Friday, February 15, 2013

UiT satser på film - with the help of ReCO

Utropia møtte Kristine Vollnes Johansen, Marit Olsvik Oppshal og Audun Hetland for å snakke om filmkurset og konkurransen som arrangeres av helsefakultetet.



(Foto: Kasia Mikolajewska)
Hovedformålet med konkurransen er å bruke filmen i rekruttering av studenter til helsefakultetet.
- En ting som er viktig er at vi vil bruke studenter i studentrekruttering, sier Johansen. Hun jobber som rådgiver i utdanningstjenesten ved Helsefak, og vil profilere fakultetet:
- På denne måten får vi også frem hva studentene synes om å studere helsefag. Det er så viktig når vi skal rekruttere folk fra videregående, å vise hva våre studenter har laget. De er her og dette er slik de opplever det. Det selger utrolig mye bedre enn alle ord vi kan skrive i studiekatalogen, sier Johansen.
Film som medium
- Det er mange måter å formidle på, enten det er tekst eller bilde eller film. Mer og mer dreier seg om formidling med film på nett. Mange deler av samfunnet er flinke til akkurat å tilpasse seg det, men vi på universitetet, vi er nok litt sånn gammeldagse og ligger litt bakpå.
Universitetet i Tromsø er relativt nytenkende når det gjelder å bruke film som formidling og rekruttering i Norge.
- Universitetet står på tre ben, sier Audun Hetland. Hetland syntes at det var god opplæring i forskning, god opplæring i undervisning, men i formidling fantes det ingenting. Helsefak hadde et formidlingskurs på 3 studiepoeng, og Audun Hetland med andre ville løfte tilbudet – i form av ReCO.
         ReCO Research Communication and Outreach
ReCO ble etablert i 2010 for å jobbe med formidling av forskning på alle nivå. Etter hvert har ReCO fått en halv million i støtte for å bygge opp organisasjonen. De kjører nå kurs tre til fire ganger i året og har deltagere fra førstegangsstudenter til professorer og forskningsledere – også fra andre universiteter. Tilbudet er unikt. Hetland forteller at alle kan melde seg inn og medlemskapet er gratis, med mulighet for utlån av foto-/filmutstyr.
- Vi ser at for eksempel det å lage film er krevende, og at det er en hel del du må lære – de fleste går kanskje med en mobiltelefon i lommen og det er godt nok til å lage film med, men du må vite hvordan du bruker kameraet. I løpet av et par kvelder her nå, håper vi at vi skal få hamret inn det meste av basisen, sier Hetland.
Filmkurset
Filmkurset ble arrangert 4.og 5.februar som en forkunnskap til filmkonkurransen, som har frist 15.mars. Det er ikke nødvendig å ha vært med på filmkurset, men det kan være appellerende for mange.
Kristine Vollsnes Johansen jobber med rekrutteringen.
- Det er mulig for alle studenter å være med på filmkurset og konkurransen selv om hovedkriteriene for bidragene er at de må handle om helsefag. Fjorårets vinner var for eksempel en jusstudent, sier Johansen.
- Filmen hans sier litt om det å være helsefagarbeider og medmenneske. I tillegg legges det vekt på filmteknikk og kvalitet. Pengepremien på 10 000 finansieres av administrasjonen og utdanningstjenesten.

ReCO initiated UArctic Course in Science Photograpy

The course is part of a cooperation between UiT, ReCO and the new UArctic Thematic Network on Communicating Arctic Research. It is open to all PhD students at UArctic member institutions. Thanks to UArctic for funding the project!
  

BIO-8008 Communicating Science Module 3 – Visualizing your science - 1 stp

The course is administrated by

The course is administrated by

Faculty of Biosciences, Fisheries and Economics
Application deadline

Application deadline

1. September 2012
Type of course

Type of course

This workshop is aimed for PhD candidates and researchers that have a keen interest in photography and want to develop their skills in scientific imaging and photography in general. We are aiming at a multidisciplinary working environment, which will be accomplished by selecting students from sciences, arts and photography.
Admission requirements

Admission requirements

If you are interested in the course, please send a short letter of motivation and a CV detailing your language skills, background in photography and status of studies by email to Ingjerd.nilsen@uit.no, along with the official application form found below by 18.2.2013.
Admission PhD Courses
Based on the applications, up to 20 students will be selected to participate the course. The course is aimed at PhD students and researchers, but the course is open for all. In other words, master/bachelor students are welcome to apply too (they will not be able to get credits, but we will provide with a course certificate). If you aim to get credits from the course, you should discuss it with both your supervisor and your faculty. If you do not want credits, but want to take the course anyhow, we will provide you with a course certificate. Your accommodation during the course at the Kilpisjarvi biological station and all the materials needed on the course will be provided for you. Therefore, your enrolments are binding. We will also try to arrange travels to participants by car-pooling. More information about the practicalities will follow after the selection process.
Course contents

Course contents

We live in a visual world; therefore science communication should be visual too. This course will teach you to reflect upon - and train to use - different methods to visualize your science. The theme in spring 2013 will be photography.
Objective of the course

Objective of the course

The objective of the workshop is to enhance the photographic skills, critical visual reading, visual literacy and photographic thinking, which are usually left aside in academic practices. Further, we aim to increase and enhance the visual possibilities in the scientific approach. Effective publications are developed through photographing activity on site.

On the course you will learn:
  • to produce a photographic project
  • about microphotography, time-lapse and repeat photography, landscape and underwater photography and graphic design.
  • to reflect about the role of the research community in science communication, and to understand the power of visual communication
  • to visualize research, and to adjust the message according to the intended audience
Language of instruction

Language of instruction

A significant number of both teachers and students will be coming from countries Finland, Germany and Norway, so English will be the workshop language and good to fluent skills in English are expected from participants.
Teaching methods

Teaching methods

The workshop teachers will include professional photographers, teachers of photography, photography artists and researchers of natural sciences from Subzero - a thematic network on photography of UArctic. Details on the teaching personnel will follow later.

The workshop is based on the idea of getting scientists to work together with photographers as small groups on a small project, that is to be completed during the workshop. Contents of the workshop include practical demonstrations and "hands on" sessions given by visual experts. Best results from student projects may earn some international visibility in conjunction with the Kuusamo Nature Photo 2013 event where we are displaying the workshop activity.
Assessment

Assessment

The exam will consist of the delivery and an oral presentation of the project in the end of the work-shop. Evaluation: Pass/Not passed.
Schedule

Schedule

Lectures Spring 2013Full days the whole week, starting on 9:00 on tuesday19.3.13 and ending at 20:00 on friday 22.3.13. Travelling days monday 18.3.13 and saturday 23.3.13. Important dates: Deadline for registration/applying for the course: 18th of February.Course duration: Week 12, 19.3-22.3 at Kilpisjarvi biological station in FinlandCourse-leader: Elina Halttunen, e-mail: elina.halttunen@uit.no
Teaching Science and photography workshop at the Kilpisjarvi biological station 19.3.-22.3.2013

Monday, February 11, 2013

On the wall or in the ear, climate science comes alive as art — The Daily Climate

On the wall or in the ear, climate science comes alive as art


Jon at graphic-768
Jonathan Perl, an audio technology professor at City College of New York, looks over the artwork prior to a public opening of Polarseeds, a collaborative effort trying to make climate science as beautiful and accessible as art. Photo by Shelley DuBois.
Feb. 1, 2013

A collaborative effort pulls video gamers, music professors, multimedia designers and polar researchers together in a bid to make climate science approachable. 

By Shelley DuBoisThe Daily Climate
NEW YORK – Art may follow life, generally, but at a new exhibit, art follows science.
You must try to give something as close as possible to the data, but provide some kind of aesthetic.
- Marco Tedesco,City College of New York
At the entrance of the gallery, crystal-clear photographs of cracking ice pop in polar blues and whites. Along the back wall, infographics in blocky text and blue-green images fill in the facts behind stark photos of a changing Arctic landscape.
A video, projected on the left wall, shows two blocks of ice – one blue, one black – under a heat lamp. The black one, though bigger, disappears faster than the other: This simple science experiment demonstrates how Arctic ice sullied with soot melts faster. A loop of ambient noise pulses throughout the gallery – the instruments softly but ominously intensify. It's music that might play at a high-end fusion restaurant. Except it’s from melting ice – or rather, clips of cumulative totals of Arctic ice loss – put to sound.
The exhibit, which runs through Feb. 14 and has a public reception tonight, is an effort by City College of New York professors and students to make climate science more accessible and compelling.

Approachable science

They failed utterly with the exhibit title – Communicating Polar Climate Change Through Data Visualization and Sonification. But inside the gallery science and art become approachable. The space is warmly lit and welcoming, a contrast to the cold-colored art. On the wall next to the melting ice video is another projection, this one of a computer game. Viewers can play it on a laptop set up in the middle of the room. The objective is to slow coastal flooding by blocking the sun's radiation with cloud cover. You can slow it down, but you can't prevent it completely.
The collaborators for the project, dubbed Polarseeds, adhered strictly to scientific data to guide their creations. Putting daily melt data to music produces random gibberish. But add the cumulative melt, and you can hear the dips and swells of melting ice, all moving on one big trend line. Polarseeds is the brainchild of Marco Tedesco. He is an associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at CCNY, but he feels at home in the artistic world. "I grew up in Italy, so art is in the history there," he said. He claims this project was the most fun he's had in his life. Still, he's an empirical guy: "You must try to give something as close as possible to the data, but provide some kind of aesthetic."

Different disciplines

Tedesco realized his research lent itself to this project when CCNY president Lisa Coico called for grant proposals in 2011 to bring together experts from different disciplines. Tedesco's project ultimately used the combined brainpower of electric design and multimedia program director Ina Saltz, game design expert Ethan Ham and audio technology professor Jonathan Perl. The professors, in turn, hired seven current and former CCNY students.
Ima and jon-400
"I see this as a microcosm for the projects we could do here," Saltz said. CCNY is known as a school that focuses on science, technology and math, she added, and those are fields that desperately need help reaching the public. Departments all over the school produce fascinating data, work fastidiously displayed on research posters in the halls, "But they're inaccessible," Saltz said.
One of her students made a simple graphic showing the complicated forces that form the ephemeral lakes atop glaciers. The information looks clean, even elegant – "inevitable" as Saltz describes it. "But a lot of decision-making goes into something this beautiful," she said. That's where artists can help scientists represent their ideas.
Many scientists already convert their data to sound to better understand their results, Perl said. But they don't necessarily make it musically interesting. Yet producing musically interesting information can reveal new insights, he added.
For example, Perl said, putting daily melting patterns to music produces random-sounding gibberish. "There's too much variation," he said. Only when Perl looked at cumulative melting – or the daily melt data on top of the amount of melt since the beginning of the year – did music-worthy sound emerge. Then you can hear the dips and swells of melting ice, all moving on one big trend line, culminating in a crescendo.

'You went deep'

The final sound product took a tremendous amount of work – manipulating volume, pitch and intensity to convey trends including the albedo effect, melt rates and air temperature. "I was a little geeky. I was so immersed in the process," Perl admitted. "You went deep," Saltz agreed.
But all of the geeky work behind the scenes comes together in simple visualizations and sounds. There isn't a strong political message. It really is nerd art; it sticks to the numbers, which is what makes the exhibit feel cohesive.
And the one message to come home every time, whether converted into an audio loop, splashed on simple graphics with blocky text, coded into a game or posted on the wall as pictures of ice, is that the Earth is warming slowly, over time.
When it comes to climate change, the data speak for themselves.
Communicating Polar Climate Change Through Data Visualization And Sonification will be on view through February 14 in the Compton-Goethals Art Gallery, Room 134, Compton-Goethals Hall, on the CCNY campus. A public reception for the exhibit will be held 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, February 1.
Inset photo: CCNY electric design and multimedia program director Ina Saltz talking with audio technology professor Jonathan Perl in the exhibit's gallery.
Text and photos © Shelley DuBois, 2013. All rights reserved.
Shelley DuBois is a reporter for Fortune Magazine in New York. Daily Climate is an independent, foundation-funded news service covering climate change. Contact editor Douglas Fischer at dfischer [at] DailyClimate.org

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