During the CEICS Nobel Campus, we were surprised that all the Nobel prizes put a strong emphasis on doing “good” science (science for the people) and on our duty as scientists to communicate science to as many people as possible.
Nowadays communication is becoming increasingly prevalent on the Internet from traditional outlets as well as in social media such as
Twitter, Facebook, and so on. Although in this media we can create dynamic (and even real time) contents with just a web browser, we (scientists) commonly use static figures for our documents. Now it is time to embrace these new dynamic techniques.
In the Amaral Lab, we believe in communicating our discoveries with the public in the most efficient and broad way. That’s why we use modern web technologies to convey scientific results with dynamic visualizations. We have obtained surprising results during the analysis of huge datasets because we can interactively focus on and build better intuition of the data. For example if you have a long time series, with these techniques you can zoom in certain areas on the fly. Give it a try and select the part of the time series you want to see in the small plot which is zoomed in in the big one on the top.
To do that we used a Python wrapper for NVD3 which enables us to create dynamic figures for the browser directly from within Python. These new kind of techniques have made our data analysis faster and more efficient, and we would encourage you to try it. Follow the installation steps at https://github.com/areski/python-nvd3 then you can run some of the examples.
Which other tools do you use to communicate science?
—Arnau
We would like to thank all the lab members as well as the Datascope Analytics team for their help and suggestions.