science stories Archives - Before the Abstract

Notes from a Storyteller

Yes. Unhesitatingly, yes was my response when invited to share a story at a storytelling evening among landscape ecologists.[1]

It’s not that I’m a show-off. In fact I’m an introvert. But I was burned out at the time, worn down from overwork and life stresses. The result was that I felt I’d lost whatever creative spark used to infuse my work. Storytelling seemed like just the thing to get the juices flowing again. So I leapt at the chance.

Little did I know that only weeks later as the event drew near, I’d be wrestling with a draft of my story, a growing tangle of nervous discontent and self-judgement in my belly.

The good news is that it didn’t end that way.

As a social scientist with a background in the humanities and ecological sciences, I’ve always been drawn to stories in research and life. The core questions that underpin all of my work are: How do people experience their own love of nature? What moves them to care for and protect natural places? How does one person reach out and touch that motivation in another?

For years, I’ve worked in the field of environmental conservation, always focused on people, places, and stories – ethnography, oral history, local knowledge, Indigenous culture. I’m that woman who walks around in the backcountry with an audio recorder in hand, always ready for the next good tale. My professional writing is woven with narrative excerpts – the stories people have shared. Even tracking wildlife or measuring plants, I’m really just following storylines that are imprinted on the land.

My own memory is chock-full of personal stories from the field – wacky adventures, near misses, beautiful reflections, colourful characters – that never make it into formal written papers. But somewhere along the way, my own brief pieces of creative writing fell aside, and dried up all together – casualties on the factory floor of academic productivity.

So of course I was eager to tell a story. It sounded like good fun! The staff from Springer and Story Collider were supportive from the start. They warmly received my pitch for a story over the phone, and encouraged me to send a written draft so that we could polish it together. No problem. I write for a living.

Yet somehow, when I wrote it out, that spark fizzled out again.

I entered the familiar territory of revising, wordsmithing, struggling with decisions about what to edit out…and the story lost its energy. I had excellent feedback from the producer, from friends and colleagues with whom I practised…yet I couldn’t make my story feel right.

In anguished frustration, with five days to go until performance night, I complained to my partner: “I should be good at this! Stories are what I do. I want to be good at it. Why is this so hard?”

That was when he gently pointed out something that should have been obvious to me: “You deal with other people’s stories. Telling your own is different. How often do you do that? It’s going to take practice.”

Hm. Of course.

It turns out that telling a good story, a personal story that touches other people, is an art and a craft. Like music or singing, it is a unique combination of skill and technique, together with phrasing, tonal and emotional nuance, feelings. This is something that the people at Story Collider know very well, and thankfully they have experience guiding people like me through that epiphany. Their producer didn’t skip a beat when I told her four days before the event, “I’m throwing away my written draft.”

I went for a walk, cleared my head, and then got out a blank sheet of paper and a pen. I drew a meandering path across the page, and began filling in features along the way: events, quotes, sensory details. Then I looked at it for a while, put it away, and recounted my story from memory over the phone to Story Collider’s producer. Better. Getting there.

Practice, practice, practice: over the phone to friends; muttering to myself while walking on public footpaths; visualizing silently on the plane to the event.

At last we were there. I saw the other storytellers, and realized we were all nervous – even the senior professors who have taught and lectured to large audiences for years. This was different. There were no notes, no slides, no prompts, and it was personal.

I walked to the microphone and spoke my first sentence. Eager smiles and laughter! Second sentence – the audience was right with me. I thought, This is going to be OK. And it was. In fact it felt wonderful.

And that is the magic. People connect through stories. Stories are how we learn, relate, empathize, and remember. Standing up there and telling my own story, I felt the power, humility and vulnerability in sharing a personal story with a room full of people. I was reminded by the audience of the generosity inherent in the act of listening, really listening.

As a social scientist, working on the story gave me helpful first-hand insights to many of the methodological decisions I deal with in my academic and professional writing. What details to include or leave out? Where is the central theme? How much to guide the audience’s interpretation of someone else’s experience? Am I representing the characters fairly?

Crafting a good story yielded some valuable techniques that translate to improve the way I communicate about my work and how I teach. I truly believe personal stories do have a place in professional scientific discourse. Without them we are at best dull and forgettable, at worst lost.

For me, storytelling is not merely a form of science communication. It is a core aspect of human connection to the world around us. In my work, storytelling is a forum where the colourful personal emotions and experiences that often make conservation science work most meaningful are celebrated as the best part! It reinvigorated the dormant passion that underlies my work – the creativity I’d lost in recent years. I can’t wait to try it again.

[1] The event was jointly produced and hosted by The Story Collider and Springer Science + Business Media, at the International Association of Landscape Ecologists (IALE) Conference in Portland, Oregon.

Access Jonaki’s story here.

Aerin Jacob: Stuck in the Serengeti

Dr. Aerin Jacob recalls the three most valuable conservation lessons she ever learned…from a man with a machine gun. Listen below or stream the official podcast!

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Aerin Jacob, PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria and a Wilburforce Fellow in Conservation Science Fellow. Trained as an ecologist, she works to develop management strategies that incorporate local, Indigenous, and scientific knowledge to achieve conservation objectives while maintaining human well-being. She works with First Nations communities in British Columbia to study the environmental and socioeconomic outcomes of marine management in the Great Bear Rainforest. Aerin is also a member of the Sustainable Canada Dialogues, a network of scholars developing viable, science-based policy options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and guide sustainable development in Canada. Her previous work includes studies of land-use change, restoration ecology, and animal behaviour in East Africa and western North America. Aerin earned her PhD at McGill University and her BSc at the University of British Columbia.

Making News, For People

So you are a scientist or press officer and you’d like to get something covered. Where to begin?

I shape news. Specifically, health-related news. I work for a major media organization. I’ve worked for major media organizations in New York and internationally most of my career.

Every day I come into work and help direct what articles will be written and where they will be placed. A large bulk of what’s commissioned or picked up is planned far in advance. We can guess fairly well which stories are going to trend and when: cold and flu season revs up in February; allergies hit the Northeast United States in late April.

We also cover more topical, breaking stories – the kind you couldn’t see coming. These might include a family in Denver adopting a kitten with rabies that consequently infected the whole family. Or how a pediatrician in Detroit refused to care for a child with lesbian parents.

There’s a third type of story that we cover too, the kind researchers often want us to publish. We often find out about those from press releases or direct media outreach.

Those last types of stories – the ones presented to the mainstream media to be considered for coverage – are often the hardest to sift through. This is partly because there is such a huge volume of them regularly being pitched at us. It is also because there’s a whole industry of highly skilled public relations experts pitching them. To borrow an expression from the statistician Nate Silver, how do we separate the signal from the noise? How do we determine what stories should be covered and what should be ignored? This is where good storytelling comes into play.

There is no universal methodology for news media picking stories. It can come down to a whole slew of factors including precedent, business intelligence and leadership, which are all organization-specific. But often what carries the most weight is people’s personal editorial discretion. Connect a potential story to an editor personally and you’ll be a heck of a lot closer to getting that editor to want to connect it with his or her audience.

It turns out that a good news story is often just a good story, period. It usually has the same elements. There is a conflict or problem established. People’s lives are affected or changed. Perhaps there’s an injustice or an illness that personally touches, or we have someone close to us who is affected. There’s often a solution, or at least an inroad toward one. If that solution is novel or surprising, all the better.

Good storytelling is essential to people – including news media professionals – caring, retaining and sharing. In most cases people click through directly to individual stories through search or a referral. Contrary to what most people probably assume, for most of mainstream media, the homepage is irrelevant as a traffic driver. The vast majority of traffic bypasses homepages and goes directly to individual stories. People find those stories by actively typing a topic into a search engine. They also find stories through curators like Yahoo! News and the Drudge Report, or curation-platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Essential to having a story go viral – which is most often the goal these days – it must connect with people. People must care, retain and then share the story. If people care enough to share a story, the odds are other people will find that story interesting, and worthy of sharing. This happens offline just as much as online.

So the next time you want to get research covered, or make sure your latest discovery makes the news, using storytelling can be key. After all, I can assure you as a media professional that the hype is not true – we are, indeed, people too.

Dennis Petrone is a senior manager at CBS Local Media in New York. The views expressed in this post are his own and not the opinion or position of CBS Corporation. He can be found through http://dennispetrone.com/

Story Notes #3 — Use Just Enough Science

The following post about tips on storytelling is the third in a three part series called “Story Notes,” all of which originally appeared on the blog of The Story Collider Co-Founder, Ben Lillie. This entry was a guest post by Erin Barker, Senior Producer for The Story Collider.

How much science should I include in my story? (Scientists Edition)

One of the biggest challenges The Story Collider faces when working with scientist storytellers is how to blend complex science into a compelling narrative that everyone can understand and appreciate. I will admit up front that I have not always had the best ideas in this area. I once asked a neuroscientist to explain his work at a fifth-grade reading level. Suffice to say, I regret this, and will never do so again.

It occurred to me after this conversation that maybe the key isn’t to treat the audience like ten-year-olds. After all, they aren’t dumb — they just aren’t all scientists. They may be experts in other things like tax law or real estate or cake baking or karate chopping, or other important or complex subject areas. They can be perfectly intelligent people who don’t want to be talked down to, just because they don’t happen to have a decade-plus of foundational knowledge in any given scientific field. There must be a better way to communicate with them than by condescending.

Maybe the key instead is to be concise, I thought. By limiting the amount of scientific explanation you include in your story, you could avoid overwhelming the audience without treating them like dummies. A great example of this is a Story Collider story by cognitive neuroscientist David Carmel. In this story (which, naturally, I highly recommend listening to), David struggles with his fascination when his own father suffers a stroke that leaves him believing that the arrangement of his limbs is out of order. (“The bottom two-thirds of my body are gone,” he tells David at one point.) David’s explanation of what’s taking place in his father’s brain, and why it’s so unusual, is succinct — no more than a few lines — and it lasts only about thirty seconds.

There is a representation of the body in the brain. It’s called the homunculus. There are actually several homunculi. There’s one for the sense of touch. There’s one for motion. There’s one for proprioception, the sense of where your limbs are at any given time, so that you can balance properly. And the homunculus is plastic, meaning it can change over time, through experience. For example, the representation of the fingers is larger in pianists. But I’ve never heard of a complete remapping, a complete rearrangement, of the body representation after a stroke.

I’m sure that David, being a cognitive neuroscientist, could have waxed lyrical about what was going on his dad’s brain for hours. But because he kept it to only a few lines — and used really only one or two pieces of jargon — it becomes much easier to digest, and in fact, much more memorable. I have remembered the term homunculus and what it means ever since I first heard this story over two years ago, which is longer than I remembered the names of half of the people I’ve dated.

Sadly, David and I are not the first geniuses to consider this. In his book Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style, science communicator and filmmaker Randy Olson also advises concision.

“Dumbing down” refers to the assumption that your audience is too stupid to understand your topic. So you water down all the information or just remove it, producing a vacuous and uninteresting version of what in reality is complex and fascinating. “Concision” is completely different. It means conveying a great deal of information using the fewest possible steps or words or images or whatever the mode of communication is. The former results in a dull, shallow presentation; the latter is a thing of beauty that can project infinite complexity.

After listening to David’s story, who can argue?

So what can you do to be more concise? Start small. If you could teach someone just one thing about your work, what would it be? What are the facts we absolutely need to know in order to appreciate your story and the stakes at hand? Each time you are including complex scientific information, ask yourself: Does this advance the plot? Does the audience need to know this in order to follow the events taking place? If the answer is no, it’s likely that your story is better off without it.

You may feel naked without it. Suffocating detail can be like a warm, comforting blanket to scientists. It means you have covered all your bases and left no stone unturned – understandable instincts for someone in your line of work. But when it comes to storytelling, if that detail comes at the cost of losing the audience’s attention or overwhelming them, what is it really worth?

Erin Barker is senior producer of The Story Collider and a host of its live show in New York. She is the first woman to win The Moth’s GrandSLAM storytelling competition twice and has appeared in its Mainstage and shows in cities across the country, as well as on its Peabody Award-winning show on PRX, The Moth Radio Hour. One of her stories was included in The Moth’s New York Times-bestselling book, “The Moth: 50 True Stories.”

Erich Ritter: Getting Back in the Water

Shark-behavior researcher and enthusiast Erich Ritter learns how to dive through adversity, injury and a wall of skepticism to get back in the water.

Since early childhood, I have been fascinated by water. As a child all I ever wanted was to be at Lake Zurich, Switzerland, in summer and winter. I learned how to swim when I was three years old, and got my first dive mask at five.

One day–when I was seven–I saw sharks on TV for the first time and was more than just intrigued at what I saw. I did not really understand what the narrator of that show meant when he described these animals as vicious and dangerous, since what I felt was altogether different. This first encounter with sharks on television triggered something in me that would last a life time. After one episode of Flipper when a shark got killed by the porpoise, I actually felt sorry for the shark.

From then on I collected everything ever written on sharks, but since most books were written in English–which back then was not taught at school–I pretty much had to translate everything myself. To this day I kept my dictionary which serves as a vivid reminder of those early days.

When I was 12 years old my mind was set: go to the university and study sharks. Convinced that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich was the right school, I signed up for their biology program and was eager to get started. But what a wake-up call that was! Studying biology did not entail what I had anticipated. I still remember the frustration during a zoology lecture when my professor finally started to mention sharks, but it was over in less than 15 minutes. After class I waited for the professor and put him on the spot. He was not really sure how to react when I blurted out that these few minutes on sharks were the main reason why I went to college and signed up at the technical institute. He was dumbfounded, but managed to suggest that I should probably leave the ETH and sign up with the University of Zurich, where I could likely study “fishes.”

I signed up with the University of Zurich and believed that I finally found my way. But I was unprepared for the fact that the program was literally about “fishes”–the boney kind –and not the cartilaginous variety I wanted to study. So I asked for a meeting with the head of the department and once more, in a rather frustrated state, asked if there is any chance to do anything – anything – that would entail sharks. Although he said that he could not really help me with anything related to sharks (he was an ornithologist), he promised that I could focus on the apex predators for my master’s studies. For the first time I started to believe that I would actually get the chance to work with these incredible creatures. Of course what I had in mind was not what reality chose for me.

I was under the impression that I would start swimming with sharks, describe their behavior, develop experiments about their interactions with humans, and spend my time on islands surrounded by sharks. Granted, I was still a dreamer back then. Instead I ended up in a lab doing anatomical studies on their muscle system. But I told myself that once I have a master’s degree I would then be able to sign up at one of the universities in the US, where classes were taught by the authors of the very books I had translated as a child. But the movie JAWS was still fresh in most people’s minds, and because my ideas included studying the exact species Spielberg had turned society against, I did not receive the necessary funding. So I ended up remaining at the Zoological Museum in Zurich studying bony fishes, and I started to accept that my fascination with sharks would likely never be more than a hobby.

I kept reading everything about sharks, but no longer in the context of a possible career choice, until I learned about a program at the University of Miami (UM) and my dream swam back into the realm of possibility. A few months later, after getting the money I needed, I started my first day at UM and was convinced that this time my aspirations would finally come to pass.

However, as was becoming a theme in my quest – two steps forward, and one step back – my hopes were again dashed. The course of study did not involve hanging out with sharks, no experiments with sharks and humans, no body language evaluation, but rather catching sharks, putting tags on them and tracking where they went. But I had learned not to take no for an answer, and this time I did not settle for middle ground.

So each weekend, after my regular research, I started trying to understand how sharks interacted with humans. Back then the general opinion was that sharks are dangerous, and that because of this, no one could dive or interact with them. Well, I did it anyway and started to commune with tiger sharks, white sharks and bull sharks. My view that this was an enhancement of my knowledge base, and a continuation of my studies, was not shared by many. I got quite a bit of resistance, mainly from my peers. In fact some comments were rather nasty. I still clearly recall how I was ridiculed when I explained that the term “shark attack” is a misnomer, and should be called an “incident,” or an “accident.” But in truth I could care less. Battling ignorance was par for the course back then.

The funny thing is, today nobody wants to remember how the study of sharks started. And it is not just language that has changed since then. Attitudes have also come a long way. Sharks are the most harmless animals among the top and super predators on our planet (based on density and number of incidents), and the best proof is to be among them. So to spread the word, I started teaching everyone who wanted to learn about sharks, including those who might end up face-to-face with these magnificent animals. I launched an organization called “SharkSchool,” where I not only taught divers, surfers, swimmers, lifeguards, and even special forces, to handle close encounters, but I also built a research station in the Bahamas solely dedicated to the study of shark-human interaction. This work included incident analysis and reconstruction, as well. I had finally found my niche! But in April 2002 all of that would change when I was nearly killed by a shark during a demonstration on live television.

One of my spotters–a person designated to watch my back–did not do his job, allowing a shark to get through from behind me and bite me twice in my left leg, severing an artery. I had often worked with spotters since they could discern when a situation would get tricky, and could warn me so I could react appropriately to avoid an accident. The wound was so severe that it was a race against time to make it to a hospital before I bled out. After eight hours of surgery, and many more after that, the doctors saved my life. I had a hard time digesting the incident, not just because of my handicap, but also because some of my colleagues showed their true colors.

Back then I was not aware that my spotter failed to do his job, and that the incident could have been prevented. Because of this the situation was not portrayed as a failure of duty, but rather as a failure of my research. It was positioned as though the way I see sharks was flawed, incorrect, and that I was a fraud. The worst part was probably how some of my colleagues who had questioned my work before the accident left no opportunity to discredit me untaken. But the more bad press I got, the more they tried to disqualify what I knew was right, the more convinced I was that I had to get back in the water as quickly as possible to show everybody that they were wrong.

It was a long process since nobody seemed to want to know how it happened. They focused only on the fact that it had happened, drawing the false conclusion that because I had been bitten, sharks should be considered dangerous. So for years my top priority was to explain why the details of why it happened were important. The unbelievable part of all this was that my accident eventually opened up the doors to foundations, sponsors and philanthropists again. And the reason was always the same: how could a person who cheated death go back in the water to redo what had nearly cost him his life, and preach the same message as before?

The fact is that sharks were, and are, not how they were portrayed in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. They are in truth the very way I have always presented them – shy, cautious and smart. Most accidents are superficial and of an exploratory nature. But even given this, the research still remained a struggle. Not just because I preferred to work with wild sharks, but because data collection got more and more complicated. Eventually my research got so difficult that I needed of find a researcher who could help me make sense of all the data I collected. So I did a search on the internet and one name popped up: Professor Raid Amin from the University of West Florida.

I still remember the first meeting I had with him. I was nervous, not just because I had no clue of the kind of statistics I really needed–and doubted I would understand it–but also because I was used to meeting resistance when I presented my work. But Raid was nothing what I imagined. Like me, he thought differently, and was not only intrigued by my work, promising to support me on any future research I might conduct, but also showed me what could be done with my work when applying proper statistics and modeling.

Raid and I have since become friends and have worked on many projects together. We are establishing new methodologies, not just to make shark behavior better understood, but to examine shark incidents properly. To this date I swim and interact with sharks on a nearly daily basis, and they still fascinate me the same way they did when I first saw them on TV all those years ago.

And as attitudes change, so has my ability to spread the message that sharks are not to be feared, but to be respected. And most of all, they need to be understood. And perhaps the most important thing I have learned through all of these lessons is that when things don’t go exactly as you might have planned, don’t be scared to get back in the water – dive even deeper.

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