On Social Media and Science

Photo of Tanya Berger-Wolf on the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

The power of persuasion

Many people can have a great idea, or important insight, or strong persuasive personality.  In order to bring that idea to the world, there is no match for the power of social media.  Let's say that you are a scientist that is promoting a unique project you've been working on such as Tanya Berger-Wolf who along with her team at Translational Data Analytics Institute which she founded, combines the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence, wildlife biology, and social sciences (including social media) to create a project that tracks wildlife through people's uploaded online wildlife pictures and videos. 

You could write numerous scientific papers about all the research leading up to this discovery and you can speak at various conferences and have your papers recognized like this one (Tantipathananandh et al. 2007) This will garner attention from people who are in your field and happen to have gone to the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. As you become more well-known, and your research is cited over and over in the case of the above paper 625 times. Your name will come up in more Google Scholar or other scientific journal web searches because the citations cross reference to your work.  

You might be invited to talk at a TED conference because what is more interesting than how datamining is being done to identify an individual whale on a random person's Facebook post, just through the artificial intelligence that is combing social media sites for pictures of whales. First off, this changes the way that history is documented, not just in big events, but small moments in specific places at specific times. Secondly this will really interest the limited number of laypeople that happen to be at that TED conference.

To really get the idea and the science to the public and win the hearts of people though you need to layer this through getting your message online, in this case on YouTube, where it can be viewed by the current 46,000 viewers. Now YouTube has become a powerful mobilization channel to get the word out. If the public likes your idea and starts to share this on their social media you get more and more hits. 

If you then create a Linkedin profile so that others can easily find you, you now have a great tool for making you and your ideas easily accessible.  The more people that you network with, the greater your influence in the scientific community and the more grants you attract to your college and institute.  

Reference: 

Tantipathananandh, Chayant, Tanya Berger-Wolf, and David Kempe. "A framework for community identification in dynamic social networks." Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining. 2007.