into an anxiety or being counter more counterproductive than that, I find it to be productive. So especially I'm not as super familiar with Twitter, I learned that years ago. So for me to try to open that and re learn that and be active on that seems like a very, very daunting task. So I was wondering if you guys have any insights on whether how the science communication network, quote unquote, is in other social media fields, such as Instagram, or I know tik tok is out there. But I feel like Instagram might be a interesting way to go about it, given that you can create like visual infographics about your studies in one post, rather than having a thread which I find very hard to follow. And that equals, like Instagram lives, about your whatever, and talk with everyone. So that's something that I could find myself doing to limit my time since I know that feels. But I didn't know if you guys have any insights about what's going on? Jonathan Peelle 53:07 That's a great question. I'd like for Julia Strand 53:08 you to do that. And then teach me how to do it. Jonathan Peelle 53:10 Yes, exactly. Then you can you can talk at the next one of these and teach us all how to do science, communication on Instagram, that be perfect. Julia Strand 53:17 But But I think the point is, there's so many ways that you can do this, right, like communicating can happen in so many, like, through different venues, through different apps through different platforms. And so figuring out the ones that work well for you, and that you have time for and energy for and will reach the people that that you want to reach. I mean, that's that's the goal. So we're, you know, we're talking about the ways that we have done it. But I think, yeah, I would love to see how people are doing this on Instagram or Tiktok. And so don't don't be afraid to pioneer new ways to Yeah, Jonathan Peelle 53:50 yeah. I mean, we're old. And so and so I think we're talking about Twitter, because that's our experience more than that, that is the best way to do it. The other thing I would say is, I think, you know, it's really good to be mindful about that, you know, the cost that it does have to whether that's interacting with yet another additional community or getting feedback from people if you're not in the mood for getting feedback, and so on. So there might be other you know, so for example, writing as a thing that tends to have less feedback depending on where you post it. And you can also sort of practice making explanatory videos that maybe you share with people in your lab or your department before you like start posting on Instagram that like you can actually practice your skills a little bit. Now for me. What like when we were getting the podcast ready, I in theory, did some practice editing, but it was just really hard to make time for it. And I just didn't, I didn't do it until we actually clicked publish and then I had to do it. But but in theory, I think you can do a lot that isn't public if you're not in a in a space where you want to do that. Jonathan Peelle 54:54 Another question that came in, in the survey was about sort of communicating to clinical practitioners. So so I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of reframe this a little bit. So if it was me, and I'm not a clinician, and I want to communicate to, to a clinician, what are some good ways to do that? And so I think there are a lot of really good reasons to do this if we have a basic research funding that has clinical implications, but how do we how do we get? How do we get there? And I think broadly, there might be two pathways to take, and I don't know, which is better. One is, you see where the clinicians and Sorry, I'm grouping all clinicians together as a, as a monolith entity, which is not fair. But you see where the clinicians are already getting their information from, and you try to go there. So for example, in my department, there was audiology Grand Rounds every month or whatever. And so if I had something I really wanted to communicate to the audiologist, I know they're already meeting together as a group, I can email someone and say, Hey, can I give a give a talk at Grand Rounds? Now, maybe I would prefer to do a podcast. But like, right now, none of the audiologists in my department are listening to my podcast. And so I could say the thing and say it perfectly, but they would never hear about it. And if I email out a link and said, you know, please go listen to my podcast, they probably wouldn't, because they don't already do it. So I think, you know, whether it's publishing in a journal that you know, that target audience reads are going to talk to them or, or whatever. That's, that's one way. The other way would be try to make something so compelling, that people will pick it up. And so whether that's a pamphlet that you leave for people, or a podcast, or a website or a Twitter account, in theory, you could sort of come up with a way of packaging the information that would draw interested clinicians to you. I think that's probably a little bit of a bigger challenge. But it also depends on if you're trying to reach the people at your institution, or sort of like worldwide. So I don't know if that's really an answer. But I think trying to think about, you know, the realistically who's going to hear your message is probably important. And then if you can partner with a clinician, they can probably key you in to the best communication practices for their field better than you can guess, by your by yourself. So that would be another another route to go. Julia Strand 57:28 We also had a nice kind of broad question about strategies for effective science communication. So thinking about how to tell a story, what we think makes for effective and engaging science communication. And one of the things that I think is really important to keep in mind when making decisions about communicating anything, is to really have an audience in mind and think about who you are doing this for. So often, when we're recording podcast episodes, the audience that I have, in my mind is people in academia who are somewhat junior to us, and are kind of figuring out a lot of this along the way. And although there are other people who listen to the podcast, too, having that audience in mind, I think is really useful for thinking about common ground, what terms do I need to define what concepts are likely to be familiar? and and you know, you all know this from from writing to like, what journal Am I sending Is this too is this a general audience journal or a specific one. But but I think it's also really important in science communication, when I'm when I'm going to write a tweet summary of my paper, I might write it differently, if I'm trying to explain it to a total layperson who doesn't know anything about the research. But typically, if I'm sending it on Twitter, it's going to be for other people who know something about research and know something about language, but may not be experts in exactly the field that I'm that the paper has written about. So I think thinking about who you're writing for, is really important. And remembering whenever you're doing science communication, that you don't have to tell the whole story, right? If you publish an eight experiment paper, you can choose to do a tweet summary about experiment one. And this is kind of like when you have a manuscript and you're going to present a poster at a conference, it doesn't have to be the whole entire paper, it can be a chunk of it. And I think it's much better to choose a chunk that you can convey to your intended audience in in a way that is not like simplified and dumbed down, rather than trying to take the whole thing and make it very simple. So So think about who it's for, and you don't have to do everything every time. Speaker 5 59:45 So I think you may have partially answered my question already. But we had a conversation in an earlier meeting about how when we as scientists see a popular press article on our field, we just cringe because we know how much of it is going to be, you know, sort of 10% Right are just at a level that we don't feel like captures the nuance or certainty, especially of the results. Maybe not with dumbing things down. But have you guys found a way to balance sort of your level of your projection of your level of confidence about the definitiveness of these results? against, you know, being compelling, you don't want to sort of put a lot of hedged words in any any of these sort of things, or maybe this maybe that, but as scientists, we always have those hedges, kind of floating in the back of our minds, hopefully, right? Jonathan Peelle 1:00:32 This is not quite fully answering that. But I'll take a little bit of a stab at summarizing, a scientific study for a broad audience is is, is challenging, and it's also a learnable skill. So I've gotten better at this. So again, my preferred medium for this is Twitter. And so I've gotten better at writing a five tweet summary of a study than I was the first time I did it. A lot of the first times I did it was I was not sharing my own research, I would, I would, um, this is back when I was trying to be as a postdoc trying to just be more involved on Twitter. And one way I did it is, if I read an interesting article, I would tweet about it. So I wouldn't just tweet the title and a link, I would, I would like try to say, oh, and this study, Myers and colleagues studied X, Y, and Z, and they found blah, and here's a couple of figures and what I like about it. And so I didn't pick it, I didn't take, I didn't do studies that I thought were really bad. I did studies that I thought were reasonable. And I didn't really, you know, it was like, Hey, this is interesting. It wasn't a strong endorsement. So if that study was later retracted, I wouldn't be like, super embarrassed. But it was kind of good at summarizing it. And I try to do that with our labs publications. Now I say, Oh, look, we have a new preprint. Here's the title, here's a couple of figures. And we've gotten, you know, and people, people see those tweets, I get modest amounts of feedback, but at least it kind of advertises it. So I think I think I've gotten better at it. And I think we can all get better at it. But the point is, I think it's fine to do it with papers that are not your own paper, as a kind of a lower bar to entry maybe. And then it's also fine to do it in a sort of not like you're reviewing the paper and but just sort of a little bit more descriptive in that that can be a way of doing it. And so I guess, to answer your question, now, for real, the more that I've done that, the more like when it's my paper, I kind of know what we can claim and what we can't. And so I've got I've kind of found a rhythm of of how to ride the line between trying to say something in understandable English, that is like, not incorrect. Julia Strand 1:02:43 I haven't experienced, I haven't done that as much, because so much of my science communication is more like meta science. So it's not like here's a particular study. But But when I have talked about research areas publicly, I think about it in kind of the same way that I would think about teaching a concept in a class, like, it would be rare that I would teach something in a class that only one paper had ever showed, you know, it's more like, well, has there been a meta analysis on it? How confident can we be that this is, you know, something of a finding that we can be confident about? And, and also how I would like, write about something in an introduction section of a paper, right, like, Sure, I'll talk about individual studies, but I'm not gonna, you know, build an experiment design on something that has only been tested once and you know, it is, I'm less confident about, um, but I think Yeah, calibrating calibrating that is, is really important. But but i think is the most important when you're like, any young or like someone who is writing these huge, sweeping popular press articles about research, but for the kind of science communication that many of us do, you know, it isn't. I mean, it doesn't have to be like writing a book that's accessible and summarizes a research area, it can be, you know, it can be talking about individual studies talking about your own research and things like that. But I think Yeah, as you get like higher up writing books and things like that, it does that that does become a way bigger issue. Jonathan Peelle 1:04:10 One assignment that I have sometimes done in my cognitive neuroscience class undergraduate class is, you know, find a find a press release or a story that summarizes an article, and then go back and find the original research article and write me a paragraph or a page on how, how well, it did help you know, how accurate the press summary is, and as you know, most 90% of the time, 99% of the time, it's, it's over simplified, and so drastically so that people with no background can tell that it is. And so, you know, I kind of like that from a critical thinking perspective. If they take nothing away from my class, they learned that press releases are, you know, not telling the whole story, which is not, again, not really answering your question, but I think that's kind of a fun way of trying to publicize that fact. Anyway. There's a Can we switch to the discussion going on in the chat? Because there's a lot of really interesting things here. I want to go back there was one question, I wanted to make sure that wasn't lost. And then we'll get to slack and Twitter for class. The earlier question was about, do we how much do you worry, especially as a more junior person about like future employers, finding your Twitter and seeing what you what you said. So I would assume everything you post online, is going to be accessible publicly, even if you think you have a private account, just assume that somehow is going to get hacked, and it's going to be public. So just be a little bit cautious. You can decide in your own heart what you want a future employer seeing or not, if you get really embarrassed by stuff, delete your account before you go on the job market. That being said, I I think I think, you know, anyway, I don't know what would be a fireable offense. I don't think I've ever tweeted anything that I feel embarrassed about it, you know, enough to go back and delete. So, so yeah, so think about it, but maybe don't, don't forget about it, you're not going to not get a postdoc or a faculty job, because you criticized appeal at all. 2018. Um, you know, in your in your online discussion, Julia Strand 1:06:21 especially if you do it respectfully, Jonathan Peelle 1:06:23 right? Well, exactly. Right. Julia Strand 1:06:25 I get a really big kick out of his comment, saying you were afraid to follow professors on Twitter, but would have loved to have an open invite to not feel weird about following them. That is a really useful piece of information. Thank you. Because I anytime I talk about Twitter in classes, I feel kind of like a nerd where I'm like, Hey, you should follow me on Twitter. Right? And, and so knowing that people might be nervous to follow, like, be weirded out by that is actually incredibly useful. Yeah, thank you for that. I'm gonna feel less weird about saying it now. Yeah, Jonathan Peelle 1:06:58 yeah. So there's a little discussion on like Twitter versus slack. And so I would, so what I do, I've found that so post pandemic, I have now moved to having a slack workspace for all of my classes. Many students have no prior experience with it. But for me, I don't make it optional. I just say, look, all the class announcements and all of our discussions are on Slack, you will download it and use it. And the reason I do that for two reasons. So we our content management system is Canvas at Wash U. It's not great. I don't like how it does notifications and discussions. Every time I want to comment on a student post from my phone, I have to two factor authentication, and I hate it. So by moving into Slack, I'm more responsive. And I know that there are lots of places outside my class where we're knowing the basics about how slack works will be useful. So I actually think it's a transferable skill. So I don't feel bad at all about requiring them to use slack. And I'm super open. If people have problems with it, they should let me know and no one has. So I think that's a great option, even if they don't have any familiarity or with it already. And then for those that do so much the better. Twitter, I would feel weird, like requiring them to join Twitter and follow me. But I love the idea of posting things on Twitter, because that way you help your class and a broader community. And so I think something like if you did have a Twitter account that you posted stuff for class, but then you could also just stick those tweets into slack. Everyone sees them, but it sort of opens the door to nudge people if they want to engage on Twitter, they can without requiring us I think I'm actually gonna, gonna steal that idea, that hybrid idea that I just mushed together for my class this semester. Julia Strand 1:08:53 I also started using it for all my classes and making it required. And one of the things that I really like about it is I think it lowers the barrier to students contacting me. And different people may have different feelings about this, especially depending on on how big the class is. But I but it seems like students are willing to send a slack message that asks kind of a small question or something that they might be reluctant to be like, dear Julia here is an email it is more formal. And so I find that it's very nice for for that and for kind of just like easy casual check ins you know, like, I can send a note that says, hey, so and so you seem kind of quiet in class today. How are you feeling is everything going okay? In a way that if I was sending it as an email, it feels like a I don't know more more direct and official check in. Also the students get really cute with like making custom emojis to respond to stuff and sharing gifts and like, it's it, especially during pandemic times feels like it's kind of building building community too, because it's easier for them to talk to talk to each other. And to me, Jonathan Peelle 1:09:52 the idea I stole from Julia was I have on Slack, you can have channels that sort of to organize information. So I have an introduce yourself to All that I and the TA is kickoff photos are, you know, great, but optional, people can say whatever they, they want to say. And so it's not required, but most people do it. And it's really helped foster a sense of community. It's also a great way to model using pronouns if you want to do that. Another suggestion I saw was encourage people to tell a story about themselves in the third person, which is just sort of a fun exercise. But then also is a is a, maybe perhaps a lower barrier to entering pronoun discussions if people aren't aren't comfortable with it. So I also, this is getting out in the weeds a little bit, but on my slack workspace, I have my pronouns listed, and I encourage my team to do it. And some students do and some don't. But I tried to, to not make a big deal about it, but just kind of normalize it a little bit. Julia Strand 1:10:52 Um, great question about the does this using Slack, make it feel like the professor should be available 24 seven, does it kind of reinforce that. So I talk with students about that at the start of term and say that I like having them use slack because it means they don't have to compete with everything else in my inbox or my attention. And I tell them that I don't check it all the time. I turn it off at 9pm every night. And especially during pandemic days, when I don't have childcare. If I'm up to my elbows and playdough I'm going to be focusing on my kids and not get to them right away. So I say it's quicker than email, but it's not going to be instant sometimes. Jonathan Peelle 1:11:28 Yeah, that actually, that's great, too. And I tried to, yes, be explicit that this is a quicker way to reach me than email. But But I mean, respectfully, I'll get to it when I get to it. So you I try to get back to people within a day and no one's ever yelled at me. But I, I think a lot of these things, we have to be really firm about setting our own boundaries, because the technology and our colleagues are very bad at it. And I'm part of that too. So if I have a really great idea, I might message Julia to am, I don't expect her to get back to me by by 230. But I, I also want the freedom to write it then and not have to write myself a note to email her at at 9:30am or something Julia Strand 1:12:08 quick, quicker than email is can be kind of a low bar to email. Right? We got another question ahead of time. That is that is kind of about about framing stories, and how do we tell a story about a scientific journey and what kinds of analogies work? Well, those kinds of things. And I have found the most useful resource for thinking about how to communicate ideas, in ways that are accessible, has come to me through teaching. So if you teach the same classes regularly, you start to see patterns in the kinds of things that are unclear, and where people get tripped up. I also noticed this in my research lab, when we first start talking about, you know, some fundamental issue in spoken word recognition. And I found that Oh, people always get confused about, you know, why this particular phenomenon occurs? What is it about how I'm explaining that, that leads to this particular kind of miscommunication, misunderstanding, that, that that can be really a kind of a useful insight into how you are explaining things, right, if you're if people are consistently misunderstanding you in a particular way, that says you need to reframe something about about how that's working. And I have found that I have been able to extend that kind of knowledge and that process, even to novel areas where I'm like, Oh, I'm going to explain this in a slightly different way. Because I know that when I explain this in a slightly different way, it works really well. And so I think the the that advice is kind of like well just wait and get more experience. But But the other thing comes from just making sure that you are listening to people about what is unclear about how you're communicating, right, because that is such a valuable source of information. And so that can mean, you know, checking in with students about how teaching is going, it can mean getting input from other people about your writing. But but it's also being being open to the fact that the way that you were communicating may not be the clearest way, and, and being willing to listen to other people and and, and learn and improve. Jonathan Peelle 1:14:15 But I do think it's an important point, because I think there are a lot of real and perceived barriers to entry for certain kinds of communication. And so if you so because I just I'm me, I don't think that I'm, I'm like a Twitter expert, but but I could imagine someone who's never been on Twitter before, might be like, Oh, look at that Peelle fellow, he's doing all this Twitter stuff. I could never do that. But actually, I didn't start there. I started by by lurking for two years. And I mean, you know, it's been 15 years that I've been on Twitter. So like I had a long journey to get there. And so how did I, again, not that I'm any kind of expert but whatever I'm doing, how did I get there? I didn't just start there. I did a lot of practice and tried to think about And be be intentional and so, so you too can be just as bad at Twitter as I am or, or figure out how to do this on Instagram or a podcast, but it's really wanting to do it and, you know, deciding whether it's important to you. And I think one of the other things is, you know, I mean, I guess, Julian, I, you know, because we've been focused on on our podcast, you know, in a way that's been, like, in my mind, that's sort of where my most of my efforts are, but that I think that's a fairly high barrier to entry. And so if any of you want to do a podcast, that's awesome, but like, you definitely don't have to, so you can decide if you want to spend five minutes a week or, you know, five minutes a day, or 10 minutes a day, you know, something that seems reasonable if you want to expand your communication, and if you don't, like maybe that's fine, too, for now, and you just know about it. And next year, you might feel differently. I'm Julia Strand 1:15:51 putting my putting my email into the chat, if people have a follow up questions after the fact. I'm happy to answer more questions offline, too. Unknown Speaker 1:16:00 Hi, I just had a question because Jonathan, you were talking about, like starting out on Twitter. And so I just was wondering if you had some advice about that, because I also, like, just made a Twitter account, and I'm not really sure like what to do about it, you know, like, you have, like, 20 followers, and I feel like, you know, someone else in my lab could tweet something and like, reach a lot more people. So it's almost feels like futile to like, try. And so I'm kind of curious, like, how do you go about like, starting in like using it more effectively? Jonathan Peelle 1:16:33 So I would say so first of all, I think it's fine. To start off, I mean, so you're gonna have to grow? Okay? One, one principle is, you'll probably get out of anything, what you put into it to some degree. So so there are people who, and not that this is you, they join Twitter, they get on there for 10 minutes. They're like, what is this and then they never open it again. And then later, they say I didn't really get much from Twitter. Maybe I think that's to be expected. I think like anything, if you want to engage a community and learn about it, you have to put some time in. So you can read that the link that Julia sent around Twitter for scientists is great and very in depth. So I'll give you like three points here. But but you can go read that to follow a bunch of people. So maybe to start with, you're following 100, or 500, or 1000 people and you only have 20 followers, that's fine, you're going to see what people are talking about, you're going to learn from them, you're going to kind of curate the kind of, you know, community that you want and figure out what kinds of things you want to be reading. And as you interact with people, people are going to probably follow you. So if your goal is like, I'm going to join Twitter, and every tweet that I say is going to reach 1000 people or whatever, like you'll be disappointed for a long time. But if your goal is I'm just going to try to learn some things and interact with people and be myself or whatever version of myself I want to share publicly, then you can you know, kind of cultivate a community that's going to grow over time kind of organically. So I think, I think probably my biggest change on Twitter was, for me, this was a postdoc when I felt more comfortable being myself and I made you know, to a certain degree, and sharing X amount of personal things with Twitter. And then I felt like I got to know people more and people interacted with me more. So I think my current kind of stick on on Twitter is trying to be, I hope, super honest about the challenges I face in my job to help normalize them. And some of us have some of the observed things and in our career to a point not being mean about it, but just to share and then maybe some some coping strategies and encouragement that hopefully people find useful. Julia Strand 1:18:53 Ah, Emily's question, I think is a nice one to go out on about the the biggest payoff or reward we've experienced, from our science communication efforts. And I think this for me, has been hearing from other people who have said things like, I'm incorporating open science content into my courses, because your materials are there, or, you know, talking to people who said, I just found a mistake in my paper. And your essay helped me feel better about bringing it forward. You know, Can Can we talk about that? And getting emails from our podcast listeners saying, you know, I feel like I'm an unofficial mentee, because you're giving me the kind of input that I would like to get from my mentor, but we don't have that kind of relationship or something like that. And, and so, you know, every once in a while, you get an email that's like, Hey, I loved your paper. And your data are really nice. But But those kinds of that kind of feedback that I get from other researchers, is not nearly as satisfying as hearing from people that the work that I have done is actually like, making it easier for them to teach or making it easier for them to apply. Open Science practices their research or making it easier for them to self correct science. So I think it is, it can make it easier to see how the work you are doing is having a positive influence on the community. And that is super rewarding. Jonathan Peelle 1:20:14 I can't I can't add anything good to that. That was a great Julia. And I guess I will I can always I can always talk more, right, the podcast. But But the people that we've met through science outreach, or that we've interacted with more, for example, today, today was super fun. And I really, you know, I learned a lot from your questions and our discussion together. And that wouldn't have happened had we not been, you know, trying to be intentional about this over X number of years. So there are there you know, there are definitely a lot of benefits for making making friends who are interested in similar things. Julia Strand 1:20:45 Thanks so much for listening today, Juice and Squeeze listeners. As always, if you want to give us feedback, you can go to our website, juiceandsqueeze.net. We're always very happy to hear from you and we'll continue to answer your questions as best as we were able. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next time. Jonathan Peelle 1:21:01 Bye, everybody!