Hello, everyone. Welcome back. So it's my pleasure today to introduce Professor Richard McElrath. He's a professor of anthropology and the director of the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture at the Maximum Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He also wrote a very popular Bayesian statistics textbook. His research interest lies in integrating theory with data analysis and study design. He thinks that too many researchers treat research like a hobby and that actual professional standards are needed. For instance, today we'll argue how we as scientists can learn from other professions like software engineers. So Richard, thank you for accepting our invitation. I know many attendees are looking forward to your ever entertaining presentations. All right. Thank you. And thank you all for coming to hear me say some hopefully interesting analogies. And I'm going to try to get through this at a good pace. So maybe we have a little bit of time for questions at the end. I know we have time constraint. So, yeah, I want to draw some analogies between science as a profession and other professions, specifically software development, but also cooking. So let me get to that too. So what I study, yeah, I'm an anthropologist. What I study is why people exist, which I think is a deep puzzle that still is unexplained. When the context of this problem as a scientific problem goes is really terrible. It's kind of the worst possible scientific problem you can study because it's empirically really intractable thing. So here's the big overview of why my occupation is hard. So this is life on earth may measured in gigatons of carbon, which is not how you usually evaluate life, but this is how much it weighs, right? And carbon is the main thing that we are, right? Stardust. And most life on earth is plants. That's what you see in this diagrams from this 2018 paper on biomass distribution. And then the little gray triangle in the corner is animals of which there's just two gigatons of carbon in total. And then if you zoom in on animals now on the right of this slide, you'll see that humans aren't even that much of all the animals, right? Insects and fish dominate. And, but here's the amazing thing about people. Humans and our livestock are essentially all of the mammals on earth. Essentially all of the mammals on earth are humans and our livestock. We're just completely weird dominant sort of species. Do you expect any kind of species to dominate or if you expect to plant or an insect, right? This is a weird thing for us to do. Trying to figure out what produced this weird kind of ape that gives online lectures, right? As a profession, we have this very integrative and difficult empirical problem of figuring out the history of where we came from and our ancestors and then how we people the world and so on. And this is a big interdisciplinary project that involves all kinds of messy evidence and modeling, right? Because we can't do experiments. We need dynamic models to make any sense of the data at all. And this is, I love this. It's absolutely wonderful sort of problem, but it's very, very difficult. And why am I telling you this? This is not an anthropology lecture. Well, I like to remind people that anthropology exists. Maybe you should do some, but also that this is a kind of scientific problem that exemplifies the large scale version of what all scientific problems have is that in science, we're trying to generate some knowledge about the world, explain why it is the way it is, and maybe just for the sake of explanation, but potentially to do interventions in the future. And to do this right, we need to somehow integrate our work with the work of other people into some common body of knowledge that we can agree on and we can audit and justify. This is this process of continuous integration of updating of scientific beliefs. And the way this is done in science is usually almost entirely chaotic, right? This is the thing that philosophers of science will tell you is that there is no scientific method. It's sort of like chaos reigns. And, nevertheless, it's amazing that we learn things, right? And I'm not going to argue that we should have some strict formalized version of how we do this. What I am going to argue is that we could do a whole lot better by looking at other occupations. So the primary analogy I'm going to look at is software development. And one reason to focus on this is because a lot of contemporary science involves software development. This is not a, this is a thing that I think shocks a lot of people when you get into science. You're fascinated by some scientific context and then you learn you have to code, right? It's terrible. It's like a bait and switch, right? You get interested in psychology. Now you have to learn R. Yeah. And sorry, but this is just the way it's going to be from now on. And so this software development is now a routine part of being a professional scientist. And even if you don't code yourself, you're using software and you have a responsibility to understand how it works. And software development is a profession that has lots of professional tools about how to do continuous integration of code and work in teams. So I'm only going to be very light on these things because you can read about these things on your own later. But teams of programmers have a very professionalized culture about how they work together. And when you train as a, as a software developer, you train to learn a common stack of tools so that wherever you end up working on whatever project, you can work with people. And you can work with people in a way that does quality control. And this, this whole ecology is something called continuous integration. And it involves code development and testing and lots of detailed things like separation of different kinds of edits, things called branches. And it's very professionalized now. And it's actually also quite new. I would say really the last 20 years have been a period of very rapid professionalization and tool building in software development, software engineering. And research software engineering is the side of this that's just getting started where we take some of these tools, not necessarily the whole package that I have on the screen here. We're not interested in copying them, but we're interested in borrowing the things that we need. So version control and testing are things that are becoming more common in the sciences, but are still incredibly rare. I'll try to convince you of that as we go. Maybe you don't need convincing that give you a specific example. Here's a project that I've invested a lot in myself. This is the Stan math library. And we use this to do statistics, arbitrary models. And this is a project where the people at the core of it are professional software engineers and they keep it all integrated together. And there are dozens of programmers making contributions to Stan at any particular time, and at different levels. And this all has to work in the end. And the thing I want to emphasize to you that is a really stark contrast to how science is done. I'm talking about the code for a second, but it's just the whole ecology of data and hypothesis testing and the relationships between hypotheses and statistical models. The really stark contrast here is that most of the code in the Stan project is code that exists only to test it and guarantee that it works as planned. So that's what I show you here. This is this is old. If you went and looked at there'd be even more code now, but there's 3.6 megabytes of library code. That's the code that you'd actually run if you if you use Stan to do a project. And there's 7.6 megabytes of testing code, which is the code that is there for quality assurance. And this is quite typical of professional software projects, especially in the open source community. Is that you'll have twice the three times as much testing code as actual deployed code. And that's necessary though, because this is a profession and they want to know that it works. Let me do another analogy and then I'm going to run through some examples that are closer to science and really about science if you're not so interested in software engineering. This is a great old article kind of lost article from cosmopolitan magazine from 1967, called the computer girls, and I only bring this up, but it's a weird historical case but there's this fantastic quote from a very famous computer scientist and grace hopper. Zoom in on it here grace hopper is a real legend in computer programming she developed the first linker, which is like a compiler, it's not exactly like a compiler but she was really a big deal early on in making the modern world as we know it in computing. And she was an admiral in the Navy in the United States Navy. Yeah, so there's a great quote, they got her the quote for this article in Cosmo, which is a real really is something says they're talking about programming and what it's like and back then lots of women worked in software development still do but the proportion was higher back then. And she says, oh it's just like planning a dinner explains Dr grace hopper now a star scientist insistence programming for Univac. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it's ready when you need it programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail women are natural so computer programming. So this analogy to cooking is a really nice one because programming is a lot like cooking. If those of you who'd like to do cooking and and Dr hopper's analogy is very apt I think. But it's also apt in the same professionalism sense right that cooking as a profession is also very organized and streamlined it has really strict regiments for how people work together in kitchens.  This is not this is not how professional kitchens actually work and professional kitchens are professional.  Where you leave your knives, anybody who's worked in a kitchen you know this stuff, but all of this is necessary for making the kitchen run smoothly and and things can fall apart. This isn't exactly the same as continuous integration and knowledge but it's continuous integration of the meal, right and there's an assembly line here that has to produce a lot of food at exactly the right time, and they start in the morning and they make it work. Yeah. Okay, so just say there's nothing special about softer developments the analogy is just that there are professions and where there are lots of culturally evolved rules for making the profession work better. And unfortunately I think science is not one of them. I am a scientist and I love science but come on where it's it's kind of a mess in here isn't it. Here's my favorite quote about this this is from the previous editor in chief of the Lancet, which is the most prestigious medical journal in the world I think really used to be until this quote came out. So, Horton was at a kind of closed door meeting of heads of granting agencies and journals in the UK. Back in 2015 and after that meeting, he couldn't share any exact quotes because it was closed door but he wrote an editorial in the Lancet about this meeting and lots of the shocking things that had been reported on. So this is the quote, you know, if you'll indulge me I'll read it. The case against science is straightforward much of the scientific literature, perhaps half may simply be untrue afflicted by studies with small sample sizes tiny effects invalid exploratory analysis and flagrant conflicts of interest together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance. Science has taken a turn towards darkness. Yeah. The only thing I disagree here was the end I think we've been in darkness for a long time. I'm going to make that argument later this is not a new set of problems, even though the details are perhaps different because the incentives are constantly changing in science. It's never equilibrium. But these sort of dark problems have always been around. And we still learn things. So this isn't an argument that science doesn't work. It's an argument that we could do a whole lot better and that we are currently violating the public's trust and I think this is a deep ethical problem. The lack of professionalization in our field. Okay. So people who are enrolled in this summer school. This stuff is not going to shock you right you. There are still scientists who've never heard that science has problems but not the people who were enrolled in this. Yeah. You're here because you're interested in trying to do better. P hacking is this great term. It's a terrible practice, but it's a great term that has done a lot I think to draw attention to some of these problems and it's a fairly famous case now they're even online guides to show you how it works. And this has gotten a lot of attention. But my opinion is that there's a bunch of stuff in the stream of integration of how we do science that is quite different than P hacking in the sense that it has more to do with unintentional error. Then intentional error and the unintentional kind of errors can be much more devastating in principle and I want to show you some examples of those things today and talk about how analogies to software engineering or if you prefer working in a professional kitchen can help us do better over time. So let me try to back this up. Here's this article from nature in 2016 where they're talking about the replication crisis and such and they asked a bunch of scientists about various, you know, vaguely unethical practices or kinds of mistakes they make and then at the top of these things that I would classify, you know, and, like, using Dante's inferno kind of categories as greed we've got selective reporting pressure to publish low statistical power poor analysis. So the things where scientists are conscious of these things at least in the in the periphery of their consciousness, and they know it's not quite right to do these things but they do it because of professional incentives. And then there's this middle category which I call sloth and this is what I like to focus on is the sloth problem, right the lack of professionalization. It's people don't even remember how to replicate their own work. Yeah, this often happens in labs. And they didn't take detailed enough notes and no one can get the thing to work again, or you don't have your code, right your code doesn't run insufficient oversight methods code unavailable for experimental designs, not having the data and so on. And lots of problems like this where people aren't trying to be bad. The thing is that there aren't, there isn't as kind of professional training and a set of norms for doing better. And, and that's what I want to talk about. Let me give you a few specific examples. You'll indulge me here. So, and these are famous examples of apologies if you've heard them before. This is my life where I'm telling the same story over and over again. I need to do better about that. But, so here's this example from economics to, I think Harvard economists right heart and rogue off in 2010 published this, this paper it was a preprint at the time of growth in a time of debt. And this came out. Remember there was this recession in 2008 rights and there were a bunch of international debates about public spending in order to stimulate the economy and so on. And this paper made the argument based upon this single graph that public debt is bad for growth that there's a negative correlation between the the GDP, the debt to GDP ratio, which is on the horizontal axis. And the percent growth in GDP. And so this is the whole paper basically is this graph and this paper actually had a big impact in parliaments and in the US Congress it was in the US Congress it was actually waved on the floor of the US Congress in a debate about public spending. Anyway, it turns out the data wrong the analysis was just wrong it was just an Excel error and here's a Thomas Herndon pointing at the air and Excel spreadsheet. These are the unsung heroes of science the people who actually look at the detailed analysis and figure out how the results work. And in this case, Thomas saw that there was just a formula error, and they had failed to include some countries that went against that trend and once you actually drug the formula down all the way in the Excel sheet, the result vanished. This is the actual spreadsheet you can see that if you know how Excel works. First of all, apologies I'm sorry that life has done that to you that you have to use Excel. It's a terrible tool but that blue bounding box that you see is where the formula input ranges and you see that they just excluded some countries down below and those go against the trend. So it's an error. Yeah, and but lots of policy was made on the basis of this paper before the error was discovered. This is sloth right this is not. This was not an intentional deception either because the authors provided the spreadsheet they weren't trying to cover anything up. They wanted to get this right. Right this is the kind of thing that arises from a sloppy way of working and using a tool like Excel which is not designed for scientific analysis and provides no or say very few tools for quality control and inspection. Yeah, it's designed to be convenient and visible. And that is exactly what you don't want in in a profession like this. Okay, I'm going to pick on Excel sorry but Excel does lots of other terrible things because it's not a tool designed for science it's a tool designed for business people to make tables right that's what it's for and it it does a bunch of stuff without your consent. It'll just convert data right everybody who's use this know that it likes to find dates in things right Excel is is is like that annoying guy who thinks everything's a date right and it converts all kinds of stuff dates and so Jean names this is the famous case Jean names and these are abbreviations and they get converted so like septin one keeps getting converted to September 1. Yeah, and this is terrible because a huge proportion of published genomics papers have these errors that are introduced by Excel, and they cut this is a significant problem in the genomics literature. And so, for a long time biologists have tried to get Microsoft to do something about this behavior but Microsoft just doesn't care about the scientific community right again their marketplace is business people making tables and that's what Excel is for. So eventually, the biologists decided they would just change the abbreviations of the genes. So this creates another problem is you've got old papers that use the old system and have these errors and you have new ones and it's a never ending cycle it's a snake that eats its own tail. The problem is the tool and the fact that there's no professional standard for what tool we're supposed to be using. Yeah, this is the using Excel is like the equivalent of just, you know, leaving your knife out in the kitchen or something like that. Yeah, these are things you're not supposed to do the consequences of things like this are really serious and and again a lot of you know about this but these audits of reproducibility research findings are quite depressing. Right, so here's here's just one from 2012 that the whole snowball some of this concern in biology buyer tried to replicate a bunch of published results and only about 25% of them could be validated. This is a serious problem is a waste of public funding when the public is paying for it. Yeah, only 25% of supposed discoveries can even be validated in any sensible way to be pursued further. And these are serious issues and again this is probably not news to you this is this is kind of old news at this point. But these things are arising in teams where no one's trying to get away with anything or at least I don't think most of this is fraud most of this is slot. Yeah, and professionalization will help. Okay, very quickly, I said something earlier that I don't think the darkness is new. It's a fantastic history of science book called the lost elements, and I just want to advertise it to those of you like history of science. It's a it's a history of all the elements in the periodic table, and there was a lot of false elements there this book catalogs more false discoveries of elements than real elements that currently exist. So it isn't like me now when we teach the periodic table we teach it like this immaculate thing that sprung forth from the forehead of Athena or something right and we just got it right but that's not what it was it was a mess out there. Because it science wasn't professionalized then either. It's more professionalized now than it was then so maybe we're doing better I don't know. But I want to say this is not like it's some new problem that's caused by you know, late 20th century capitalism or something like that. I've complained about things like this for some time and and I've unfortunately developing a reputation for this so this is this natural section about science paper comes up again and I only mentioned it say that this, the same point is that I think it's easy to focus on deliberate to get away with things like like thinking about people doing fraud and such and those things matter. And there's probably more fraud than we know. But I think that the norms and science have sort of evolved to satisfy particular careerist ends rather than reliability ends and that's the basic problem is this cultural evolutionary process where we're incentivized to get promotions. But it's very hard to know if you're right in science and most of us will probably die before we know if we were right about what we study. Right. And I'm starting to get this feeling, but I'm going to keep doing it as I get this feeling that is summarized by this slide that I'm standing around discussing science reform quite calmly all the time and meanwhile science is just like flipping out in the background. But this is just what it's like and we have to, nothing's in equilibrium and the ideas for communities like the ones that I'm a member of and many of you are to. We need to keep discussing these things even though it's not clear how we're going to fix the whole system right now because we need to be ready with serious policy recommendations when the opportunity arises. And it will arise because governments are getting really interested in that flipping out car in the background. And when I talk to people in high level leadership. They've all heard about this people in government heads of granting agencies. The moment is coming when communities that are interested in open science and science reform are going to be able to have a big influence, especially in Germany. Which is where I know people I've talked to about this, but also in the UK, which has gotten really serious about it. This is the hopeful message right and you focus on the car but but there will come a time when we will have safety standards in place. Okay, so this is the argument about about the natural selection of bad sciences, science as a profession does a really good job of making successful scientists right and sort of how it is professors make professors right and so. The professors who train their students to be good at being a professor, those are the sorts of traditions that will propagate. And so these are skills like how to get funding how to get published how to get cited, how to give credit which is also a thing that helps you professionally. The professional aspects the continuous integration the testing the programming skills if you will the kitchen etiquette where you leave your knife, how you avoid cutting your thumb off. Yeah, things like that. These things are in most contexts informally transmitted people learn them at the bench with their colleagues in the lab sciences they learn them from published papers in behavioral sciences. There isn't a lot of professionalization about how these skills are taught. People just kind of pick up coding right from their peers or from online tutorials. We could do a lot better. Things that are rarely taught but our extent essential professional skills for the sciences broadly defined are things like how we organize our data, how we curate it. How we do testing of our procedures, which I think is almost never done will hardly ever test their code at all. How we manage distributed contributions this is the continuous integration analogy. And then this point at the end that I'm going to focus on a bit strongly for the remainder of my time here is the logical connections between hypotheses and data analysis. And I think this is a real dark hole in the sciences broadly defined I don't think there's a single science currently doing a good job at this, even though in the stats community there's been a lot of work on this over the last say 100 years. It's not the sort of thing that is really focused on instead we sort of focus on null hypothesis testing right and but the logical connection between scientific hypotheses not no hypotheses but the actual hypothesis and data analysis is something we could do a lot about desperate need to professionalize this more. So the couple things about slot right so you all know that there are these audits of the replicability of studies, and this is just to talk about the curation side of this before I pivot to the logic. So here's something that a student in my department did a few years ago Rihanna Minooker did this big audit of the social learning literature in humans and animals, and just tried to figure out in what proportion of papers. The result could even be reproduced this isn't about whether it's right or not. But can we reproduce it at all so this was a huge task of emailing a bunch of people and trying to get raw data and then trying to actually take that data when it was available and reproduce the result. This is a basic quality control thing right and at the end here there's a bunch of details here. But at the end, the combined the reproducibility combined from being able to get the data and then be able to understand the data processing procedures as documented is only about 24% in this literature. I can ask you if any any other profession you heard a number like this what would you think right there's a bunch of products being pushed out, and in only about 20% of the cases, can we even understand how they were produced and know that they're correct. This is not acceptable. Yeah, and the social learning literature is not special in this regard. Here's a great paper from Antica Cholna and colleagues in 2020, doing something very similar in ecology, trying to see just the availability of code. 346 articles, randomly sampled and only about 20% is even potentially reproducible. We've got to do better. This is the curation and professionalization of data management code management right this should be easy. We just need the will and the standards and say that it's not okay that you don't have code and so on. There's other detailed procedures that are closely more closely related to software engineering that we need training for and the trainings is serious thing that people like me have to commit to provide so at my Institute every year we have a week long intensive course on these skills to help out students, but I know in a lot of programs there isn't an annoying person like me who's going to force that to happen. But this is a professionalization thing, a campaign that I'm committed to things like version control being being very serious about controlling our documents understanding the edits. This is like track changes and Microsoft Word but for code. Very important aspect of being professional about code development and then testing, you know your code, you want your code to be able to do something, you should write code to test it. And that's part of basic quality control as well and as anybody who's coded knows, no matter how long you do it, you will make mistakes. And so the testing is not optional. And I, any of you who've watched my stats lectures know this, I test the data analysis by making synthetic simulations of the scientific hypothesis and that's also a kind of testing that's unique to science that you wouldn't see in software engineering, but is also necessary is to say, can my data analysis pipeline in principle, get the analysis right, and we should prove that before we ever introduce real data to our pipeline, I think now of course I'm a strict and annoying person I know I recognize that but I think that's a basic professional standard that I would like to to lobby for documentation can we understand what people did. I think this is a positive message because there's this occupation called software engineering, which has lots of training materials, and has been professionalized and we can borrow a lot from them. We're going to have to adapt it to the way we work. I'm not saying we become software engineers, God forbid. I like making a scientist. I don't want to be a software engineer. But there's a lot we can benefit from here we don't have to develop it ourselves like they did. Yeah, they had a really hard job doing this stuff. Okay. So, yeah, okay, so this is about I should have put this up when I talk about version control. Yeah, copying documents and renaming them is chaos because future you is going to be very confused by your folders right version control solves this quite a lot. And how do you learn these things so if I mentioned that my institute we teach a workshop on this every year and say you're interested in doing this yourself you don't have to invent yourself there's this great organization called software carpentry and they have a branch of their materials called data carpentry which is really focused on scientists and essential skills for organizing data and and having pipelines and managing projects with version control and we use these materials of my institute we modify them a little bit. We tune things, but these are excellent, it's really professionalized, and they'll train instructors to you can send a member of your of your team to their instructor training we've done that here. It's really great. I hugely endorse this you can all the materials are free online you can go through it on your own at home with a bottle of wine. If you'd like it's it's really great stuff. So given in the future, we have benefited a huge amount from all the professionalization and software engineering and the culture of things like this of data carpentry and software carpentry, and we can use these things to lift ourselves up now. I work a lot with ecologists and so there's a whole module for ecologists actually and there's a module for psychologists so it's even getting customized now to the different kinds of data needs and and cleaning problems that you have. So I hugely endorse this I think this is the kind of thing this kind of basic data carpentry certification is kind of thing I'd like to see as a professionalization of being a scientist who works with data, which is basically all of us right is to be able to say yes I've done this it should be so on our CVs it's not that you know I can use Microsoft Word well of course you can but no you've gone through data carpentry and you've got the certificate that would be a minimum kind of professional standard I think. Version control for big projects requires bigger tools and I just put this slide up to advertise that those tools exist to but you need other specialists to help that work so my department we have this kind of continuous integration of distributed databases with different people contributing data from different aspects of the project. And this has to be managed as well and we do all this with database based with version control on a database. And it's very essential to do this kind of stuff to this would be impossible for an individual to manage without specialized training so this is the we need teams where we have support staff who are focused on these sorts of things. And in Max Planck we can afford this and I appreciate that in other places you don't, but this is again just part of the professionalization and research institutes that want to be taken seriously in the future I think we'll have to provide services like this. Okay, let me pivot to the logic and then I'll stop and take some questions in the last few minutes. I'm very big on the idea that we need to prove logically that that our data analysis could work in principle. And even in principle that is given some state it's out of assumptions about our scientific hypothesis, what we think is going on. Would it be possible even in principle for our data analysis pipeline to work to show whether the hypothesis was true or not or to get the estimate that we want that's usually how I think of it. And I think the standard way that data analysis is done in the sciences does not address this at all. People have quite vague heuristics about how they develop an estimator for things. And there's no testing of any kind anyway. And so I put up this this screenshot of you to Pearl's book because this is really the core of it is about causal inference which is most of scientific research is about inferring causes. And maybe you want to argue with me about that later on but I defend that point quite strongly. There is a science at this about being able to logically connect generative model of a natural phenomenon to an estimator that is a statistical procedure for studying it. And that's what you to Pearl you to Pearl's probably made the largest contribution to this of any single person, but there's hundreds of mathematical statisticians computer scientists who work exactly on this issue. And we're living in the future again and we just need to disseminate these insights. So a couple quick examples and then I'm going to stop. So here's here's a version of this that I was involved in personally with my colleagues where people are doing data analyses which are wholly unjustified there's no logic that connects their statistical procedure to the supposed scientific problem they're trying to solve. And so that they're just publishing your relevant estimates and in cases where it's provable that what they've done doesn't make sense. So there was this period years ago where I got involved in this policing bias policing debate about whether police, mainly in North America, tend to shoot minority individuals more.  But also it's a very important civil rights issue right and and when you have statistical knowledge I think you have an obligation to work on these things when the opportunity arises but. So here's a paper that came out from Cesario and colleagues who are really trying to get things right these are serious people who really care about the civil rights issues and they're doing the best they can. But no one trained them and how to do this logical connection between the scientific hypothesis and the estimator. So they do this adjustment, they recognize that there's this problem with the administrative records and they do a statistical adjustment. And, and then they report on what happened with it, but their adjustment their adjustment and statistics could mean anything right it just means including some variable. And the particular adjustment they did just does not work. And so my colleagues and I, Cody Ross and Bruce Winterhalder had this follow up paper where we are we nerd out basically we like to do algebra is kind of kind of people we are. And we proved that the estimator that sorry and I use all used just doesn't work it doesn't solve the problem at all. In fact it can actually give you exactly the wrong answer in these cases. Now I don't mean to pick on Cesario because this is just a case that I was involved in right but this kind of thing goes on a lot so let me give you one more example. So there's this is one maybe a lot of you've heard of the hot hand effect. So there's this weird North American sport called basketball and back in the 80s. There are some psychologists Gilovich of alone and diversity publishes paper arguing that this thing called a hot hand doesn't really exist but basketball players believe it does the hot hand is his belief that players get on streaks. And when they're on a streak a coach is supposed to recognize this and direct other players to pass the ball to them and that will improve your your odds of winning the game. So I did an analysis of some data from professional games and and said that the hot hand is a myth. Players and coaches believe in it but there's no statistical evidence of it. This paper was hugely influential and it was part of a big industry of arguing that people are irrational and and so on. The paper is completely wrong. Totally wrong. Scarbage, never teach it. Okay. Here I am teaching it only teach it as a lesson of like how not to do data analysis. So the problem with the diverse key paper is that their data analysis procedure was completely ad hoc. They didn't have any kind of generative representation of the hot hand phenomenon and then derive an estimator or anything like that they just said, Hey, what if we just looked at sequences of three shots and looked at how many streaks there are in and it turns out that this is a procedure that gives you deterministically the wrong answer. And there's this great paper I show you on the screen from Miller and Sanjuro. I think this came out in 2018 or 2017 where they study this estimator that Tversky had all used and it is always bad. And it's especially bad in the way that Tversky and his colleagues used it. And when and Miller and Sanjuro then went on to derive an actual a good estimator unbiased estimator, and they find that the hot hand does exist and the coaches and players were correct. Yeah, I love this story. So there's real value in professionalizing this ability to connect scientific models to data analysis as well. And it's obligation of people like me to produce the materials and training materials to help you do that because this is not you're not on your own here we're all in this together. We are there we we all sink or float together right. So the simple version of this. This is a schematic we have this four step plan to success. We want to express a theory as a probabilistic program and in code, and then prove that a plan analysis could work using that probabilistic program, then we can step three we test it on synthetic data so we have the quality assurance and our colleagues can believe that the estimator at least will work in principle, this would have saved Tversky, right. And then we can run the thing on empirical data. There are additional problems after that have interpretation and model rejection and maybe we go back to step one and sure everything is flow and I don't think this is a linear sequence, but getting the quality control in here is really important and the tools exist. We know how to do this in as a community we just need to disseminate it and democratize it. We can do this in real in real workflows which is like chaos I'm not going to work you through this but there's this great paper called Bayesian workflow by Andrew Gellman and his colleagues where they, they problematize all the little sub flows that are in real scientific data analysis problems.  Okay, I'm going to stop there. Sorry, if I run right to the end I guess. Science is about continuous integration, and we should be professionals about this we should not be ashamed to show the public how we produced our results or our work folders and I guess that's my only message. Thanks for your indulgence. Thank you so much. You're getting a lot of applause is here and online apparently. There's things floating on my screen that's kind of haunting. I've heard a version of that presentation a while back, but I got again very motivated so I hope the new listener got inspired as well. There are several questions already in, in the q amp a box, but we will also take. Did I stop the recording.


Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's, we call it our weekly online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, an online show. As I say repeatedly, the terminology is up for debate.  Live online with our show. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record the show every week. So if you are unable to join us live, you can always go to our website and watch recordings of all of our previous shows. And at the end of this session today, I will go over and I'll show you our website and where you can see all of those previous recordings. We post up the recording, we post up if anyone, as you can see here, has any presentations, slides, handouts, anything related to their show. And we do collect any links that are mentioned to any URLs and have them posted up there as well so you have a nice one-stop shopping for anything related to the recording. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos. Basically our only criteria is if it's library related in some way, we'll have it on, we'll put it on the show. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff sometimes come on and do presentations for things that are specific to here. But we also bring in guest speakers and that's what we have this morning. On the line with us is Ann Matzke. Did I pronounce that right? I'm sorry, I never asked. Yes, you did. Awesome, okay. And well, I know where you, what would you be, you're like, what are you doing now? And I know previously you were at Wilson Public Library here in Nebraska, but I know you are no longer there. That's correct. I was the children's director for five years and right now I'm involved in a couple of different ventures. I'm actually a writer and I'm pursuing that. I have some books that have been published and so I'm writing full time. And so I'm doing that, but I'm also involved in a couple other ventures. So they always make the comment when you retire, you find that you're busier than when you were working. And it seems to be really true. Yes, it is definitely. Since my parents have, my mother has retired, I can never get in touch with her. So great, but Ann does have done this presentation at our previous Nebraska Library Association and School Media Library Association School Librarians conference last fall about this new category of fiction, new adult fiction. Something sort of young adult, sort of adult, we're not really sure. And that's what we're going to figure out today, I guess. You're going to tell us what exactly it is that we're talking about. And what it is we're reading, I suppose. Good thought, there. You know, it's a topic that I've been interested in for a couple of years. You know, I started to see articles that were being talking about new adult, I saw blogs referring to new adult fiction, even saw it identified in book catalogs, and I was really kind of interested. It just piqued my interest to know, what is this, and how do we define it, and who are our readers, and where do we shelve it, and just all those things that we think about from a library perspective. So that's what we're going to do a little bit right now. Great. But let's go ahead and look at young adult literature. It's something that we're all really familiar with. And as I was putting this presentation together, I found that the definition first appeared in 1968, so you know what, it's been around for a while. And we know that our protagonist is a young adult, starting about age 12, which is what we technically say is the end of childhood, up to about 18, which is really kind of on that brink of being an adult. Often, books are written in first person, and I think that we also use a language that is so typical for the reader. If we think about Meg Kavitz, the Princess Diaries, it's a good example of how language is used, and it's truly a YA. Mia speaks like any other adolescent girl, and her language displays the typical adolescent spunk and self-consciousness and excitement over things that probably really won't matter to her in a couple of years. And so we have to kind of realize that that is their world. They're also dealing with adult issues, and we can think of some of our classics like Gary Paulson's Hatchet. It's actually a tale of survival, but it also talks about how Brian feels about his parents getting divorced. And then there's also Lauren Anderson's Speak, which is one of my favorites. But you have Melinda Lundering, you know, why are her parents still together? All they seem to do is constantly quarrel. But we also see that within the young adult literature, we see the protagonist who is rebellious towards authority. And one that quickly comes to mind would be like The Golden Compass by Philip Holman, where Lyra defies the adults. And she actually goes up against even more powerful adults in her quest to save the children from the goblers. Often in young adult literature, there's that sexual awakening, that first crush, that first kiss. And then we've seen, you know, some of the young adult novels that go a little bit further than that. But for the most part, our protagonist continues to exist within those confines, that structure of rules that the family has and that school has. And for the most part, you know, young adult literature tries to leave the reader with a sense of hope at the end of the story. So if we take it from there and we look a little bit deeper and we think about young adult literature, you know, it's exploded over the last few years. It's just, you know, come into the scene with, you know, great books that we know kind of there are not necessarily clear boundaries for. And there are specific themes that go with it. There are also just the fact that the text is there, you know, not for the reader so much. It's that the reader is there to pick the book. And what we're also seeing in this area is that the adults are reading YA. We've got quite a following who would actually prefer to read a young adult book than an adult book. But let's talk back, let's go back a little bit, let's talk about the history of new adults. And what we can do is we can look through the publishing industry. If we looked at some of the things that were starting to appear around 2009, 2010, Rachel Deal is the news director for Publishers Weekly. And she really felt that, you know, here is this huge market for YA, but a lot of the readers were beginning to age out. They were no longer in that category of 12 to 18. And, you know, here they had this whole market and they were potentially going to lose some of that readership. And so, editors started to get concerned about that. And they were also concerned about trying to hold on to those adult readers who were reading down. So there definitely was a delay within the publishing industry. And then about 2009, what we found was that Dan Weitz, who is the St. Martin's Press, he's an editor there, came up with the idea. He wanted to see more manuscripts being submitted by writers that had to do with that next step in a reader's life. You know, we had the young adult established, but what happened when these readers and even these protagonists got to be 18? What was going to be happening in their lives? And so he basically put together a contest. And he was hoping that writers would submit manuscripts that would target, you know, that emerging adult. The kid who had graduated from high school and was going off to college. The kid who had graduated from high school and was seeking a new job. You know, what were they doing to navigate their career? You know, how did love play into that? You know, were they living at home? Were they living on their own? But what he really wanted to was to find manuscripts that had characters that were in that 24-7 connected technology world. And to be really honest with you, I don't know what happened with the contest. I don't know if it was successful, but I want to believe that it was. Because shortly after that, we saw this huge explosion of a new type of literature. So let's look at a definition for new adult. New adult fiction is a developing, I'm going to say, area of fiction with the protagonist who falls in that age range of being about 18 to 25 years of age. But you also occasionally will see a protagonist who is age 30. So they're really kind of stretching that concept of what a new adult is. So roughly 18 on the brink all the way to 30 does fit. And basically what they're looking for is exploring what it means to be an adult. So it's that I'm on the brink of adulthood, I'm no longer a teenager. I'm moving from one type of lifestyle to a different. So what types of issues does that bring up? So let's look at some of the characteristics of new adult literature. When we know first of all that the protagonist is older, and we just said about 18 to 30, there are other adults present because there can be the boss, the professor. There's a whole new realm of adults that are going to be involved with that protagonist's life. We're also finding that they are definitely more sexually graphic and that romance is the core of many of these books. Often they're written in first person, kind of like our young adult. And we also find that the new adult protagonist is much more self-aware than the YA protagonist. The protagonist is responsible for themselves. They're more independent. They have bigger issues of a place to live, car payment, a job, all of those types of things. And romance is truly key, and what you're finding is that the male characters in these novels are often very hot with lots of tattoos. But another characteristic of our new adult literature is that the story leads the reader with a sense of hope, much like our young adult novels. So you're going to see that there are some similarities to the two groups. And then also there are some very specific differences. So let's talk a little bit about some possible themes. As I mentioned, here we have our protagonist who is moving away from home possibly, so they have the whole concept of college life as a theme. It could be a first time living alone, acquiring an apartment, maybe even living with another person that they haven't done before, a roommate. It could be a first job. It could be even after college is over and they're launching themselves into a first job, a first career. Definitely first serious relationships, that is key. That you're going to find in just about every NA adult or new novel, identity issues. Here they are, they're out on their own, and who are they? And what do they believe in? And what are their interests? And who are they identifying with? Also you've got the theme of sex, something that they have maybe not experienced before. It's a first time experience or it's something that fully consumes them. You've got experimentation as a theme, which could be sex and alcohol, drugs. So you've got that whole realm opening up to them. Struggle to find themselves. They are pretty much defined by their family and their rules in adult novels. But as you move into the new adult category, there's this real struggle to find who they are and what they're about. And change is definitely a theme. You can see that in just even some of the other themes that have been listed. Change is huge.  All of that can be kind of in that category. But also money problems. Here they face, they were dependent upon parents possibly for some funding, and now all of a sudden you see themes where money is an issue. They've got to support themselves. They've got to pay the electric bill. They've got to buy things but also pay for their bills. So you've got that as a possible theme. So you can see that this whole area of new adult is very rich in topics and themes that are going to just permeate the stories. Well, you know what? Let's take a little look at who are the authors of some of these books. And this is what I found to be very interesting when I first started out. Kind of investigating or exploring it. Because what you're finding is that the new adult authors are young themselves. Often they are 20-somethings themselves. Cora Carmack, she's become a New York Times bestselling author. And I love what she says, as a 20-something myself, I know my generation lives in a time of extraordinary change. We are a generation marked by a marriage between dream big idealism and the unavoidable stark realism. New adult acknowledges that unique perspective. So I think what we're seeing is that these indie authors are bringing their own personal experiences to their writing and they're not very far away from it. Many of them are actually living it as they're writing it. Which I think, in many ways, makes many of these books so compelling. And you can see why they appeal to the audience that they're written for. So let's take a little look at some of those that have come on board. And we definitely see very strong emerging indie authors. In 2011, Magline self-published The Vincent Boys and The Sequel, The Vincent Brothers. And she did these online. So these were e-books.  And she was selling and doing quite well online. And interestingly enough, Simon Schuster and some of the publishers started to take notice. Who were these people that were self-publishing? What were these books that they were self-publishing that are selling like gangbusters? So basically, Simon and Schuster came to Abbey and they acquired both of those books that they then published under their imprint, Simon Pulse, which is a young adult imprint. And they republished them in December of 2012. So this was a real first in publishing because the general history then, you write a book, you send it to an editor, you wait to see if the editor is even interested. If they are, they'll respond. And everything is in the publisher's perspective. They are the ones that are in control. But what we started to see happening with this whole NA field is that the authors were becoming the people in control. And they were doing things differently than what had been done before. And Abbey Glynes was just the beginning. If we look at Cora Carmack, she started in the exact same way. Here she was, she was e-publishing and she had put a book out there. And all of a sudden, again, the publishers were taking notice. They were the ones that were coming to the authors. They were the ones that were offering, like in Cora's situation, a six-figure contract for three books. That's pretty unheard of. And then printing the books and they took off. And so, again, very young author, selling more than one book, which is, again, unusual in the publishing industry. And here she had a three-book deal and she signed a six-figure contract. And that was in November 2012. So if we look a little bit at our e-book history, and if we look at the shares, the unit sales, look at where fiction is. It's heads above all the other categories, academic, nonfiction, religion, juvenile, and scientific. I mean, there is, in 2012, this spurt, there is this huge growth. It's a momentum that is growing and it's not, and it's by the independence, I mean, it's not necessarily by the publishing companies, it's by those young indie authors going out, writing their books, putting them online and selling them themselves. So we're still talking about this whole digital format. So let's look for a minute here. What we're finding is that the new e-book novels are reaching a much wider audience in digital format. And Rose Hill here, who's an editor at St. Martin's Press, said this, which I thought was so interesting. Those who read on devices, kindles, whatever, seem more concerned with intense, immediate action and have less patience for the subtlety, texture, and nuance, descriptive language, which is really the qualities that work much better in print. And so here you've got, again, a new trend. You've got books that are being published by very young authors. They're e-books. They're more intense. They have immediate action. You don't have all of the flowery language and you don't have the time that's taken to create the subtleties or the texture. And it's groundbreaking because that's what is selling. So let's talk about the elements of success. You know, we've got independent e-book publishing and it's really driving. This is what is driving the whole new adults category and its growth. And what we're finding is that the online venues are encouraging it. They're encouraging the authors in the novels. Where in the past, if the same writers were submitting manuscripts to publishers, I truly wonder if there would have been the response. If the publishing company would have really taken a step in this direction. I kind of doubt it. I think that for the most part, like it says here, that they were shut out of those regular markets, that regular pathway to publishing. And because they created it on their own, that and e-publish, that's really what drove the whole area of new adult. So let's talk a little bit about how they promoted their books. And I found this really interesting. We had a patron who came into our library and she had written a three-book trilogy. She had self-published it and she wanted to do a book signing.  She had a whole community of readers already that she had done through social media. She was tweeting. She had a Facebook page. She had, and it was an author Facebook page, her books were being supported and encouraged by word of mouth. You know, there were other people who had blogs who were blogging about her book and about her book tour and she did an online book tour. She had gotten hooked up with Goodreads.  And so all of those things, she was promoting her book in that way. And they were savvy. They were not your traditional, you know, let's send the postcard out because we have this new book that's being released. It was really immediate and she was getting the response from her community about her books and that's what was driving her sales. And her sales were doing really well. And, you know, I kept thinking as we were talking, gosh, I haven't seen these titles and some of my book magazines. I, you know, and that was my first indication that the way that these authors were promoting their books was so uniquely different. And just a real quick note on NA Alley, I was on earlier this week and I found that it has actually changed its name and it has evolved. And so what really made me think about book promotion, too, was that, you know, New Adult has forced book promoting to evolve. It evolved to a different place and a different way of disseminating information, of collecting a community of readers, and it's exciting. I mean, if anything, I have found that the New Adult area is just a vibrant, pulsing area, category of books. So here are, very quickly, just some of what we would consider to be the core New Adult books that have been published. You've got Abbey Glynes, you've got Jamie McGuire, who actually has just recently released a third book in that series. You've got Cora Carmack with her losing that series. You have Colleen Hoover, who has Hopus, and in that area, you've got Jay Crownover, his Mark Men series, and you've got Tamara Weber. And so these tend to be what you find as the core New Adult books, and some of them were the very first that were published. Well, you know, I was curious, you know, this is kind of the core. So what I did in preparing for this is I went to find out, I went to Goodreads to find out what were the top five New Adult titles that were being read this week. And what I found was, you know, and there's actually more than five, I just couldn't, like, stop with five, so. But what I found so interesting was Jamie McGuire is still on that list from being one of the very first in our core group of NA books. But look at Colleen Hoover. She has three books this week that are all being read. Never, Never, which then she's collaborated with Taryn Fisher. Then you've got November 9. You also have Confess. So she is making a real presence in New Adult titles. And I think you see the same thing from Jamie McGuire. And a few of the others. So as I was saying, NA Alley was a website, and it has a blog, and it has a lot of information on New Adult literature. And when I prepared this presentation for the Nebraska Library Association meeting, this is what was trending at that time. And that Jamie McGuire had just announced a groundbreaking distribution deal for indie publishing. And this was huge. Here she was. She had self-published several books on her own. And now she was able to take her books for the very first time to the big brick and mortar superstores, and specifically Walmart, to have her books sold there. This used to be something in the past that publishing companies would take care of. They would take care of where your books were placed. They would take care of even if your books went to like a Barnes and Noble. The books that face out on the shelf, they pay more for that. Publishing companies pay more for that. And so here was this indie author who was making this deal because of her own career and where she's gotten into. And so this was just huge at the time. And this has only been a few months ago. So I don't see new adult peeking or plateauing. I see that they are accelerating. They're going beyond maybe what has been achieved in marketing and promoting books from a publishing industry in the past. But new adult is not without its own controversy. And I think we have to talk a little bit about that. There was a lot of public criticism because 50 Shades of Grey could technically fall within this new adult category. A lot of people were saying it was sexed up YA, and that it was really marketed on the whole concept that they were wanting to entice teens to read more erotic material. And we all have our thoughts on that. But I think what's interesting at this juncture is to look at what some of the people in the industry, publishing industry, are saying. Like Sarah Megabow, she's an agent with Nelson Literary Agency, and she tends to disagree. She's saying that when she gets manuscripts through her, across her desk, what she is seeing in the way of submissions for books that fall within that category of new adult is that they are really good. That their conflicts are more about early adulthood, about dating and jobs, and getting that first apartment, landing that first job, having money on your own for the first time. Who are you as an adult? Are you able to be self-sufficient? And so basically, I've heard from other people in the industry that these shades of green may have just been a kind of an occurrence on its own. But to try to group it in to new adult is not where everybody's saying that it should go. But again, here's a little controversy. Here's something to discuss. Here's something that your patrons can give you some insight on. Or as a library staff, you can talk about it and how it fits, if it has some of the true themes and characteristics of new adult or is it kind of an entity of its own. So let's look at who is actually reading new adult. And I went to a couple other libraries from an article and book list to find out what other librarians were saying. What they're finding is that readers tend to be urbanites and they're wired. They're techno-savvy. They're up on trends. They're cultural and politically social issues that they're looking at. They're checking out the books because maybe they have an edgier content. They've got zippy plots. They have identifiable characters, characters who stand out, characters who they can relate to, characters who might be within their same age, but also some unusual narrative structures, which I thought was interesting. And then also from Illinois, you've got, and I thought this was interesting, new adult books are circulating very well, but also for the adults who are under 40, but not so much for the 20 to 30-year-olds, but it's appealing more to those who are probably reading the romance novels that might be under 50, but they're typically romance readers. So you've got, to me, two different areas. You've got those that are really up on the social scene and the trending with different things, and techno-savvy and wired and connected to technology. And then you've kind of got the romance readers, a little bit softer readers who are kind of maybe coming over and finding that this is a new area with books that they're really enjoying. Well, then I went to, I kind of looked at that. I looked at what other libraries were saying. And I was curious to know about our own patrons. What were our patrons saying? And so what I did is I just did a little informal survey and just asked, as books were coming back, to find out kind of what their feel was for the book. And it was interesting because what I found was that they wanted to read about those first time experiences, what it was like to live alone, what was it like to land that big job, to interview and to prepare for a career and then get that job, and also about making friends. A lot of them, a couple of them commented that what was it going to be like when they moved away, when they went to college, when they got that big job in the big city, or that maybe they went to a different city for a job? So those were things that they were hoping to find in new adult books. But I thought it was so funny because they also were talking about the fact that the book really did focus on, oh my god, hot guys. And just look at the book covers. So there was a little bit of both. There was something that they were wanting, but there was also the reality of what the story was about. And then I found this second quote to be just really interesting. The patron said, I like the premise of these books, but it's frustrating because the characters are all white. There's not enough diversity of characters and genres for me, which I thought was interesting. And I went back and I looked at the covers of those core NA books and new ones that were coming out on Goodreads in different places. And she's right. The characters tend to be white. So I think, if nothing else, that's encouraging for this category because there is much room and growth to include other cultures and some diversity within it. So then we need to look a little bit about young adult versus new adult. The borders are really blurry. There's no hard fast line to say, this is YA and this is NA. There is that blur. And there are books that cross over. And I think it's interesting because if you look specifically at YA fantasy, sci-fi and historical fiction, these books that have already been written cross up nicely to new adult. And one of them that comes to mind for me immediately is Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light. Think about her main character, 16-year-old Maddie Gouki. Here she is. She's living on her own. She's supporting herself. And just for the fact that within that historical fiction category, she is a teen character. But the age of maturity is measured differently. And so technically, you could say a Northern Light could potentially be a new adult novel. Or here's the reverse of that. Or are new adults marketed as YA? Are we going to see that some of those main characters and new adult are going to be just on the edge? Maybe they're 17. Maybe they are 17 and they're living on their own for reasons that have happened to them. And they have to support themselves. But then there's those elements that we talked about the characteristics, experimentation, and sex, and some of those things. So I guess what I'm saying is new adult has not been clearly defined. There's just not that distinct definition between the two. And then that brings up the whole concept of crossover. We've got our Alice Award and that those are books for adults that appeal to younger readers ages 12 through 18. And some of those have more adult characters in them. And so then how do you identify those? Are they new adult? Are they adult? And so you've got that whole concept that we could discuss and debate for some time. And so where do we shelve NA?  I'd love to hear some of your comments about in your own library where you choose to shelve NA. Yeah, if anyone has any thoughts, ideas about this, go ahead and type it into the question section. And we'll see what if you guys have been dealing with the same issue of what is it? What do we do with it? We do have one question from someone, Ann, who asked when you're talking about what is New Adult, really what it entails. Are there somewhat defined subgenres within New Adult? Or is it pretty much restricted to just the topics you were mentioning that that's all usually in it entails? You know, I know there are. You're beginning to see some fantasy new way. They're a new adult. You're also being able to see some historical fiction new way or new adults. But yes, definitely there are genres that are beginning. It's beginning to expand. I don't think that it is so defined yet that I think there's lots of wiggle room, and we're going to see lots of other books coming in that are going to be under that category. And it's like you said with what appears to be not very much diversity in the era. And it's very new. As you said, was it 2009? Was when that contest was, I believe? For the name of it. There's lots of room that it may end up developing into that type of area that it needs. Yeah. Exactly. I just think even with Abby Glein's coming out in 2011, that's not that many years ago. And I think the other thing we tend to forget on the library side is that when a manuscript is submitted and accepted by a publisher, it's a minimum of two years before it's published. And so there's a lot that happens. And so if you think about it, this is 2016. Books that were submitted and accepted in 2014 are just coming out. So I think with our whole move for more diverse books, again, you're going to see this area of new adult just exploding. I think that there's great things coming. OK. Does anybody have any ideas of where you would shelve this kind of title if you have it in your library, or if you have any of those authors? Tell us, where did you put them? Go ahead and type into the questions section if you do. And while we're waiting, somebody did ask about getting copies of the slides afterwards. And we do the room when you put the recording up. And do you have a link that you post your slides at, or send them to me? Or do you have a practice? You know what? I can just send them to you. OK. The slides will be available afterwards. Yes. But I am also grabbing links on some of the articles you mentioned that are out there as well for people. Let's see. We do have some comments. Someone says they have a self-published shelf that displays the books to catch our patrons' interest. So they actually put a specific category of self-publishing, which could actually cover anything. Not just the new adult. But that's an interesting idea. Yeah, here's everything self-published. Someone says, all of theirs seem to be in the young adult section. Someone else says they put Sarah Moss in the YA section. So that's where it seems to be falling towards. Someone else says they don't know. And they're looking to see if Overdrive maybe has created a category for it. If within Overdrive, there has new adults been set up as a category. Does anybody know? Someone else says we put them in the YA section and let the teens discover them. Yeah. Does anybody put them in the romance area? Do you have a romance area? Is that where you put some of them? Because you said they seem to be very much leaning towards that a lot in there. Yeah, exactly. Does anybody have romance sections that they're still putting things into? Nobody's saying. Maybe they don't. It seems to be falling mostly into the young adult. It looks like for most of the people that did comment. Yeah. I thought I was typing something long. That's why.  So it was being divided up between young adult and adults, mostly on a judgment call from the cataloging librarian, which wasn't ideal in the long run. But our community wasn't really at a point of being aware of the category we're asking for it yet. That's a good comment, a good observation as well. Because it's so new, does anybody even know that it's a genre they could look for? Right, exactly. And that actually then leads into my next slide. How do we promote these books? Right. Now, when someone says they got rid of their genre sections about seven years ago and haven't gone back because they don't even categorize things that way anymore. Oh, there you go. And that's the way to go. Do it to be different. Yeah, absolutely. So what are some ideas now that you've had some time to think about new adult? How would you promote it in your library for your patrons? Yeah, so anybody have any ideas of what you do? Obviously, some people did say they put it in the young adult and let the teens discover it, which is fine. And we do know that not just teens read both young adult books. Lots of it. I do. There's lots of them I've read that I think are awesome. Anybody can read. Anybody does read any genre or any. We categorize it as something that, like the library says, we don't even do genres anymore. Anybody can read anything. Someone else does say this is the first time they've ever heard about new adult fiction, so they're going to have to work on that, I guess. Does anybody have any ideas or thoughts about how we could promote it? What would you guys do to try and get people more interested in it? Oh, here's something. More adults seem to go to the YA section to look for these types of books. That's where they're putting them. Adults reading this type know that they like to read what's been categorized as young adult, so that's where they go to find more of the type of book that they like. And she says, exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, they know what they're looking for, so that's where they're going to go to. Here's a question. Is there a different? Well, I guess it's been categorized. The terminology has been used as new adult fiction, so that does potentially take it, separate it, differentiate it from youth books. Is there maybe a reason we should rename it something else so people don't think that it's just because some people also have that preconceived notion of YA novels, I'm a grown up, I don't read those. But maybe they should be. Well, and I think this is we're really still at a juncture we can talk about. Is the new adult title appropriate? Or how should it be identified? I think there's lots of room for conversation about this. I like the idea that some libraries are putting it in or near their young adult section, because for people who are already reading young adult, it's kind of like that aging out thing. They're just transitioning to the next step, to the next level. I often worry if you put them just with romance, that they get lost. So it's an interesting question to ponder. It is similar to romance, but I think it's got more, there's more stuff going on in it than traditionally in a romance, all of the other features that you mentioned. Kind of you can think of young adult books as a gateway into the new adult. And like you said, you want to move them over there. We do have some comments coming about this though. We have a college in this town and the college age patrons make a beeline for the YA to find this stuff. So that's just I think because it's new, they don't they assume it's going to be in there. We first put the books in the new book area and then move them to young adult. So it's just anything new we have all together. We could make a special display to draw them to the new genre, maybe also with bookmarks to explain the difference. That's a good thing to explain how this is not the same as what you might have. And someone says, I'm going to buy some of the authors you mentioned and see if there's any interest and put them out on display for a while. Just put this is the person so they'd never heard of this genre before. So they just put them out there on any sort of and here's some of the news things and see who grabs them. Great idea. Somebody has a question wants to know and this is also an idea as well. Does anybody have programming or book clubs at their library for this category? You've got your children's book groups, your adult book groups, whatever. Do one that is focuses on this. Has anybody gotten into that? The same person has also many of these also cross genre lines as well. So it is hard to label I suppose. Yeah. So is there anything out there, Ann, about programming specifically for this that you've seen or book clubs focused in this area? You know, when I presented in October, we had a lot of discussion. What we did is we just kind of went down the rows and people would give ideas and some of the top things were like a book display, like the bookmark where you define on one side but why it is and give some examples and on the backside you do new adult and give some examples. Definitely the book displays were talked about. Also doing some things, if you have like a newsletter or a blog connected with your library where you talk about one of the authors, you know, like Colleen Hoover who's just exploded on the scene and do a little background about who the author is. You know, I think what's intriguing is the fact that so many of these authors are very young and you know, how did they get their start? And what's interesting too is that, I forgot to mention in the NA Alley, they've actually converted that to a place where if you're interested in writing new adult, there are some guidelines and some different resources for writers which I thought was really interesting. You know, so I think it's not only new for us as librarians, but it's also new for the public and so how do you, you know, kind of show that? You know, I think book discussion groups would be great. I don't remember that one coming up. You'd have to see, you know, if there are any reader guides that have been developed for some of these books or, you know, do an online, you know, do something creative online.  Oh yeah, all right. Doesn't look like there are any other ideas being thrown out, so. Well, in conclusion, you know, here are just some questions to ponder, you know, do we need a new adult category? You know, and does a category serve the writer or the readers? And will it continue to exist mainly as romance, you know, or are we seeing a shift where, you know, we're seeing some subgenres of, you know, fantasy and sci-fi and different things? And will writers feel a need to write non-romance new adult? So just some questions to think about as you continue forward. Yeah, that would be interesting, because if not some people may be, well, if it's not their thing turned off by, you said it seemed to be a lot of romance, might not be turned off by that, but it might like some of the other things that are in there and just not realize it, that there's more to it, it's not your traditional, stereotypical romance level. Oh, here's a good question. How do you take your older books and incorporate them into a new category? Is there mainly, are there possibly some older titles that exist that we didn't realize could be in this? Well, you know, that's why I thought of Unbothered Light, because it seems to fit some of those, you know, guidelines for New A, but it's, you know, it's been around, and it's Prince, you know, honor book. So I think, yes, you know, going back and looking at your collection, looking at some of the classics, I think you'll find that many of them could, I don't wanna say crossover, but could be identified, you know, and may not be heavy on the romance side, but fit into all those other things of being independent and getting a job and living on your own, supporting yourself, that are, you know, within the category. So yes, I think we definitely are. Something as reader's advisor we need to think about, yeah, have we read something that... Exactly. Yeah. All right. So does anybody have any other questions for Ann or thoughts of your own about the topic, answering any of these questions here, any of your ideas, thoughts or ideas, or those of you who have encountered this, how you've, if you thought about these things, because we do have about five minutes left, can type in your questions, we can answer any of them. I said I've been collecting the links that you've been mentioning, I've got the NA Alley here, which I did notice too when I went to the site, they have changed the, it looks like last October, they changed the name of it, is what the idea was, to Next Lit, which is an interesting concept. And they're actually talking about upper YA, and then new adult and select adult titles. Uh-huh. So that's another category, upper, upper YA, okay. Right. Oh, this is a good thing. Do you know anywhere where there's a place where there's a list of core titles in new adult? Or places where you can get lists? Right, I think I ended up the slide that is in here that has kind of the core. I think it came from the article that may be posted at the bottom, or even on Amazon or Goodreads, and I think I just Googled or searched for core NA titles. Because you said some of the authors were actually using Goodreads to promote their stuff, so that would possibly be something, if they know that's the genre, they've mentioned that as this is what my book is. Right, right. And then I had to ask access to, I know I went through a while back and just tried to look to see what was available through the fiction, when the new kind of just revamped. Someone does pose the question, and I had mentioned this earlier, too, that I think the young adult title may be a little confusing to people, and that's kind of what the purpose of this is. What could be a better way of describing it? For the new adult? Yeah, new adult, did I say that wrong? Yeah. I think the best way to describe it is to look at that one slide that had the definition, you know, it's that next category of life. You know, when we talk about development, you know, you get to adolescence and you get to adulthood, and it's that kind of narrow window between it's that transition place between the adult or the teenage years and the adult years. And it's those things that people are encountering that really is truly what the books are about. You know, it's a transition from being a teenager and dependent to being an adult and being independent. And I think it's an educational, it's an education issue that needs to be out there, and someone just has comment on that exactly thing. The category name can definitely be confusing to introduce and promote at times because a lot of patrons thought we meant new books available in the adult section. Every time we talked about new adult, they would go over to the new release shelves and not realize that it was actually a category. And she says, I guess it's just something that will take time for people to come to understand. That's true, it's gonna need the promotion and the education and just doing the bookmarks and the flyers that explains what it's talking about and for people to get it in their heads, yeah. And it would be interesting if people with a brainstorm, what would be a better terminology for it? What would be a different way to refer to it? I would just love to see that people would come up with because you're right, new adults can be very confusing. Oh, someone said one of their college patrons called it 20-something lit. Okay, there you go. I'll suggest emerging adults lit. Uh-huh, awesome.  That's another one, yep. I like the 20-somethings emerging. Yeah, that's what I was trying to think. What do you call when, I mean, what do we call the people that are just past 18 but not really adult, there's that whole middle ground and it is a weird time in life anyways. Someone says actually, they actually thought that's what this webinar was about, was new books in adult fiction. But she's glad to find out that it's actually a genre and that's the person who said they're gonna look for more titles in this and put them in their library and see if they get some traction on it, so. That's right. Yeah, someone does have a question. Do you have any suggestions for good action-adventure titles in this era? Oh. Like my lean more towards that side. Yeah, you know, I'm struggling off the top of my head, no. You know, I think that they all kind of have, you know, I shouldn't say all, but I would say that quite a few do have that kind of edginess, that immediacy and not that that's adventure, but you know, I think that's, I think that you'd have to probably explore it a little bit and just see what's out there. One thing I couldn't find before the presentation was to find out how many, you know, like a number of new titles are being published each year and that I couldn't find because I was just curious because I thought, you know, if it's exploding like they're saying, it would be nice to be able to say, you know, there's, you know, five thousand titles, new titles this year or whatever, but I wasn't able to find that. I think it's just, because it is still new, so new you have to kind of. Right, are the publishers even putting it in that genre or are they still lumping it into the YA themselves? Well, some of them are actually making imprints that are strictly just new adult. Oh, okay. You know, Simon Polk, the YA one, and so I think you have to look. I think that, don't quote me, but I want to say, I think Harper Collins has a new imprint that is more new adult and I think Random House, but you'll have to do some searching on that. You can search and find. Someone does have a suggestion for the person to ask about action and adventure. Court of Thorns and Roses maybe. She hasn't read it yet, but most Sarah Moss books have a good amount of action and adventure. So that might be an author to look into that leans more that way. All right, we just hit 11 o'clock, 11 o'clock, oops, so I think we can wrap up. Anyone have any last minute urgent questions or things they want to mention? Someone did say, instead of saying the end to this presentation, it should be to be continued because you still need to figure out what we're doing with it and what it is. And someone does say they have read a Court of Thorns and Roses and it definitely is they agree it is action and adventure. So that'd be a good one to go for. Great. Well, thanks for sharing that. It's awesome. Yeah. Okay, well, thank you so much. And I'm glad we got you on the show to talk about this. This is a, like I said, I have read some young adult stuff as well. I also do lean more towards, as you had mentioned, just personally, fantasy and sci-fi and that kind of thing. Some of the young adult titles I read, they can be too young for me, I think. I like the storyline, but this might be something that I'm gonna start looking into myself because it might be just a little bit above that for my personal preference that I might be into. So I'm gonna start looking through some of your, looking for some of your titles that you suggested. Cool, all right. So thank you very much, Ann. Thank you everyone for attending this morning. I am going to pull back presenter control to my screen now. Waiting for it to come up. And here, as you can see, I said I was collecting the links and things. We use delicious to collect our websites. So you see, I've got the things that you had mentioned here, linked in a alley and a couple of the articles you mentioned and the YALSA Awards. So if you want more information, that'll be there. This will be on our website. As I said, we are just finishing up recording. And if you go to our Encompass Live website, you just have to Google Encompass Live and it will come up in your first search results. We apparently the only thing called that, which is awesome. And right here beneath our upcoming sessions, we have a link to our archives. This has our archives of all of our shows going back to when we first started this in 2009. So you can go back and see, watch anything you want.  We'll put up the slides on slides here and all of those links that I saved will be here as well. But that should be available some time later today to pay in on how long it takes for all the processing and editing of the recording itself to go. I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is modern pathfinders creating better research guides. Jason Puckett who's from Georgia State University has written a new book about using live guides or lib guides, depending on how you want me, we'll find out exactly how you're supposed to pronounce that. And other systems to create research guides online. And he's gonna come next week and talk to us about how you can best practices for doing that and how to really get that going at your library. So I hope you join us for that. And any of our other upcoming shows we have listed here, you can see the ones we have come up for the next month and moving into April as well. So if you are on Facebook and Compass Live does have a Facebook page, so if you can pop over there using the link off of our website, you can like us. 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