Video Technology Adds New Dimension To The Research Paper

TWO FOR THE SHOW Here's how to obtain copies of the two videos mentioned in this article. " Hydrogen Collision Dynamics on a Rough Nickel Surface,” based on research by University of Illinois nuclear engineering professor David Ruzic, is available from: The American Vacuum Society 335 E. 45th St. New York, N.Y. 10017 Phone: (212) 661-9404 Fax: (212) 983-6745 The video is in the University of Illinois library system and is “slowly working its way into other science and engineering libraries around the country,” Ruzic says. He hopes it will be on the shelves along with the science books, not “stuck in the undergraduate film library next to Gone With the Wind.” " “The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Earthquakes in the Middle East,” based on research by Stanford University geophysics department chairman Amos Nur, is available from: ESI Productions P.O. Box 2365 Stanford, Calif. 94309 Ruzic and Nur both say many of their colleagues are using those videos in their classes. —S.P. Although ink on paper remains the primary medium for presenting research results, scientists in some fields are discovering that nowadays they need more than a reading lamp and a comfortable chair to keep up to date. What they need now is a TV set and a VCR. For, while the flood of books, journals, and papers continues unabated, video is gaining ground as a vehicle for communicating research findings. The July 10 edition of Astrophysical Journal, for example, is supplemented with a videotape including five segments that illustrate concepts discussed in papers in the issue. Video can show some processes that are not evident from a series of pictures on pages, says Helmut Abt, the journal's editor. If the idea catches on, Abt plans to do video editions of Astrophysical Journal twice a year. He had no trouble finding material for this issue. More and more scientists who present papers at conferences are bringing along videos to illuminate their presentations. A few pioneers have taken the next step into the video age. They've produced and starred in videotaped presentations of their research. David N. Ruzic, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, made what he calls a “video book”—a 37-minute tape titled “Hydrogen Collision Dynamics on a Rough Nickel Surface.” It premiered at the American Vacuum Society's annual meeting last November. Ruzic believes it was the first scientific paper presented on video instead of in print. “My idea was to not just do the simplest of videos, but the one that could double as a scientific paper,” Ruzic says. “I wanted to really put all of the science into the video format.” Stanford University geophysics department chairman Amos Nur made the jump from print to video with “The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Earthquakes in the Holy Land.” It evolved from a paper on earthquake prediction he wrote with Ari Ben-Menahem and Moshe Vered (Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors 12:1-50, 1976). The paper spawned a slide show, and then an impressive 55-minute TV documentary that aired on public television. He also showed it at last year's meeting of the American Geophysical Union. These two researchers' topics could hardly be more different. Ruzic examines interactions of particles so small that the only way to visualize them is to use computer simulations. Nur studies the movement of immense chunks of the planet's surface. Sweeping aerial shots and satellite photographs often provide the best view of what he discusses in his video. Their approaches to the topics also are quite different. Ruzic's video is a text for graduate students and researchers. Nur's is aimed at a wider audience—laypeople as well as scientists. Despite .the differences, both men are convinced that video is the best way to explain their work. And both believe more scientists will try it. 'A Better Way' Several years ago, Ruzic found himself overwhelmed by four-foot high stacks of printed data on atomic collisions, the result of “hours and hours and hours on the supercomputer.” There was no way to comprehend so much information in that form, he says. “There's got to be a better way,” Ruzic recalls telling himself. “And the way to do it, I thought, was video.” His presentation on molecular dynamics is built around computer models showing each atom's effect on all other atoms in the simulation at intervals much less than a trillionth of a second. If it had been a standard paper, Ruzic would have needed to include thousands of figures. Video provided a way to show all the computer-generated images in an easy-to-understand form. Ruzic narrates the program, which features simulations and graphs generated by the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Equations and references are superimposed at the appropriate points. Numerals are shown in a corner of the screen so viewers can easily refer back to sections of the tape that are of particular interest, just as a reader can turn to a page in a book. “We could put a lot more data and understanding into the pictures, into the images, than I think people have been able to do before,” says Ruzic. Nur thinks video gives a scientific presentation “a real dynamic dimension.” In his program, Nur tells viewers that the best way to predict when an earthquake is likely to occur somewhere is to study the history of the region and look for patterns. And, he maintains, no place on Earth has a longer recorded history of earthquakes than the Middle East. Nur believes he has documented all the major quakes that have occurred in the last 2,000 years along the fault line that runs from the Sea of Galilee through the Dead Sea to the Red Sea. His program is a video tour of key sites. Along the way, he pulls in elements of archaeology, seismology, engineering, history, and religion. “Sometimes you can get across in one hour of video what it would take six weeks of lectures to teach,” says Nur. “Because people start thinking about. . . how things are interrelated in a way that regular science lectures just don't get across.” So instead of simply writing or talking about the cataclysmic quakes that have leveled Jericho, Nur presents his data while standing on the very spot where, according to the Bible, the walls came tumbling down. Elsewhere, while discussing the types of structural damage caused by quakes, he does not speak in abstract terms. He has his hands on the broken blocks and columns as he explains how it all happened so many years ago. Nur includes video of the modern inhabitants of the Jordan rift zone and comments from people who have seen the devastation earthquakes cause. There's even a wonderfully ironic moment when he shows what happened to his Stanford office during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. Shelves fell over, and Nur was trapped under his desk by an avalanche of books about earthquake prediction. All this brings to life dry scientific theory and ancient events. It also bolsters the appeal Nur makes at the end of the program for safer construction methods in quake-prone areas. Get Professional Help Both Nur and Ruzic say they learned some important lessons about making science videos. First of all, it's not enough to just come up with an idea, grab the family camcorder, and start shooting. All that will get you is a spot on “Academia's Funniest Home Videos.” It takes professional photographers and editors, using broadcast-quality equipment, to make videos like Ruzic's and Nur's. Scientists can get this kind of help from a variety of sources. Researchers at universities can find out what's available through their schools' communications departments. Many public TV stations are also affiliated with schools. Scientists working at large corporations may be able to turn to their company's media division. Video production companies can provide all the help you need to put your research on the small screen, although this is generally the most expensive option. Nur and Ruzic were fortunate to have dedicated, talented collaborators. Ruzic says Robert Patterson at NCSA was “the key person” in producing the video images. Patterson also directed and edited the video. Nur' s former student Chris MacAskill persuaded him to make the video. MacAskill directed the program and shot some of the videotape. All of them ended up putting alot more time and effort into the projects than they'd expected. “It's a lot of work,” says Nur. “But it's kind of fun, too.” Time And Money One of the fundamental rules of making videos is: Anything you do will take longer than you expect. Ruzic shot his on-camera parts in just one afternoon at the local public TV station. But generating the computer images and assembling all the pieces seemed to go on forever. It took an editor, two programmers, and “untold hours of computer time.” “I had no idea the editing process was going to be so intense,” Ruzic says. “It took us an eight-hour day to edit four minutes of video.” And the meter is running as the hours pass. The rates at production facilities can be hundreds of dollars an hour. Ruzic qualified for status as a strategic user of NCSA, which amounted to an open-ended grant to make his video. He still doesn't know exactly how much it all cost. If he had told people at NCSA in the beginning how much time and effort it would take, he says, “this never would have been approved.” Nur says he and MacAskill didn't have time to apply for a grant and probably wouldn't have gotten one anyway, because funders would have thought making a video was “a wild idea.” So they financed the project with their own money. He says he found out later that it costs about $500,000 to make a one-hour episode of the PBS science series “Nova.” “We had a lot of volunteers and so we did it for a mere fraction of that, like maybe $120,000. But still, it's very costly,” says Nur. He would like to do another video, perhaps one on the earthquake history of the United States. But he says he won't even consider it unless he gets some financial support and corporate help in setting up editing facilities “to do it right.” Shoot First, Write Later “Once you start shooting, it's inevitable that what you envisioned isn't what you end up with,” says Randy Atkins, who produces video news stories for the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C. “So it's impossible, unless you're a Hollywood movie studio and you have complete control over everything, to write a script and then go out and shoot the video to your script.” The first step should be collecting the visual elements, such as videotape, graphics, and photographs, says Atkins. Then you write the script to match the pictures. Atkins, who was trained as a scientist, says one of the reasons he got into television is that it's “a great medium.... You get to use words, you get to use sound, you get to use pictures, and you get to blend them all together.” And each must complement the others. So what's obvious from the sound or the pictures should not be repeated in the script. On the other hand, Nur didn't work from a script at all. He had a list of the things he wanted to show and knew what he wanted to say because he had given the lecture countless times. “So when we went out to a site, we would just improvise,” Nur says. That's not easy, especially for someone who has never done this sort of thing before. Fortunately, Nur appears comfortable on camera and his comments about the pictures he shows are concise and compelling. Cameras And Credibility While Nur and Ruzic are breaking new ground in the use of video to present their research, some other scientists remain suspicious of anything they see on a TV screen. “Many scientists feel that way about TV news because it tries to describe very complicated things in just a minute or two,” says Atkins. Scientists who “brag about not watching TV” probably wouldn't think videos like Ruzic's and Nur's are “real science.” Even scientists who are masters of the medium are wary of television's power to either report or distort the truth. Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Philip Morrison has appeared on many TV programs and knows that video technology can create virtually any image. So, he says, scientists have a responsibility to make sure there's evidence to support what they put on the screen (The Scientist, June 10, 1991, page 19). Nur agrees. “Everything you do is fraught with these kinds of dangers,” he says. “It's just another powerful tool that has to be handled with scientific conservatism, just like everything else.” Ruzic says his video provides “a mental map” for researchers. “Everyone has some way of visualizing something going on,” he says. “This gives a visualization that has more science in the basis behind it.” He sent his tape to three scientists in the field before the final edit and made some changes as a result of their comments. It wasn't exactly like traditional peer review because he knew who was looking at his work. He says it was more like sending out advance copies of a book for review. “No one has said that it's not good science,” says Ruzic. But he adds that he would have gone ahead with the project regardless of what his colleagues said. The Scientist's View “The Walls Came Tumbling Down” won the Silver Apple Award in physical sciences at last year's National Educational Film Festival. Yet if it had been up to one television producer, the program never would have been made. Nur says he pitched the idea for the video to this producer and the response was: “It doesn't sound like science to me.” “There's a real difference between science TV program producers' view of science and the scientist's view,” explains Nur. That's why it's so important for the scientists themselves to be the driving force in presenting their research on video, he says. “To me, science is about the unknown. But to producers who are not scientists, science is about the known. To us, it's uncertainty; to them, it's certainty. “The tension and the excitement comes in when you reach the edge of knowledge. And I think for that you need scientists.” Hopes For The Future Ruzic, Nur, and Atkins all expect the idea of presenting scientific research in video form to gain acceptance. “Sooner or later I think we're going to see a real increase in using this medium,” Nur predicts. He expects programs that include video footage and computer graphics to “become more and more central in science.” “The computer software to generate the visualizations is getting easier and more available,” says Ruzic. And advances in video technology should make these projects less expensive and time-consuming. “It's tremendously rewarding to do it,” says Nur. “Of course, some attempts fall flat. But it's like anything else; you just have to keep at it. And once it's successful, it's really terrific.” Stephen Pendlebury is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C.

Video Technology Adds New Dimension To The Research Paper

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August 1992

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