#sketchyourscience at #ESA100

Never underestimate the power of sketches to communicate your science, engage people in science communication, and liven up a huge conference.


  1. At our #ESA100 booth, the recently launched #ESASciComm Section encouraged folks to sketch their science - we were blown away by how many people enthusiastically did so. This Storify curates twitter activity related to #sketchyourscience and #sciart at the annual meeting. Images are interspersed with twitter quotes and tweets about data pointing to myriad benefits of sketching, doodling, etc. for research, learning, and engagement.
  2. @katteken ran a bunch of code through R to distill key take-aways from the #ESA100 twitter storm. Since the content in this Storify relies on twitter, here are a few outtakes from @katteken's analysis which relate to #sketchyourscience, #sciart, and #ESASciComm:

  3. #ESASciComm's #ESA100 #sketchyourscience initiative was inspired by @mtnresearch.

  4. At #ESA2014, several MRI Mountain Research ecologists participated in #ESASciComm's workshop on "Advancing ecocomm through multimedia." In that workshop, participants were encouraged to act on the skills they developed by producing some sort of #scicomm piece/project during the conference. The Mountain Research crew came up with the idea of cruising the conference looking for mountain ecologists willing to sketch their science; here is a guest post they did on @esa_org's blog EcoTone, a Storify they did on the project, and here's a write-up #ESASciComm did on the project.

    A related sketch from #ESA100: In the picture below, Amanda Young starts to sketch out treeline tree species competition, and in the process, explained to #ESASciComm how the Japanese Alps got their name.
  5. A lot of folks at #ESA100 were thrilled to sketch their science, and many more were supportive of the idea.

  6. We were fascinated by how elegantly some study questions and systems were distilled into visuals.

  7. But, perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised. After all...

  8. An unexpected bonus was how much we #ESASciComm folks learned about the research being conducted by ESA members.