SciVee: YouTube for Science
No matter what the field, it takes a lot of time to keep current on research. I know that just reading the papers relevant to solar imaging filters and calibration techniques (my particular area of expertise), takes more time than I have.
I try to offset what I don’t have time to read by going to meetings and talking with the people directly about relevant research that I need to keep abreast of. but while traveling and talking to people is a lot of fun, it’s pretty inefficient.
Now, it looks like the National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center are going to try and make things easier for those of us trying to keep up with all the research that’s out there.
SciVee is a new site designed to make research more accessible by allowing paper authors to explain their research in a video. Summarizing the content of the paper can make it easier to understand, especially if the explanations are coming from the people most familiar with the research.
So far, the site looks biased towards a lot of biology papers, I haven’t seen anything related to astronomy yet, but I’m hoping that will change.
i couldn’t find a way to embed any video like one can with YouTube, but there are some features their video player has that I liked. For example, text boxes pop up with relevant text from the paper so that we can review what was written as the author speaks in the background. You can disable this if you find it annoying or too distracting.
Papers are synchronized to the video by creating a “SciVee”, which appears to be a way to link the text to the video and make a really handy quick-jump index that hangs out on the left side of the player.
Illustration Credit: SciVee
This index lets you jump around a bit to any parts you may want to re-play or just skip ahead to what interests you.
This looks like a lot of work for an author to go through in order to make this all come together, I’m not sure how many people will do it. It is a good way to get your work noticed though, so I hope more people start uploading.
The site looks to be in the alpha development so only certain people are uploading, this may explain why it’s so heavily slanted toward biology right now, there may not be many astronomer alpha-testers. There is a signup here for becoming a beta tester when they are ready for it.
Technorati Tags: astronomy video, SciVee
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POSTED IN: astronomy video
1 opinion for SciVee: YouTube for Science
siere
Sep 8, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Hello,
You should also check this site. It is similar but with different idea. http://www.dnatube.com
With Regards,
siere
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