Find out about social sciences at the British Library including collections, events and research. This blog includes contributions from curators and guest posts by academics, students and practitioners. Read more
In March 2014, Festival of the Spoken Nerd: stand-up mathematician Matt Parker, geek songstress Helen Arney, and experiments maestro Steve Mould hosted an evening at the BL exploring the laughs, graphs and gaffs of science. This highlights video gets to the chart of the matter, as the Nerds plot a course through the highs and lows of visualising data.
The Nerds were joined by an outstanding set of guest geeks including citizen science gurus Erinma Ochu, Jonathan Swinton, and the BL’s own data visualisation experts Richard Ranft, Christina Duffy, Nora McGregor and Johanna Kieniewicz who gave the audience an opportunity to get down and dirty with data in live experiments, and hear the back story to the Beautiful Science exhibition.
From human Venn diagrams and chicken-based infographics, through vocal visualisations and sunflower maths, to a mathematically-accurate love song (with greater than 95% confidence) - prepare to eat humble pi!
Check out the event programme to find out more about those involved.
And watch out for our next Beautiful Science event video, coming soon...
As regular readers of this blog will know, earlier in 2014 we hosted the British Library’s first science-led exhibition: Beautiful Science. From classic diagrams from the Library’s collections to contemporary digital displays, Beautiful Science explored how the visualisation of scientific data is crucial for making new discoveries and for communicating those discoveries effectively. Nearly 70,000 people visited the Beautiful Science exhibition over its three month run at the Library, with thousands more experiencing the exhibition at Cheltenham Science Festival.
Beautiful Science also comprised a spectacular season of events that ranged from serious debate to comedy, from family fun days to data visualisation workshops, from competitions to hands-on experiments.
If you missed out on the fun, or just want to remind yourself of what happened, then you can watch a highlights video of the season.
Over the coming weeks we will be posting videos from some of the key events in the season so watch this space…
Natalie Bevan explores some interesting traces of the geological past buried in St Pancras stone...
Over on our Collection Care blog, Christina Duffy recently wrote a fascinating piece on the stones and brickwork of the British Library’s architecture, the variety and origins of materials that have gone into creating the St Pancras site.
Following on in this vein of urban geology we decided to take a closer look at the variety of fossils that can be found all around us in the different types of stone used in the library's building work.
Inside the main building Portland stone is used in the flooring. This is a pale smooth grained limestone. Examination of the material depicts brown shapes within the white stone, reflecting fragments of fossilised marine flora and fauna.
Here you can see shell fragments; calcareous algal pellets are in evidence also, which look like coin sized white patches in the stone.
A much darker material from the late Jurassic/early Cretaceous period has also been used; Purbeck limestone, from the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. This brown-blue stone has been placed on the flooring alongside and providing contrast to the white Portland, this is best seen on the upper ground floor.
Purbeck limestone contains a multitude of curious swirly patterns, clearly defined – fossils of ancient shells well preserved, of freshwater molluscs such as pea mussels of ponds and streams.
The final example here is Italian Travertine. Used along the walls and pavings of the interior. It is a cream-coloured, rough textured stone.
The occasional indentations in the stone, shown here, are remnants of aquatic plants; the hollow stems of rushes.
Travertine limestone is a calcareous mineral deposited by flowing water, and originates from the Tivoli Hills outside Rome. It is the material often used in Rome’s classical buildings.
Geology on your doorstep : the role of urban geology in earth heritage conservation / edited by Matthew R. Bennett [et al.]
For geological research the British Library’s contains a wide ranging collection of geological literature and resources.
Becoming a reader will allow you access to some of the best online resources available in this field, such as Geobase and GeoRef. We also provide access to a variety of up to date reference books, some of which can be browsed on the shelves in the Science Reading Room; please search our library catalogue for further details.
Johanna Kieniewicz reflects on Envia, a new tool for flooding researchers and practitioners
This past winter, the UK received unprecedented amounts of rainfall. I returned from Christmas holidays to find a big damp patch on a south-facing wall of our Victorian terrace house. Our mild inconvenience was nothing compare to others across England who faced disaster, as rivers overtopped their banks, flooding communities for weeks on end.
A debate played out in the press about whether dredging the Parrett and Tone rivers might have saved the Somerset Levels. The then Chair of the Environment Agency, Lord Chris Smith, defended the work of his organisation, standing firm in the face of enormous pressure from politicians and communities alike. In the end, pumps were imported from The Netherlands that sucked the water away, and some dredging is now planned. In the wake of this, the Chartered Institute for Water and Environmental Management published an interesting report: Flooding and Dredging: A Reality Check, in which they examined the impact of dredging rivers on flooding. They concluded that although dredging may benefit flood risk management in some cases, it is not a standalone solution and should be viewed as part of a larger suite of tools and that the risks that it poses must be well understood at a local level.
Flooded farmland in the Somerset Levels (Image: Shutterstock)
To me, the debate whether to dredge or not highlighted the importance of the scientific evidence base to flooding researchers and practitioners. The ability to easily access trustworthy information quickly, particularly in a crisis, is of paramount importance. Intuition might say that if a river that accumulates sediment over time is flooding, then it might be a good idea to dredge it from time to time. Fair enough. But evidence also suggests this may speed up the movement of flood water (increasing risks to communities upstream), destabilise river banks and result in loss of fluvial and floodplain habitats. I can’t say whether the dredging debate would have played out any differently, had politicians and the public had better access to information. However, it did emphasise how important it is for everyone involved in tackling flooding—from local authorities, to charities, to academics, to the Environment Agency-- has the very best evidence available.
At the British Library, we are keen to help make that possible. A few years back, we started to look at whether we could make more of our environmental science collections, providing instant access to information online, to anyone, anywhere, for free. To that end, we now have Envia, a new tool that allows users to discover and access a curated selection of reports (including UK government, EU and more), PhD theses, and data resources online. It’s a simple search box, either on the Envia website, or something embeddable in browsers or webpages, that you can use to search over a wide variety of content. We had good evidence from our own research that flooding would be remain a high priority across the environment sector in the UK, and so decided to focus on content relevant to flooding experts for our pilot.
Over the past few months, we’ve been adding more content and functionality that will make Envia as useful as possible to people.
New Content – Envia will now connect you to reports from EU institutions on topics including water management, meteorology, coastal protection, climate change and more. We have developed our selection relating to the social impacts of flooding, and flooding and habitat management. We are also experimenting with content that you may need to pay for in order to access.
New Layout –Envia now has a cleaner layout that also displays beautifully on your smartphone or tablet computer. So now, whether in the field or whilst travelling, you can search and discover environmental information.
New Functionality –Envia now supports the export of search results by email, as well as in formats suitable for Refworks and Endnote.
So, if you are a flooding researcher or practitioner, or anyone interested in research and policy information relevant to flooding , do please try Envia, and tell your colleagues. We are keen to know how we might make Envia more useful to you, so don’t hesitate to give contact us at [email protected].
While Envia itself might not be able to hold back the waters of the future floods that will undoubtedly come our way, we hope that it may help those in search of the evidence they need to make the very best decisions possible to protect homes, businesses and habitats.
NERC Science Policy Intern Adam Levy sums up his three months with the Science Team
I applied to undertake a NERC policy internship, hoping to be presented with the opportunity of working at one of eight fantastic organisations. When I received an email to offering me an internship with the British Library, I was thrilled. Not only did it feel like a huge achievement to be offered any of the schemes, but the British Library is also a great institution that many of my peers find invaluable to their research. That said, I was as yet unsure exactly how my time would be spent with the Science Team. Well, I’m pleased to report, it has turned out to be a hugely varied and rewarding three months.
Without a doubt, the biggest responsibility I’ve had during my time at the Library has been to organise an event for the Science Team’s long running TalkScienceseries. I am thrilled by the amount of creative control I was entrusted with – from picking the topic and speakers, to tweaking the format of the discussion. The event took the form of a panel discussion, titled Extreme Weather: Climate Change in Action?, and my aim was to bring together four panellists from distinct spheres (science, policy, press and communication psychology).
When the day itself came around, it felt hugely personal, and I fully expected to be too nervous to hear anything our panellists discussed. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case, and I was delighted by how broad the conversation was – discussing not only the science linking extreme weather to climate change, but also why improvements in scientific understanding haven’t led to significant changes in public attitudes. This was also one of the first TalkScience events to be filmed, so feel free to judge the outcome for yourself!
Enjoying the outcome of my hard work at TalkScience!
Katie Howe reflects on the 3rd Francis Crick Institute post-docs’ retreat held at the British Library in June.
Over the past few years Team ScienceBL have watched with interest over the building site located at the north end of the British Library’s St Pancras site.The building under construction is the Francis Crick Institute, which when it opens its doors in 2015 will be a leading centre for biomedical research employing over 1000 scientists.
The Francis Crick Institute - viewed from the ScienceBL office window
We are excited that the Francis Crick Institute will be our newest neighbour and were particularly pleased to collaborate with the Crick on this year’s post-docs’ retreat. The event was hosted at the British Library Conference Centre and brought together about 200 post-doctoral researchers from the Crick’s partner institutes for an interactive day of science, careers and networking. This is the third such retreat and the second time we have hosted the event here at the British Library.
The programme was organised by a committee of post-docs from the Crick’s partner institutes and included a range of sessions, covering everything from careers advice to the parasitic behaviour of cuckoos. There was plenty of time for scientists from all six institutes to get to know each other over lunch and in the coffee breaks as well as during a dedicated post-doc networking session. One thing that stood out for me was the non-linear career trajectories that were followed by many of the speakers. Especially enlightening in this regard were talks from Dr Nessa Carey and Prof Mark Lythgoe, both of whom had had varied and non-conventional career paths before ending up where they are now. This was a very refreshing insight for early career researchers who are considering their career options.
L to R: The post-doc networking session; Nessa Carey (Photos: David Bacon, LRI)
The ScienceBL team were pleased to be invited to host a session entitled ‘Open Access for Early Career Researchers’. From our work with biomedical researchers we know that it is not always clear what is meant by the term Open Access and so in this session we wanted to shed some light on this complicated and often misunderstood area. Our own Anna Kinsey (EuropePMC Engagement Manager) kicked off the session by breaking down some common misconceptions about Open Access and explaining what it means for researchers. Anna went on to explain how EuropePMC can help biomedical researchers access a wide range of Open Access content. The Open Access session also included a thought-provoking talk from Steve Royle (Senior Cancer Research UK fellow at Warwick University) who shared his perspectives on Open Access publishing from the point of view of an early career researcher. Steve pointed out some of the pros and cons of publishing your research Open Access and explained why he felt that it is important for early career researchers to embrace this new development in publishing practice.
The Crick-BL retreat was finished off with a drinks reception in the Library’s terrace restaurant overlooking the Crick building before the post-docs headed off on an urban orienteering trail around the St Pancras area. We think we can safely say a good time was had by all and we look forward to working with the Crick in future years!
Our data citation workshops have gone on the road. This blog post summarises the recent event at the University of Glasgow.
On Friday 13 June, we held an Introduction to DataCite workshop at the University of Glasgow. As well introducing what DataCite is and what it does, we demonstrated the various ways you can look at what you put a DOI on (see this previous blog post), considering issues about the versioning of data, and the ‘granularity’ – whether you apply a DOI to a collection of data, individual data files or some other slice of the data. Slides from the day are available on our website.
We had two really enlightening talks from users of the service Gabriela Lopez-Gonzalez and Graham Blythe, both from the University of Leeds.
Gabriela is a researcher at Leeds, and runs the site forestplots.net. The site is part of international work to share longitudinal inventory data from permanent forest plots. Gabriela spoke passionately about how important data citation is for her and her community, and how having a persistent identifier such as a DOI for that data will help to acknowledge, not just the researchers who collected the data, but the research assistants, data managers and curators. These people play a vital role in the quality of the data, and in making sure the data are available for further research, but they do not traditionally get recognition in subsequent research papers. And most of them spend an equal amount of time camping out in the rainforest, enduring mosquitos, snakes and spiders as those who are recognised on research papers!
Making good quality research data avialable for reuse involves many people. Image credit Gabriela Gonzalez-Lopez
Graham is part of the research data management team at Leeds. Gabriela provided them with a great test case early on in their planning. He talked about the process Leeds has been through in deciding how to use DOIs for their data. He was wonderfully honest in talking about where, like many institutions we’re talking to, not all the possibilities have been decided on – or even uncovered yet.
Some of the issues around using DOIs seem difficult at first, for instance what data should get a DOI and when. It can be hard to make those decisions when you’re aware of how diverse an institution’s research and data is – no one wants to set policies that will exclude important data. But while it’s good to have general rules on assigning your DOIs, it is important to be flexible as best practice evolves.
We hope to run further data citation workshops around the country, not just to provide details on working with DataCite, but also to bring institutions dealing with these issues together – keep an eye on our webpages and Twitter feed for details.
Natalie Bevan looks back on last week’s World Environment Day #WED and considers the role of environmental data, outlining some examples of global ecological information sources available today.
Last week saw the annual celebration and public awareness campaign for all things green World Environment Day. With this in mind it seems an opportune time to consider some of the outstanding information resources available today for those interested or working in the broad discipline of environmental sciences.
Taking biodiversity as an example, data generated from scientific research are being used in a variety of innovative and progressive ways by organisations and individuals. As more data is made available, better analysis can be undertaken regarding the risks and threats faced by the natural environment. Most vitally this data can also be interpreted to discover effective solutions to complex global ecological problems.
The United Nations Environment Programme and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre - which support World Environment Day - have recreated this Conservation Dashboard. It provides easy access to snapshots of key ecological profiles country by country.
Biodiversity data are available to view, download and analyse in a variety of tools via this site. These include, to name but a few: Ocean Data Viewer – this tool provides access to, and geospatial navigation of data on the conservation of coastal and marine ecology and Protected Planet - this gives access to the most comprehensive global data on the world’s protected areas that can be explored through the map or searched for specific datasets.
We are also making strides here at the British Library in providing more visibility to datasets available on the web via our online catalogue, making a limited number of selected scientific research datasets records available in Explore the British Library. Search for datasets here.
We have also made datasets relevant to flooding discoverable through our Envia tool.
Finally, has it ever occurred to you that you might be interested in generating or collecting biodiversity data yourself? There are a number of interesting citizen science initiatives afoot in this area. Its worth checking out:
The Great British Bee Count – It’s well known that bees are suffering loss of habitat and food sources, but there is not a detailed picture of overall bee health across the UK. This project invites you to download an app, and record the bees you spot in your daily activities.
OPAL (Open Air Laboratories) – OPAL runs nation-wide surveys on the state of the environment. From the health of the trees in your neighbourhood, to the bugs in your hedge, learn a bit more about the environment around you and contribute to important scientific research!
Climate scientist and NERC Policy Intern, Adam Levy, explores the communication of extreme weather in advance of our upcoming TalkScience event on 17th June (doors open 6pm).
In spite of the immense threat posed by global warming, its impacts often seem too distant and abstract to motivate us to action. In contrast, extreme weather events – from droughts to hurricanes – are incredibly tangible, wreaking havoc on communities around the world. As discussed previously, climate scientists are now beginning to establish the effect that manmade climate change is having on extreme weather patterns today. We are quickly finding out, however, that communicating this scientific understanding presents challenges of its own.
This winter, the United Kingdom was hit by the most extreme rainfall observed in Southern England since records began almost 250 years ago. The flooding that resulted caused huge damage to infrastructure and homes, the costs of which could exceed £1 billion. As the rain continued to pour, one question in particular was being discussed in every sphere: What was the role of climate change in this devastation?
Frustratingly, examining the effect of climate change on a particular extreme weather event can take several months, and so at the time there were no clear-cut answers. It is well established, though, that hotter air holds more moisture, and there is good evidence to suggest that this will lead to increases in the intensity of extreme rainfall. While this could not be seen as the cause of the storms, it does point towards an influence from climate change on the strength of the storms. This is precisely what the Met Office’s Chief Scientist, Professor Julia Slingo, was referring to when she commented that: ‘while there is no definitive answer… all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change’.
This measured statement seems to strike the right balance – while emphasising that our fundamental scientific understanding would make a link likely, it acknowledges the lack of conclusive evidence on the role of climate change in this particular event. Many of the responses to it, however, were not quite so balanced. Newspapers with a history of climate change denialism (such as the Spectatorand the Mail on Sunday) were quick to oversimplify Professor Slingo’s comments in order to present a false conflict between her and others at the Met Office. Nigel Lawson – chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation – expressed this position particularly concisely and acerbically: ‘You'll see the Met Office's own report denies it. It is just this Julia Slingo woman, who made this absurd statement’.
Misrepresentation of Professor Slingo’s statement, however, was not limited to climate change deniers. Professor Nicholas Stern – a leading climate change economist – cited the storms as a ‘clear sign that we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change’. This statement implies an unambiguous causal link between climate change and the storms, going beyond what scientific understanding at the time was able to tell us.
These misrepresentations of Professor Slingo’s comment – both by climate change proponents and deniers – are deeply concerning. What’s more, they are symptomatic of the way climate change is discussed more widely. So why does this take place in discussions of climate science, and how can it be avoided?
It is tempting to argue that scientists simply need to communicate the science more clearly, and inaccurate reporting will dissipate. While it may be true that some misrepresentations are indeed caused by misunderstandings, this neglects other crucial factors that influence interpretations of climate change. After all, climate change is not just a scientific issue; it is a political and social issue.
The actions required to tackle climate change are often presented in a way that appeals to those with left of centre political beliefs, while conversely alienating those on the right. As a result, left of centre individuals are more predisposed to accept the statements of climate scientists than right of centre individuals. Inevitably, then, some will exaggerate scientific statements, while others will dismiss them out of hand. Worse still, a recent study has shown that amongst those who already believe or deny climate change, higher scientific literacy in fact only serves to empower people to defend their positions more boldly. This deeply challenges the conviction held by many – including Professor Slingo – who feel that better scientific communication is the key to progress.
What hope is there, then, to avoid these misrepresentations? First and foremost, climate change communicators must acknowledge that communicating the science is only a starting point. We must take account of the varied political and social lenses through which different individuals engage with the debate. Crucially, we must find mechanisms for communicating both the impacts and the mitigation of climate change that are engaging to those with right of centre politics. After all – while the debate rages on – the world keeps getting warmer.
To explore scientific and communication perspectives on this issue, come along to the British Library on the evening of 17th June and join James Randerson (Assistant National News Editor, The Guardian), with Professor Stephen Belcher (Head of the Met Office Hadley Centre), Laura Sandys MP (Conservative Environment Network) and George Marshall (Founder of Climate Outreach & Information Network).
After a hugely successful three-month run, our Beautiful Science exhibition has come to a close. We'd like to thank everyone who came along to see the exhibition-- we hope you found it thought provoking and enjoyable in equal measure.
Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insightwas an exhibition, hosted in the Library’s Folio Society Gallery from 20 February to 28 May 2014, that explored how picturing scientific data can provide new insight into our lives, our origins and our planet. From classic diagrams from the Library’s collections to contemporary digital displays, Beautiful Science demonstrated how visualising data is fundamental to the ability of scientists to make new discoveries and communicate their findings.
Next week, Beautiful Science will travel to a British Library tent at the Cheltenham Science Festival. From 3 - 18 June 2014, digital interactives from the exhibition will be on display, alongside high-quality, large-format prints of the physical objects from the St Pancras exhibition. The curators and members of the science research engagement team will be manning the tent over the course of the festival.
We are thrilled to have this opportunity to share Beautiful Science beyond London and be a part of what is, according to Brian Cox “without a doubt, the premier Science Festival in the country”. So do please spread the word that Beautiful Science will be at the Cheltenham Science Festival, and come visit us.