An Eye for Science
I have been hanging around this blog for the past week but you might not have noticed. Most of my time has gone into the little box on the left (which you won't see if your reading the RSS feed — so visit the site once, already!), with "Eye for Science" at the top and the little picture in the middle. Go on, click on the picture and see what happens.
For some time, maybe a couple of years, I'd had the idea of putting interesting or provocative thumbnail images on a page that might induce a visitor to click the image, whereupon said visitor gets a big version of the image and a short caption to go with it, a caption high in scienticity. Voilà! A little science moment. Creating those little science moments is Ars Hermeneutica's leading tactic for chipping away at the formidable wall of scientific illiteracy.
This little red box at the left finally implements the idea, not in a final form I'm sure but as a working demonstration of the idea. Oddly, it does it very differently from the way I had originally imagined doing it, even though the end result is identical.
At the foundation is a Flickr group I created last week called — wait for it! — Eye for Science. When I created the group I wanted to seed it with a collection of photographs that suggested the types of images, along with their captions / stories, that I am hoping Flickr members will submit to the group from their own photostreams. Those of you who don't maintain your own Flickr photostream but would like to participate by contributing photographs and stories: get in touch and your image can be put in the group by Euclid vanderKroew (our scienticity mascot, who happens to be a crow); that's what he's there for. Others are now on notice that I'll probably be annoying you sometime in the near future to contribute to the group.
Collecting those images was fun but time consuming. There are a number of sources I used, a mere sampling of the rich resources on the web of public-domain photographs. Many are from US government sources, like NASA and NOAA, agencies with a strong commitment to public outreach and education. Using their images helps our mission and also helps their mission. I love win-win.
Then there was the programming to get the wee box widget to work right. The bulk of that meant sorting out the Flickr API, which works reasonably well but, nevertheless, has gaps in the documentation, not to mention a bug or two. But let's set those frustrating hours aside and focus on the working widget!
If you want to see a stand-alone demo of the widget, here's one. You'll note that there's a link labeled "Steal this Widget!"; clicking it will give you the source code for the little red box, a convenience if you don't want to look at "reveal source" in your browser and try to find it there. Spreading the box around is part of the strategy here, so I'd be delighted for all of you with a place to put it to steal the widget. The randomly chosen content will get more varied and interesting as people contribute images.
One other use that I have almost ready is the "Wall of Science Images" that will live at scienticity.net. The demo is here.
So, my invitation to y'all is two-fold:
- Steal the widget and put it on your site so that more little science moments can start happening; and
- Contribute your own photos with a small science story to the group, either through joining the group and doing it yourself, or with Euclid's assistance.
Have fun looking through the collection!
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Personal Notebook, The Art of Conversation