I care quite deeply about scientific communication. Part of the frustration that I hold for how we currently communicate in academia is mostly to do with the stiffness and inaccessibility of our horrifically dense, jargon-packed publications. Is it truly necessary to encode all of our works in such a way? In some cases, a paper will only be meaningful to people who have the background to understand what is written, but in many cases, it is the format which obscures our work that limits its widespread adoption. This is especially true in the security and testing fields, where our work might be meaningfully usable by someone -- if they knew it was even relevant to them.
So how do we approach this? One method that has some amount of promise to me is interactive presentation; when people have the opportunity to ask questions, natural points where clarity is lacking are addressed. When people feel free to engage with a speaker, the points of jargon can be cut through. This requires a comfortable, diverse audience, strong moderation, and constructive questions.
Such a concept is great for one off experiences, but can we somehow disperse information in such formats to the masses?
The Macy Conferences
The Macy conferences took place between 1941 and 1960, with the objective being to have cross-domain conversations about various topics with speakers from many places. Of particular interest to me are the Cybernetics conferences (1946-1953), which discuss early computer science questions. These conferences do not specifically interest me because of the content (though many of the subjects there make for great reads), but rather the format. These conferences were published as minutes and transcripts of presentations, with detailed figures to guide the reader to the context of those presentations. To get a sense of how this reads, you might consider Claude Shannon's "The Redundancy of English". One could read these at their own pace and feel a part of the conversation; a natural flow where experts from utterly different fields felt able to ask questions and understand the material presented.
I think a sentence from the foreword from the Macy conferences, originally written by Heinz von Foerster, encapsulates this well:
I saw, and saw it ever more clearly at later conferences that beneath discussing [numerous topics] was a door being pushed open slowly, but forcefully, to let in one who, in orthodox science, was to be excluded from all these investigations: the investigator; the observer; me, should I ever ask "who am I?"
And this was no mere feat. Each conference was dutily edited by von Foerster from "a stack, three inches thick, of legal sized green pages". A stenographer had been hired to sit in and record each lecture as spoken, from start to finish, and make zero errors in either identifying the speaker and what was said, precisely. I do not think this would be easily accomplished with all the automation we have available today.
Finally, each presentation's equations are typeset and referenced, figures are inserted as visual aids, and it reads both as a paper and as a discussion. While this format is not suitable for every work, I do think it fills a void that might allow people to become more engaged with science.
Transcripts, or videos?
One might suggest that nowadays, with recordings of lectures, we can sidestep the effort of highly editorialized transcripts, typesetting, and textual recording of presentations. I personally believe that reading engages the reader far more than a video engages a watcher in most cases. PDFs can be annotated. Pages can be written on, and do not offer distractions. Figures can be observed and studied at our own pace.
Talks are still important; I think the interactions that one can have live are incredibly important for this format to work. Having this recorded is an incredible aid for being able to produce the minutes, and for those for whom videos are more approachable, this is still available. But I don't think that videos are the best format for being able to focus and learn about a topic.
Moving forward
I'd really like to try to implement this concept. I recently attended a few talks at 3cycle which I think would do very well in this editorialized transcript format. The group is small enough that fruitful discussions can still happen, and diverse enough that people ask questions that cut through jargon.
I'm going to try to prepare such a transcript and share it here. I can't say how long it will take; I fully expect it to take a great deal of effort and I can't necessarily say I have enough time to prepare this properly yet. But I think it's worth the effort to find out if such a format could be useful elsewhere.