Thursday March 13, 2014
<a href="https://aiweirdness.com/" style="text-decoration:underline;">lewisandquark</a>: Someone recently asked me if there were other grad students/scientists blogging pictures from their daily life in the lab. I realized that I only know of a couple scientist bloggers who focus on original content, generated by their own experiences in the lab/field. Do you know of any others, or even of a list somewhere?
Huh. You know, I don’t actually know of that many bloggers off the top of my head that blog about their own science and their own daily life in the lab and field. I mean, I know plenty of them exist, and I’ve come across their work from time to time (on Tumblr and beyond), but few of them have really stuck with me.
I think many (but not all) of us who start writing while we are doing science have a tendency to write about things that may be in our field, but are not what we work on, because we spend enough damn time thinking about our work as it is! That might be my personal bias from grad school coming through, though.
But I also think that scientists writing about their own work, whether they are tenured profs or first-year grad students, is enormously important, both for communicating science in general and communicating the science that you are doing. Because if you don’t talk about it, maybe no one will? Or worse, they may talk about your science in a way you don’t like.
Maybe we can crowdsource a list of grad students and young scientists who blog their own work? Leave yours in a reblog, reply, or comment!
Here’s just a few I know of to get the ball rolling:
- Danielle Lee - The Urban Scientist (she was recently recognized by the White House for her outreach!)
- Christina Agapakis - Oscillator (synthetic biology)
- The Southern Fried Science team writes about their own marine biology research alongside big ocean news
- Christie Wilcox also pokes around in the ocean and writes about it, always very well.
- Jane Hu writes about cognitive psychology here on the Tumblr
There’s hundreds… likely thousands more out there. What are your favorites?