Category Archives: #SciCommChall

My Instagram in May

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Even though I started my Instagram @fascinocean_kiel mainly as a proof of concept thing that I wanted to do for one month only to be able to put it on my CV, it has now been active for three months and it’s still going strong. Why? Because it’s fun! And because it contributed to what I had hoped would happen: Getting the PhD students in my project to also try Instagram. There are so many new accounts being created and active!

We have the project itself as @kisoc_kiel, and then there are very cool accounts (listed in order of creation) by Sara Siebert @frauwissenschaft, Martina Kapitza @martina_kapitza, David Hölscher @hoelscher_arc, Nena Weiler @nena_weiler, and a couple more that I know are in the process of being launched that I will share as soon as they are active. Check them out, they provide a great peek into the projects and especially the people that make up the Kiel Science Outreach Campus! And it’s such a fun group of people to be on an Instagram journey with! :-)

Below the cut, mainly as my private archive, my May Instagram posts. I would strongly encourage you to look at them on the Instagram website (or, obviously, inside the app if you have it) because there are a couple cool movies in here that are now just screenshots, and also I didn’t copy all my awesome descriptions in, either. Plus if you don’t read German, Instagram has a translation function… ;-)

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#SciCommChall: 10 pictures to illustrate my work

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As part of May’s #SciCommChall I am presenting a collection of 10 pictures that illustrate who I am and what I am working on, within and outside of my job. Enjoy :-)

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1. This is where I work

This is my office. I love this space! Even though it is a small room, I am very lucky to have so much light and space for my plants and my posters and paintings, featuring (of course!) research ships, light houses, and jelly fish. Guess I can’t hide that I am an oceanographer through and through! :-) (And yes, there are puzzles in the bowl on the table. I also like to play…)

2. Another place I like to do work at

Despite having a great office, a lot of the creative work that I do as part of, or related to, my job does not happen in the office. It’s not always “creative work” in the sense that I will draw, but I get a lot of quality thinking, idea generation and broad background reading done when relaxing at the sea. And I definitely enjoy “taking work home” in this sense!

3. I see oceanography everywhere and need to share how ridiculously excited it makes me

The picture below isn’t an impressionist painting (although I am fond of art, too), it represents something that I am really passionate about: Observing the world around you and discovering physics, and specifically physical oceanography, everywhere. I can’t help seeing it, but I want other people to see it, too: In puddles or the sink, in rivers, lakes, the sea. Here you see pollen on the surface of the Kiel fjord and you can use this to deduct something about waves over the last couple of hours as well as ocean currents from it! (How? Check out the @fascinocean_kiel post on the topic).

4. Communicating science

I use several ways to communicate aspects of science that I am excited about. For example, I created the Instagram account @fascinocean_kiel, where I share daily pictures of water together with descriptions of what oceanographic phenomena you see in those pictures. Two years ago, I wrote a book called “Let’s go wave watching!“, where I point out all kinds of wave phenomena so parents can go wave watching with their kids. But I am also active in many other formats, all of which appear on this blog occasionally…

5. I’m a #DigitalScientist

Being close to water is very important to me. So much that I chose this selfie of me inside a “Strandkorb” over more formal portrait shots to illustrate an interview that I gave on Social Media Consultant Susanne Geu’s blog (link!) on being a #DigitalScientist. Since a large part of my job is related to using social media as a scientist, I was very excited about getting this opportunity to present myself! Also I really enjoy the opportunities that the web presents to communicate science in many different formats to many different people.

6. I like sharing my excitement

You saw this in the previous pictures already, but I love to share what I am excited about. Part of my job is the scientific coordination of the Kiel Science Outreach Campus (KiSOC), and in that role I develop and conduct workshops on science communication, specifically social media in science communication. Here you see me (on the left) with two PhD students, looking at Instagram on my phone, and me clearly gushing about my experiences with it. All part of implementing an exciting social media strategy for KiSOC, which will go live shortly…

Picture credit: Sara Siebert 

7. Designing learning opportunities

The second big part of my work revolves around creating informal learning opportunities, and I love doing this collaboratively. In the picture you see me and part of my team work on further improving the “energie:labor“, a school lab in which we have school classes visit us for a day to work on energy in the climate system with them. Here we brainstorm on how to better integrate all the different experiences the students make throughout the day in a final activity, and how to help them compile it into a take-home message that they will hopefully remember for a long time.

8. Running the school lab

In the “energie:labor”, students conduct experiments with me and my team to investigate different aspects of the climate system. They spend about half the day becoming experts on five different aspects, before they then come together into teams to combine their expertise and use it to explain things going on in a simple climate model. I really like how hands-on experiments complemented with the climate model give students an idea of how climate scientists work and where challenges might arise.

9. Hands-on experiments

Even though I am trained as an ocean modeller, what I love best are tank experiments. This is how I spend rainy weekends (or sunny ones, if there is something I really want to try) and I am trying to incorporate my expertise in how to use this kind of experiments in teaching in my day job. I just submitted an article on the process you see in the tank below, double-diffusive mixing.

10. And where are we going from here?

Actually, I have no idea. And as an example, below you see me and my sisters a loooong time ago, playing music at Ratzeburger Segelschule (where I used to work as sailing instructor for many years), to illustrate that there are things that have I have always been passionate about: Being in/on/near water. Doing creative things in one way or another. Working in a team. Leading. Instructing. Right now, all of this is combined in my job. Are there other ways these passions can be combined? For sure! For example when I finally fulfil my dream and live in my light house, from which I will watch the sea, create materials, run workshops, all related to oceanography scicomm.

If anyone has any good ideas how to get me there, I am all ears :-)

That’s me and my work in 10 pictures. People who know me, tell me: What aspects of me & my work that you find important did I miss? What pictures would you have chosen instead of the ones I chose? Which of those I chose did surprise you? I am really curious to get feedback on this! :-)

Interview: Mirjam as a #DigitalScientist (in german)

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Remember my March #SciCommChall which resulted in me starting my scicomm Instagram account @fascinocean_kiel? Turns out that was a pretty successful move measured by metrics that I didn’t even think of before starting: After posting on that account for less than a month it had already gotten me an invitation for an interview on Susanne Geu’s blog. Since Susanne has a consultancy business for scientists’ online identities, I am pretty stoked to be featured as a role model #DigitalScientist!

Check out the interview here or below the cut (it’s in german, but if you ask nicely, I might provide a translation ;-))

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“Wimmelbild” of a research ship

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Wanna know why I am drawing a research ship “Wimmelbild”*? Check out the blog post over at our #SciCommChall blog to find out why!

And while you are there, why not join us in our #SciCommChall? :-)

*In case you are wondering what the translation English of “Wimmelbild” might be: No idea how to properly translate it! Apparently they are used in the “I spy” books in the US, in “Where is Waldo?” in the UK, sometimes called “busy pictures”, sometimes called “look-and-see” pictures. How would you call something like this?

My April on Instagram

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Yes, I have been slacking on the blogging front. But I’ve been very active somewhere else: On Instagram! My account @fascinocean_kiel has been updated almost daily over the last month (I did continue with my private March #SciCommChall), and that has been a great learning experience!

Here is a random list of things I learned in April:

  • A lot of people who like my posts do so because they are interested in Kiel. And for them to find my pictures, hashtags (#s) are super important. A lot more so than I thought! During April, most of my pictures got 40 “likes” or over. Usually my pictures are from Kiel fjord and thus tagged with Kiel, KielerFoerde, and other local tags. But then I went to Kühlungsborn for work and had a couple of — really pretty and interesting! — pictures from there, which I couldn’t tag the way I usually do, for obvious reasons. And those pictures did so much worse than pictures from Kiel! Even though I did include all the relevant oceanographic #s (like waves etc), the scicomm #s and the local Kühlungsborn #s. I guess this is what I aimed for by creating a german-speaking account that focusses on Kiel fjord, but I want to build on what I have and attract more people that really want the ocean scicomm bit, too, not just pretty pictures of Kiel fjord.
  • On that note: pictures are so much more important than texts! I guess I knew that one, too, and it comes with using Instagram as the channel of choice (rather than blogging, for example). But I still find it slightly shocking that pictures of nice sun rises with a bird in the foreground will get so many more “likes” than pictures of exciting oceanography accompanied by good texts!
  • I am assuming that only very few people actually read the texts I am writing (even thought they are an integral part of why I am running that Instagram account). I know for sure that three people on Instagram read everything I write and a couple more read occasionally, and then a handful of my friends read it on Facebook, and I hope that my parents do so either in this post or looking at the Instagram website. But that’s really not so many people compared to how much time it takes to write all that stuff!
  • Posting more than one picture at a time isn’t a good idea, people won’t actually pay attention to all of them equally. When I post more than one picture at a time, the “likes” I would typically get seem to get divided between the pictures posted at the same time.
  • Doing cool gifs to explain what’s going on isn’t as great an idea as I thought, either. I only tried this once, but a) you can’t post gifs on Instagram, you have to convert them to movies first, which makes the whole thing quite a hassle, b) it’s difficult for people to see the text as well as the gif simultaneously, so the gif has to either be self-explanatory or it won’t add much benefit, and c) I think I’ll stick to pictures and do the more in-depth explanations back here on my blog.
  • I’m getting a little bored with just posting water the way I’ve been doing for two months now (as in: open water in some kind of pretty picture). For example, I have nice pictures of latte macchiato and awesome flow patterns therein which don’t fit my vision of my Instagram account, but which I think are cool and interesting and which I want to share. Do you see these rows in the flow going down the slope of the glass below the inverse shoulder (no idea how you call that part of a glass?). How cool are those? And what is going on there? I really want to talk about this somewhere, so watch out for it on here! :-)

  • I also want to experiment more with the typical instagram-ing — describing my daily life as a scientist, using videos on stories, etc.. But that doesn’t fit with my vision for that account, either. So either I will need to start another account or work on expanding my vision to include all the stuff I would like to experiment with… But right now I am leaning towards more accounts and keeping this one the way it was set up, because …
  • I am very pleased with how me starting my Instagram did help my colleagues start experimenting with social media, and how the very distinct design choices I made for this account helped open up discussions of how Instagram can be used for a multitude of different purposes. More on that very soon :-)

Anyway, that’s all I can think of right now. All of April’s @fascinocean_kiel Instagram posts below the cut. Enjoy, and I’ll try to blog a little more during May! :-)

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My March on Instagram

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My private #SciCommChall for March was to start a science communication Instagram account, fascinocean_kiel. I had a pretty clear idea of where I wanted to go with this account:

  • The target group are people who live close to Kiel fjord who I want to talk to about oceanographic phenomena you can spot when walking along Kiel fjord
  • For that, I wanted to post daily pictures of whatever is going on that day, plus short explanations in German
  • I wanted to do this as a proof of concept, to get an idea of the amount of work involved, and to get a feel for how many people you can reach organically with this kind of content; basically to build my portfolio as a science communicator.

This post is for all of you who are curious about

a) how that has been going (I will reflect on that below); or

b) what I have actually done on Instagram, since you don’t actually use the app.

So here we go! :-)

a) How Instagram is working for me (or, at least, the first couple of weeks)

My first impression after four weeks on Instagram: It’s fun! I thought it would be less work than writing a blogpost, but it’s actually not, it is just different. I have to take and select pictures a lot more carefully, crop them, sometimes put a filter on or something (except the green lakes — those were 100% real!), but now I have to think about relevant hashtags so people can find my posts…

And social media are really that, social. Through Instagram, I have connected with a lot of people who I only met through Instagram: On my very first day actively posting on Instagram, I have received an invitation to visit something really cool (will let you know when it’s not a big secret any more). Then, several people who I didn’t know before, messaged me to tell me they liked my “feed”. And then I got recommended for an interview about scientists and social media by someone I don’t even know! I am very impressed with the community on Instagram. And connection also works the other way round: I have found amazing science communicators on Instagram whose posts I look forward to reading every day, for example stories.of.a.scientist, science.sam, bakingsciencetraveller, and sci_wilson, just to name a few.

As for how many people I’ve been reaching (after less than a month on Instagram!): A picture typically get 30-40 “likes”. My best picture currently has 87 likes, but that’s a really awesome picture if I say so myself (see below). I think this picture performed so well for two reasons: because it’s a really cool picture, but also because it’s showing an exclusive view of my favourite restaurant in really really bad weather. I think that people recognized the spot and that I had an exclusive pic really helped.

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Are you following fascinocean_kiel on Instagram already? You definitely should!

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fascinocean_kiel is my latest scicomm project — I am posting daily pictures from Kiel fjord together with a german description of some cool oceanography stuff you can see on the picture. But Instagram has a pretty good translator built in, and I am happy to translate any post if you leave me a comment with the picture you are interested in!

My latest post is the picture above: Here you can calculate the dominant wave length from the length of the pier and where waves are breaking through the floor boards of said pier. Storms are awesome when you are safely on land!

And below you can take a look at the whole fascinocean_kiel Instagram feed. See you over on Instagram? :-)

Proudly presenting: #SciCommChall – the science communication challenge!

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It’s been a little while in the making, but now it’s official and I invite you to join our #scicommchall!

#SciCommChall is a science communicator community-based challenge with the goal to experiment with different science communication formats in reaction to monthly prompts. The aim is to non-competitively inspire each other to come up with fun ideas, some of which might be taken further and become part of our science communication portfolio.

The April-challenge is currently active, so now is as good a time to join as any!

The website https://scicommchall.org, email address scicommchall@gmail.com, and social media (Twitter @scicommchall, Instagram @scicommchall, Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/scicommchall/) are all up and running, so pick your favourite mode of interaction and don’t be a stranger! And I would love for you to share #SciCommChall with your networks if you like the idea :-)

Below you see my personal interpretation of the March challenge (“Show us how you would sneak some science communication into a Brunch with your family and friends!”): As an Easter gift to my colleagues, I wrote Haikus about their research projects in KiSOC. Those little poems are on the outside of egg cups, on the inside I hid little explanations about the research projects. Check out other interpretations of that challenge on our website or social media! And join us for future challenges! :-)

Dipping a toe into instagramming

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This month’s private* #scicommchall: Run a scicomm Instagram feed! See the feed below. I’m doing this for several reasons: First: curiosity, how Instagram works for me personally as a scicomm format. Second: more curiosity, whether I can actually reach a german-speaking audience** that isn’t “just” scientists who are interested in the topic anyway. Third: Building my portfolio as a scicommer. Fourth: A little bit of laziness. You might have noticed my long blogging hiatus. I was sick for a long time, and now that I am back at work, I feel like I should pay a little more attention to what I spend all my time and energy on. Of course I still have to talk about water! But maybe this format is a little better suited for me at the moment. So I will definitely still write posts on this blog, but maybe not as many as you’ve gotten used to over the last years. But if you want to hear from me regularly, follow me on Instagram!

*”private” as opposed to the public #scicommchall that I have started. Since the beginning of this year, I am one of two scientific coordinators for the Kiel Science Outreach Campus (KiSOC), and I am challenging my colleagues there now, too. But I will report on that one another time…

**if you see a post you are interested in and would like to know what it says, just comment on that post and I’ll happily provide a translation! I’ve just decided against posting in two languages because I am lazy… ;-)