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Comments on Canada’s science and technology trajectory

I just sent this note in response to Industry Canada’s consultation paper, Seizing Canada’s Moment, and I encourage anyone who has an opinion about Canada’s science and technology strategy to write in as well. You can send your feedback to [email protected] by February 7, 2014.

I’m not naive enough to believe that anyone at Industry Canada will actually read my note, nor do I think it’ll actually make any kind of a difference, but I thought I should at least make some effort to engage. I didn’t want to pass up an explicitly offered opportunity to speak up.

I tend to shy away from posting anything overtly political on my professional blog, but I’ve made this one exception. Thanks to Cheryl Stephens for drawing my attention to the original consultation paper.

***

To the Honourable James Moore, Stephen Harper, and Industry Canada:

I’m writing in response to Seizing Canada’s Moment: Moving Forward in Science, Technology and Innovation, the consultation paper in which you solicited “the views of stakeholders from all sectors of the ST&I [science, technology & innovation] system—including universities, colleges and polytechnics, the business community, and Canadians—to help identify solutions that reflect the realities of today’s ever-changing global innovation landscape.” As one of those stakeholders, both as a science communicator and as an engaged citizen, I’d like to offer a few of my thoughts about the Government of Canada’s ST&I strategy. My opinions here are informed by my handful of years in physics research as well as my career of over a dozen years as a writer and editor:

  • In 2002 I founded a national journal for undergraduate physics students to introduce them to the process of peer review and scholarly publication; the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Journal published until 2010.
  • I have, since 2004, edited more than 175 academic journal articles, dissertations, book chapters, and books in physics, earth sciences, chemistry, and engineering, among other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.
  • I have also edited popular science books and am co-author of an upcoming book about personalized medicine for a general audience.

I’m neither the scientist making the groundbreaking discoveries nor the entrepreneur applying research results to create a new product or process, but I’d like to believe that those of us in communications have a critical role to play in the exchange of information and knowledge. We are, as Peter Levesque of the Institute for Knowledge Mobilization has said, the grout that joins the tiles.

Your consultation paper includes several questions for discussion:

Business innovation

  • Building on the advice provided by the Expert Panel on Federal Support for Research and Development, what more can be done to improve business investment in R&D and innovation?
  • What actions could be taken, by the government or others, to enhance the mobilization of knowledge and technology from government laboratories and universities, colleges and polytechnics to the private sector?

Mobilization of knowledge and technology depends, fundamentally, on a free and open exchange of information.

Although I applaud the country’s researchers for helping Canada become “the only G7 country to increase its number of scientific papers about the world average in recent years,” these papers do precious little good if other researchers and people in business can’t

  • find them,
  • read them, and
  • understand them.

Research can’t be done in a (figurative) vacuum; new discoveries are fuelled by previous knowledge, and both researchers and innovators in business need full, unimpeded access to this body of knowledge to drive scientific progress. What Canada needs is the following:

  • A robust network of libraries that serves as a comprehensive archive of scientific information, as well as a metadata-rich cataloguing system that allows Canadians to search the entire network’s content in a centralized location. This kind of network would allow everyone in the ST&I sector to easily find publications on the latest research, as well as encourage interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. Some of the most innovative ideas can arise when mathematicians talk to musicians, or when architects talk to psychologists. Further, a centralized catalogue would let Canadians find not only all papers published in open access journals (see next item) but also those published under a “green open access” models, where the paper appears in a pay-to-access journal but is self-archived by the researcher for free access in an institutional repository.
  • Open access to all Canadian-made research. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Canadian Institutes  of Health Research (CIHR) recognize that if they have funded research, we Canadian taxpayers have paid for it, and we deserve to be able to see the results of that research—i.e., the publications—without having to pay for them again in subscription or access fees. Privatizing the National Research Council Press (today Canadian Science Publishing) such that it has to put its papers behind a paywall is a step in exactly the wrong direction. Paywalls stifle innovation because many of those businesses that could be applying the research have neither the access to an academic library’s subscriptions nor the budget to pay $30 to read each paper, without knowing whether it will ultimately be useful. Mandating open access, however, although a good first step, isn’t enough: to offset the loss of revenue from the reader, open access publishers often have to charge the researcher or the researcher’s institution for the privilege to publish. A system of Government of Canada subsidies to cover part or all of those publishing costs would allow scientists to focus their budgets on research rather than on publication.
  • Plain language knowledge translation and mobilization. High-level research can involve specialized language which, coupled with academia’s deeply ingrained habit of producing dense writing, can hinder understanding of new discoveries. In the long term, the ST&I sector would benefit from a plain language overhaul of all of its communications. For now, communication professionals skilled at distilling research knowledge into usable information for other researchers, industry, policy makers, and ordinary citizens will have a critical role to play in bridging the gap between scientific discovery and innovation.

Developing Innovative and Entrepreneurial People

  • How can Canada continue to develop, attract and retain the world’s top research talent at our businesses, research institutions, colleges and polytechnics, and universities?

“Canada has rising numbers of graduates with doctoral degrees in science and engineering,” according to your consultation paper. “This valuable resource of highly qualified and skilled individuals needs to be better leveraged.” As you acknowledge, these researchers are trained, world-class experts. Wouldn’t it behoove us to listen to what they have to say?

To attract and retain skilled researchers, we have to foster an environment in which they feel fulfilled and secure in their work. In other words, we need a government commitment to evidence-based policy making and a system that allows researchers room to explore. If the government wants industry to work with our scientists, it should be prepared to serve as a role model and do the same. Science is about discovering the laws of nature—these are laws none of us can defy. Only by learning more about them, rather than denying them, will we be able to harness them to our advantage.

Further, for our scientists to succeed, we have to give them room to fail, without the fear that they’ll lose their jobs or grants. Researchers who “push the frontiers of knowledge” are bound to run into a few dead ends. When we learn about scientific progress, we get a sanitized version of history, where discoveries are made regularly, linearly. What non-scientists don’t see are the frustrations, the setbacks, and the outright failures that come with every step forward. These difficulties are part of science, but in the rush to commercialize research, the value they add to the sum of human knowledge is likely to be overlooked.

Excellence in Public and Post-Secondary Research and Development

  • How might Canada build upon its success as a world leader in discovery-driven research?
  • Is the Government of Canada’s suite of programs appropriately designed to best support research excellence? 

Although I understand that this government’s focus is on developing commercial applications of science, the fact is that you can’t apply what you don’t have. Investment in pure science is just as important as developing new technologies; what discoveries will turn out to have useful applications in the future are almost impossible to predict with certainty. Who could have imagined that Max Planck’s musings about quantum theory in the early 1900s would pave the way for the now-ubiquitous laser? And if Galileo hadn’t turned his telescope to the sky—out of curiosity rather than for commerce—and discovered that moons orbit other planets, we might still be terrified of eclipses and bewildered by the tides. (Incidentally, how many years do you figure the whole of civilization was set back by the Church’s persecution of Galileo and its denial of his theories?)

Support for pure science is also what will bring us the next generation of inquisitive, creative, scientific minds. James Day, a UBC superconductivity and physics education researcher, once said to me, “Kids who become interested in science usually get into it in one of two ways: through dinosaurs or through stars.” Neither paleontology nor astronomy are probable sources for the kinds of commercialization this government seems to be after—but to neglect these and other pure sciences in favour of those you somehow deem more likely to yield new products or processes is to deprive future generations of Canadians the opportunity of carrying on our scientific researchers’ impressive legacy.

Sources

Gulrez Shah Azhar. “Access to information is crucial for science.” The Lancet, Vol. 377, April 23, 2011, p. 1404.

Emily Chung. “No more free access to Canadian science journals,” CBC News. March 8, 2011. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/no-more-free-access-to-canadian-science-journals-1.1044255.

Industry Canada. Seizing Canada’s Moment: Moving Forward in Science, Technology and Innovation. Ottawa: Industry Canada, 2014.

Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel. “The open archives initiative: building a low-barrier interoperability framework.” Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Roanoke VA, June 24–28, 2001, pp. 54-62.

Peter Levesque. “Knowledge mobilization as readiness for care.” Institute for Knowledge Mobilization. November 24, 2010. http://www.knowledgemobilization.net/archives/261

Richard Van Noorden. “Open access: The true cost of science publishing” Nature, Vol. 495, March 27, 2013, pp. 426–429. http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676

Jack Joyce—A tour through the world of map editing (EAC-BC meeting)

I first started corresponding with Jack Joyce, founder and president of International Travel Maps and Books (ITMB Publishing) roughly a year ago when I was planning the PubPro 2013 unconference. I was inviting everyone who did any kind of publishing in B.C. to come share their wisdom about publication production. Joyce wrote back, “I’m not sure how valuable my participation would be, given that our production techniques, pre-press work, printing, and marketing differ so significantly from the needs of book publishers.” He added, “We use cartographers instead of project managers, senior cartographers instead of editors, and pre-press graphics specialists instead of pre-press print specialists. As maps are completely graphic and worked on by a dozen staff, there are no authors per se, although we credit the senior cartographers on the map when published. Even the eventual printing has to be done differently than for books.”

His response only made me want to learn more about editing and production in cartography, and we invited him to speak at our January EAC-BC meeting, where Joyce regaled us with eye-opening stories about ITMB’s rich history and the surprising state of mapping today.

History of ITMB

Joyce was raised in Toronto and educated as a town and regional planner at the University of Western Ontario. He moved to Vancouver in 1980, where he managed the Information Canada outlet, run by Renouf Books. Customers came in looking for maps of other Canadian cities. At the time, the retailer carried only maps of Vancouver and B.C. Joyce did four days of searching to track down a map of Ottawa that a customer was looking for. After that he forged relationships with suppliers, and his Hastings storefront became known as a place—really, the only place—people could get maps.

Everything was going fine, said Joyce, until someone came in looking for a map of Los Angeles. He contacted Rand McNally and began distributing that company’s maps of U.S. destinations. Then a customer came in looking for a map of London.

In response, Joyce contacted fifteen European countries asking them who was distributing their maps in North America. No one was, as it turns out, and Joyce became the North American distributor for fourteen of them. “We didn’t hear back from Switzerland,” Joyce quipped.

Recognizing a market niche, Joyce took six weeks off to visit Japan, South Korea, and China. At the time, in 1982, he was one of the first foreigners in China. After a two-hour meeting in Beijing he had secured a contract to do worldwide marketing of all maps of China, an arrangement that lasted until Tiananmen Square happened in 1989.

For South America, however, he “ran out of options.” Maps were basically impossible to find. So he teamed up with Australian cartographer Kevin Healey to form ITMB and began publishing original maps. “Kevin spent five years doing artwork by hand,” said Joyce. “He would attach typeset place names with beeswax. We worked that way until the early 1990s.”

In the 1980s, almost nothing had been published for any of South America; some governments, including Peru and Uruguay, hadn’t even done their own mapping. On one of the only available maps of Brazil, there was an island depicted at the mouth of the Amazon that Healey couldn’t find on any of the regional maps. That map, Joyce explained had been based on an aerial photograph that the Americans had taken in 1947, and the “island” was actually a cloud. This mistake persisted in maps for more than thirty years. “It’s not that unusual,” said Joyce. Even Google, as recently as 2012, showed an island in the South Pacific that doesn’t exist. “It was another cloud,” said Joyce.

Maps of various regions in Latin America became ITMB’s forte, but they also produced travel maps to other destinations all over the world. The maps of Europe at the time, explained Joyce, were all road maps. “None of the maps published showed railway lines.” Yet travellers to Europe usually explored the continent with a rail pass. So ITMB became the only firm that produced a map of Europe showing the rail lines.

Healey died in 1994. By that time Joyce had developed a relationship with the government of Vietnam’s mapping office, where he met his wife Lan, who worked as a cartographer and printer. Lan arrived in Canada in 1996 and took over cartographic production at ITMB, standardizing map design, and increasing the firm’s list from forty titles to 140 titles. Today, ITMB has over 490 titles in print and is the largest publisher of travel maps in the world.

State of mapping today

“Why are we still doing maps when everything is mapped electronically?” Joyce  said. As it turns out, the world is not nearly as well mapped as we believe. “Even Google will admit it’s only halfway through mapping the world.”

Around the time of the American invasion of Iraq, National Geographic had planed to do a feature on the historic treasures of Baghdad. Only shortly before they were scheduled to go to press did they realize that they didn’t have a map of Baghdad. Iraq was a very dangerous place to be sending in a map researcher, of course, but Joyce had a big and reliable enough team of researchers around the area that ITMB had managed to produce a good map of Baghdad. ITMB was the only firm in the world with artwork for Baghdad, and National Geographic called them for help, eventually printing 9 million copies of that map worldwide.

More recently, after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, ITMB was on call with various aid organizations providing maps of the country. Even the U.S. State Department didn’t have its own maps and had to turn to ITMB for help. (Sure enough, as of this writing, if you look up Haiti in Google Maps and zoom in, you can see roads they’ve drawn in by tracing the satellite photo, but, except for the main highway, almost none of them are named.)

There are still huge parts of the world that you can’t get maps for, particularly in Africa, where most of the governments don’t have mapping offices and aren’t concerned about mapping. ITMB has been working with a Scottish firm that has been developing a digital database of Africa, using its artwork and refining it for travel maps. Joyce and his colleagues prepared the first ever travel map of Northwest Africa. “And this was a week ago!” he said. “Don’t leave home without a map,” Joyce advised. Many countries don’t have the infrastructure to distribute maps. In some places, you can’t get a map locally.

Cartography can be a sensitive political issue; a lot of mapping is taken on by governments, and the government of one country is reluctant to map another country, because doing so implies that it has the right to map the other country. As a result, some maps look as though “the world drops off at the end of the country.” ITMB doesn’t take that attitude, said Joyce, and it pieces together information from different sources to produce maps that travellers would find useful, even for not-so-remote locations. For example, say you want to take a trip down the Pacific coast of the United States. There are plenty of road maps out there that can take you down the I-5, but if you wanted to visit McMinnville to see Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose or detour to Mount Hood, you’d be hard-pressed to find a map that had all of that information. ITMB, of course, has published just such a map.

The mapping process has certainly changed dramatically since Joyce started in this business. “In my lifetime, maps have moved from being done by hand, to being done by hand with typesetting, to scribing tools, to giant computers, to desktop computers,” said Joyce. The preferred software used to be Freehand, but Adobe purchased it and discontinued it. Now cartographers mostly use Illustrator. The iPad has really benefited mapping, because it lets the cartographer get georeferencing information in real time. She could be driving down a road in Israel and see where she appears on her map. If the map is off position, she can easily shift the road directly on the iPad to reflect where she actually is. Still, said Joyce, “A computer is only a machine. It’s only as good as the operator. You have to put in talent—a lot of artistic talent.” It’s not that hard to make a map that is technically accurate but looks boring, he said.

Editorial concerns in mapping

Curating information

When ITMB began, the firm relied heavily on atlases, travel guides (like Lonely Planet), any existing maps, and a huge team of researchers. Today Joyce and his colleagues still do this for some of the more remote parts of the world, but the information for a lot of places can be found in digital databases. “There’s almost a wealth of data. Our job is to take information out.” He had wanted to make a travel map of Australia, he explained, and he used a digital database to place a little airplane icon wherever there was an airport. “The whole map turned black,” he said—because many of the country’s ranchers and farmers have their own airstrips. To whittle down the number of airports on his map, he had to filter the database results, keeping only those airports with scheduled service, and the number of airplane icons dropped from thousands to twenty-six.

Proofreading

Once a cartographer has completed a map, it’s important to have another pair of eyes look over it. “Cartography is like every other type of editorial work,” said Joyce. Just as a person who’s written a book will have blind spots, “If you stare at the text long enough, it looks good.” Better yet is to take the map to (or back to) the travel destination and try to find errors—a process Joyce calls “ground truthing.” “A cartographer doesn’t have to have gone to Costa Rica to make a good map. But it helps,” he said. For some new maps of remote destinations, ITMB may do a small initial print run, essentially “buying five thousand researchers.” The early buyers of these maps will report back to the company—”This road is paved,” “This road is a kilometre over,” and so on. For a place like Ghana, Jack said, “You’re lucky if you can get the place name on the right side of the river and the names spelled at all reasonably,” adding, “You do your best.”

Spelling can be tricky in countries where the Latin alphabet isn’t the primary writing system. A week before his talk, Joyce and his wife were in Israel, heading toward Elat, Israel. Road signs leading up to Elat said “Elat” or “Ilat” or “Eilat.” Within Elat, most signs said “Elat,” except for one that said “Ilot.” The road signs there are in Hebrew, Arabic, then the Latin alphabet, and in many places the Latin spelling hadn’t been standardized. And the capital of Mongolia is variously spelled Ulan Bator, Ulaan Baatar, Ulaanbattar, etc. What is the correct spelling? “They don’t care!” said Joyce. Only China has imposed the Latin transliteration of its place names; other countries with non-Latin writing systems aren’t as concerned. To make sure users can find what they’re looking for, ITMB publishes the maps with the three most common variations—but there are times the cartographers can’t find any kind of consistency.

Editorial discretion

Maps done by a geological survey, said Joyce, can be used in a court of law. “My travel maps? No. Don’t try to fight a battle with them,” he said. If a road on a travel map were to scale, it would be a hundred kilometres wide—but for travellers, the roads are important to highlight. Another example is Fiji, which appears as a labelled cluster of dots on every world map; in reality, Fiji would be too small to see at that scale. Europe, too, is often depicted as bigger than it is, because otherwise it would be impossible to fit all of the information onto the map. ITMB’s business is travel maps, so its cartographers will exercise this kind of editorial discretion to give travellers the information they need.

Copyright

Joyce has noticed that sometimes after ITMB has done the legwork and published a map, other maps that look suspiciously similar will appear. But “Copyright is not something that’s so easy to defend, I’m afraid,” he said. Basically the artwork on the copy would have to be identical, down to the contours and typefaces. Even then, the legal fees involved in prosecuting copyright infringement would be prohibitive. “We don’t get mad—we get even,” Joyce said. “They published a map? We’ll publish a better map.” ITMB has built a reputation as the world’s premier travel map publisher, and the business is on good terms with travel publishers, many of whose guides feature ITMB maps. One factor in Joyce’s favour is that there’s not a whole lot of competition in cartography “because it’s so much damn work!” he said. It took them seven years to map Peru, he explained.

***

“Do we make money? Yes, overall, we do. But how much demand is there for Tonga, Malawi, and Antarctica?” Their primary motivation, explained Joyce, is not to make money; they love what they do, and “we do it because it has to be done. If we don’t do it, nobody will.”

Why open access proponents should care about plain language

Virtually all academic research in Canada receives support from one of three federal funding agencies—the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), or Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)—and researchers in other countries similarly depend to some extent on federal funding, whether from the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. or Research Councils UK. Advocates of open access (OA) have long argued that all of us contribute to this research as taxpayers and so should have access to its results—namely, the scholarly books and journals that report on the research—without having to pay for them. In fact, in 2007 CIHR became the first North American public research funder to mandate that all publications stemming from research it has funded must be published in an OA journal (known as “gold open access”) or archived for free use in an institutional repository (“green open access”). In fall 2013, Canada’s other two funding agencies followed suit.

There’s no question that the idea of OA is democratic and altruistic. (Whether OA can flourish given its financial constraints is another discussion.) Making peer-reviewed scholarly work available for free helps researchers broaden their reach and makes it easier for them to collaborate and build on the work of others. For the general public, free access to the latest research means that

  • people with health conditions can read up on the newest treatments
  • professionals who have left academia but still work in a related field can keep up to date
  • citizen scientists—such as hobbyist astronomers, bird watchers, mycologists, and the like—can learn from and contribute to our collective body of knowledge.

Making publications free, however, doesn’t go far enough. The way I see it, there are four levels of access, and if researchers fail to meet any one of them, they haven’t really met the overarching goal of OA, and we taxpayers are still getting shortchanged.

First level: Can readers find the work?

Discoverability, in this case, is an information science problem and falls mainly under the purview of librarians (major OA supporters), who have to make sure that their library’s catalogue links to all available OA journals and that they make their users aware of free, author-archived versions of papers published in traditional for-profit journals. However, plain language and clear communication have a role to play even at this level: authors are responsible for the title, abstract, and keywords of their articles. Journal publishers are usually reluctant to make substantive changes to the title and keywords in particular and rely on the authors to supply appropriate ones. All authors could benefit from plain language training that helps them craft succinct, unambiguous, and descriptive titles and distill their research into a handful of clear key terms that readers will likely search for.

Second level: Can readers get to the work?

Open access proponents focus mainly on this level, arguing that eliminating the price barrier would allow everyone to read and benefit from scholarly publications.

Third Level: Can Readers Read the work?

Beyond promoting standard concerns about design for readability—appropriate fonts, effective use of white space, and so on—this level should accommodate alternative formats that promote universal accessibility, including access for people with print disabilities, a demographic that will grow as the academic community continues to become more inclusive.

Fourth level: Can readers understand the work?

For the most part, language and comprehension don’t concern the OA movement, but I think they are key: who cares if your paper is available for free if it’s impenetrable? Specialized disciplines will use their own specialized language, to be sure, but scholarly writing could undoubtedly do with fewer nominalizations and less convoluted language. Researchers who publish for OA also have to understand that their audience isn’t the same as it was twenty years ago. Academics today are overloaded with information and simply don’t have the time to decipher dense writing. What’s more, OA has opened up the readership to people outside of their field and to ordinary (taxpaying) citizens who want to become more informed.

OA has an important presence in developing nations, too, where researchers often don’t have the means to pay for journal subscriptions, and clear communication is doubly important in this case. Although OA journals can be based anywhere, they’re largely published in English, and many authors in developing nations are writing in English as a foreign language. If they all model their writing on stilted, confounding academese, the problem of impenetrable scholarly language becomes self-perpetuating.

Sadly, clarity in language can be among the lowest priorities for OA publishers. As many people in scholarly publishing have pointed out, including Laraine Coates of UBC Press, free for readers doesn’t mean free to produce. Publications—particularly book-length monographs—still cost (quite a bit of) money to make, and that money has to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, without being able to collect subscription fees from libraries and individual users, OA journals and publishers face more limited budgets, and many of them choose to forgo copy editing, leaving their articles riddled with stylistic and grammatical infelicities that can make a publication effectively unreadable. Peer review alone isn’t enough to ensure clarity and resolve ambiguities.

Ultimately, both open access and plain language movements have the same aim—to democratize information—and each would benefit from forging a stronger alliance with the other. I’m inspired by the story of Jack Andraka, who, at age fifteen and using resources he found online through Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google—including OA journal articles—developed a low-cost, accurate, paper-based test for a marker for pancreatic cancer. Not to take away from Andraka’s insight and resourcefulness, but I can’t help wondering how much more we could collectively accomplish if we all had access—on all levels—to the latest scholarly literature.

Katherine Barber’s PLAIN 2013 banquet talk

I was incredibly privileged to get to see Word Lady Katherine Barber‘s speech at the PLAIN 2013 banquet. Because it was a banquet, I wasn’t rigorously taking notes—and even if I had been, I know I couldn’t do justice to her humour (short of reproducing a full transcript). Despite the casual levity of her talk, though, some of her points are very much worth discussing, so here is an extremely brief recap.

***

“We ideally and naively believe that language is for communication,” said Barber. In fact, language has always been used to impress others or to make the speaker feel superior. In the sixteenth century, people used to borrow fancy words from Latin (Shall we ebulliate some water for tea?), and in the eighteenth century, they borrowed fancy words from French. A secondary function of language, beyond simple communication, is to create an in-group and an out-group (hence teen slang).

Geographical variance also creates an in-group and an out-group, whether consciously or unconsciously. Barber gave some examples of how the English  Canadians use might baffle our visitors. What must they think about our morals, for example, when they walk down the street and see a sign that says “Bachelor for rent”? Or when they go to buy a newspaper and see “Loonies only”?

Language varies even within Canada, of course: in Thunder Bay, a shag is a kind of party—a cross between a shower and a stag. And in Manitoba, people would understand that if you promise to bring dainties, you’ll be bringing assorted sweets rather than frilly underwear.

From our old fort cheddar to our midget basketball teams, we use Canadianisms all the time in our writing and speech without a second thought, but we should bear in mind that what might be plain to us may not at all be plain to outsiders.

Kath Straub—Is it really plain? A case for content testing (PLAIN 2013)

Kath Straub of Usability.org showed attendees at PLAIN 2013 how important—and easy—user testing is for plain language projects.

She began with an example: the Donate My Data brochure was supposed to inform veterans about a program through which they could donate their health records to test health software. She and her team identified ten “must-know” facts that readers should glean from the brochure and hoped to hit a target of 80 percent recall. They tested the brochure using Mturk, a crowdsourced testing tool run by Amazon, and found that reader recall didn’t meet their expectations. Some of the key facts they wanted to emphasize weren’t clear enough, and, as a result, the brochure wasn’t as persuasive as they’d hoped.

This example highlights the importance of testing, said Straub. “Here we were, plain language people thinking we were good at what we do—yet we were surprised with the results.” In the age of content, she explained, there are no guides, and we have to stop blaming the victim. Usability experts and content experts have to come together to create effective documents and tools.

Fortunately, comprehension testing sounds harder than it is. There are three types:

1. “Simple” comprehension testing

Did the users get the key facts? To see if they did, the user testing team should

  • agree on the facts
  • decide which are the most important
  • create a question for each fact
  • agree on the answers

Pre-test your questions, and expect to revise them several times. Good questions are hard to write—test takers remember strategies for answering multiple choice questions from school (e.g., the longer, specific answer is the right one)—so offer participants an alternative to guessing (e.g., “The brochure didn’t say”).

Test multiple versions of your comprehension test to narrow down which version might work best for which audiences.

When reporting results, it’s important to note not only how many people got a question right but also what those who got it wrong chose as answers.

2. Confidence testing

Could users explain what they’ve just read to a family member of friend?

3. Persuasiveness testing

Users may understand the content, but will they change their behaviour accordingly? Understand their motivators, their concerns, and their barriers.

***

Straub has used Mturk for a lot of her user testing: participants get paid a small amount to answer an online survey. The advantages are that Mturk has a wide reach across the U.S., which translates to a lot of participants. The disadvantage is that you don’t have much control over your testing population. As such, your test should start with a filter—a comprehension test and “catch” questions (e.g., “Answer A even if you know that’s not the right answer”)—that can help narrow down your pool of testers who are genuinely reading the questions. Over time, you create a “panel” of people who return to your studies. “You get what you invest and what you pay for,” said Straub.

Each testing session takes about a week, including setup and analysis.

Using tools like Mturk, Straub reiterated, crowdsourced testing can be quick, inexpensive, and effective. It doesn’t have to be complicated to be robust. Most importantly, she said, you don’t know something is plain language to your target audience unless you’ve tested it in your target audience.

Neil James and Ginny Redish—Writing for the web and mobiles (PLAIN 2013)

Veteran plain language advocates Neil James and Ginny Redish shared some eye-opening statistics about web and mobile use at the PLAIN 2013 conference that may prompt some organizations to reprioritize how they deliver their content. In 2013, for example, there were 6.8 billion mobile phones in use—almost one for every person on the planet. Half of the users were using their mobiles to go online. In 2014, mobiles are expected to overtake PCs for Internet use. Surprisingly, however, 44% of Fortune 100 companies have no mobile site at all, and only 14% of consumers were happy their mobile experience. Mobile users are 67% more likely to purchase from a mobile-friendly site, and 79% will go elsewhere if the site is poor.

People don’t go to a website just to use the web, explained Redish. Every use of a website is to achieve a goal. When writing for the web, always consider

  • purpose: why is the content being created?
  • personas: who are the users?
  • conversations: what do users have to do to complete their task?

Always write to a persona, said Redish, and walk those personas through their conversations. Remember to repeat this exercise on mobile, too.

Consider the following areas when creating content:

  1. Audience
  2. Physical context
  3. Channels
  4. Navigation
  5. Page structure
  6. Design
  7. Expression

Words, noted the presenters, are only one element out of seven.

Some basic guidelines

Build everything for user needs

Again, think of who your users are and what they are trying to accomplish. Consider their characteristics when they use your site. Are they anxious? Relaxed? Aggressive? Reluctant? Keep those characteristics in mind when creating your content.

Consider the physical context

Mobiles are a different physical environment compared with a tablet or PC. The screens are smaller, and type and links on a typical website are too small to read comfortably. Maybe soon we’ll have sites with responsive design that change how content is wrapped depending on the device being used to read it, but for now,  creating a dedicated mobile version of a site may be the best way to ensure that all users have an optimal experience on your site regardless of the device they use.

Select the best channels

Smartphones, equipped with cameras, geolocators, accelerometers, and so on, are capable of a lot. We need to be creative and consider whether any of these functions could help us deliver content.

Simplify the navigation

Minimize the number of actions—clicks and swipes—that a user needs to do before they get to what they want. “People will tolerate scrolling if they’re confident they’ll get to what they want,” said James.

Prioritize the content on every page

Put the information users want at the top, and be aware that, for a given line length, a heading with more words will have smaller type, which can affect its perceived hierarchy.

Design for the small screen

Pay attention in particular to information in tables. Do users have to scroll to read the whole table? Do they need to see the whole table at once to get the information they need?

Cut every word you can

The amount of information you can put on a website might be seemingly infinite, but for mobile sites, it’s best to be as succinct as possible. Pare the content down to only what users would need.

What the heck’s happening in book publishing? (EAC-BC meeting)

Freelance writer, editor, indexer, and teacher Lana Okerlund moderated a lively panel discussion at the November EAC-BC meeting that featured Nancy Flight, associate publisher at Greystone Books; Barbara Pulling, freelance editor; and Laraine Coates, marketing manager at UBC Press. “There are lots of pronouncements about book publishing,” Okerlund began, “with some saying, ‘Oh, it’s doomed,’ and others saying that it’s undergoing a renaissance. What’s the state of publishing now, and what’s the role of the editor?”

Flight named some of the challenges in trade publishing today: publishers have had to scramble to get resources to publish ebooks, even though sales of ebooks are flattening out and in some cases even declining. Print books are also declining: unit sales are up slightly, but because of the pressure to keep list prices low, revenues are down. Independent bookstores are gone, so there are fewer places to sell books, and Chapters-Indigo is devoting much less space to books. Review pages in the newspaper are being cut as well, leaving fewer options for places to publicize books. The environment is hugely challenging for publishers, explained Flight, and it led to the bankruptcy just over a year ago of D&M Publishers, of which Greystone was a part. “We’ve all risen from the ashes, miraculously,” she said, “but in scattered form.” Greystone joined the Heritage Group while Douglas & McIntyre was purchased by Harbour Publishing, and many of the D&M staff started their own publishing ventures based on different publishing models.

The landscape “is so fluid right now,” said Pulling. “It changes from week to week.” There are a lot of prognosticators talking about the end of the traditional model of publishing, said Pulling. The rise of self-publishing—from its accessibility to its cachet—has led to a lot of hype and empty promises, she warned. “Everybody’s a publisher, everybody’s a consultant. It raises a lot of ethical issues.”

The scholarly environment faces some different challenges, said Coates. It can be quick to accept new things but sometimes moves very slowly. Because the main market of scholarly presses has been research libraries, the ebook issue is just now emerging, and the push is coming from the authors, who want to present their research in new ways that a book can’t really accommodate. She gave as examples researchers who want to release large amounts of their data or authors of Aboriginal studies titles who want to make dozens of audio files available. “Is confining ourselves to the book our mandate?” she asked. “And who has editorial control?”

Okerlund asked the panel if, given the rise in ebooks and related media, editors are now expected to be more like TV producers. Beyond a core of editorial skills, what other skills are editors expected to have?

“I’m still pretty old-fashioned,” answered Flight. “The same old skills are still going to be important in this new landscape.” She noted an interesting statistic that ebook sales are generally down, but ebooks for kids in particular have fallen 45% in the first half of 2013. As for other ebook bells and whistles, Greystone has done precisely one enhanced ebook, and that was years ago. They didn’t find the effort of that project worth their while. Coates agreed, saying “Can’t we just call it [the enhanced ebook] a website at this point? Because that’s what it really is.” Where editorial skills are going to be vital, she said, was in the realm of discoverability. Publishers need editors to help with metadata tagging and identifying important themes and information. Scholarly presses are now being called upon to provide abstracts not just for a book but also for each chapter, and editors have the skills to help with these kinds of tasks.

Pulling mentioned a growing interest in digital narratives, such as Kate Pullinger’s Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths, interactive online novels that have readers contribute threads to the stories. Inanimate Alice was picked up by schools as a teaching tool and is considered one of the early examples of transmedia storytelling. “Who is playing an editors’ role in the digital narrative?” asked Pulling. “Well, nobody. That role will emerge.”

Okerlund asked if authors are expected to bring more to the table. Flight replied, “Authors have to have a profile. If they don’t, they are really at a huge disadvantage. We’re not as willing to take a chance on a first-time author or someone without a profile.” Pulling expressed concern for the authors, particularly in the “Wild West” of self-publishing. “What happens to the writers?” she asked. In the traditional publishing model, if you put together a successful proposal, the publisher will edit your book. But now “Writers are paying for editing. Writers are being asked to write for free. They need to be able to market; they need to know social media. It’s very difficult for writers right now. Everybody’s trying to get something for nothing.” She also said that although self-publishing offers opportunity in some ways, “there’s so much propaganda out there about self-publishing.” Outfits like Smashwords and Amazon, she explained, have “done so much damage. It’s like throwing stuff to the wall and seeing what sticks, and they’re just making money on volume.”

Pulling sees ethical issues not only in those business practices but also in the whole idea of editing a work to be self-published, without context. “It’s very difficult to edit a book in a vacuum,” she said. “You have to find a way to create a context for each book,” which can be hard when “you have people come to you with things that aren’t really books.” She added, “Writers are getting the message that they need an editor, but some writers have gotten terrible advice from people who claim to be editors. Book editing is a specialized skill, and you have to know about certain book conventions. Whether it’s an ebook or a print book, if something is 300,000 words long, and it’s a novel, who’s going to read that?” A good, conscientious book editor can help an author see a larger context for their writing and tailor their book to that, with a strong overall narrative arc. “It’s incumbent upon you as a freelancer to educate clients about self-publishing,” said Pulling. Coates added, “We have a real PR problem now in publishing and editing. We’ve gotten behind in being out there publicly and talking about what we do. The people pushing self-publishing are way ahead of us. I think it’s sad that writers can’t just be writers. I can’t imagine how writing must suffer because of that.”

Both Flight and Pulling noted that a chief complaint of published authors was that their publishers didn’t do enough marketing. But, as Pulling explained, “unless it’s somebody who is set up to promote themselves all the time, it’s not as easy as it looks.” Coates said that when it comes to marketing, UBC Press tries everything. “Our audiences are all over the place,” she explained. “We have readers and authors who aren’t on email to people who DM on Twitter. It’s subject specific: some have huge online communities.” Books built around associations and societies are great, she explained, because they can get excerpts and other promotional content to their existing audiences. She’s also found Twitter to be a great tool: “It’s so immediate. Otherwise it’s hard to make that immediate connection with readers.”

Okerlund asked the panel about some of the new publishing models that have cropped up, from LifeTree Media to Figure 1 Publishing and Page Two Strategies. Figure 1 (started by D&M alums Chris Labonté, Peter Cocking, and Richard Nadeau), Pulling explained, does custom publishing—mostly business books, art books, cookbooks, and books commissioned by the client. Page Two, said Pulling, is “doing everything.” Former D&Mers Trena White and Jesse Finkelstein bring their clients a depth of experience in publishing. They have a partnership with a literary agency but also consult with authors about self-publishing. They will also help companies get set up with their own publishing programs. Another company with an interesting model is OR Books, which offers its socially and politically progressive titles directly through their website, either as ebooks or print-on-demand books.

The scholarly model, said Coates, has had to respond to calls from scholars and readers to make books available for free as open-access titles. The push does have its merits, she explained: “Our authors and we are funded by SSHRC [the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada]. So it makes sense for people to say, ‘If we’re giving all this money to researchers and publishers, why are they selling the books?'” The answer, she said, lies simply in the fact that the people issuing the call for open access don’t realize how many resources go into producing a book.

So where do we go from here? According to Pulling, “Small publishers will be okay, as long as the funding holds.” Flight elaborated: “There used to be a lot of mid-sized publishers in Canada, but one after another has been swallowed up or gone out of business.” About Greystone since its rebirth, Flight explained, “We’re smaller now. We’re just doing everything we’ve always done, but more so. We put a lot more energy into identifying our market.” She added, “It’s a good time to be a small publisher, if you know your niche. There’s not a lot of overhead, and there’s collegiality. At Greystone we’ve been very happy in our smaller configuration, and things are going very well.”

Pulling encouraged us to be more vocal and active politically. “One of the things we should do in Vancouver is write to the government and get them to do something about the rent in this city. We don’t have independent bookstores, beyond the specialty stores like Banyen or Kidsbooks. And at the same time Gregor Robertson is celebrating Amazon’s new warehouse here?” She also urged us to make it clear to our elected representatives how much we value arts funding. One opportunity to make our voices heard is coming up at the Canada Council’s National Forum on the Literary Arts, happening in February 2014.

Mark Hochhauser—How do our readers really think, understand, and decide—despite what they know? (PLAIN 2013)

Mark Hochhauser, who holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh, is a readability consultant based in Minnesota. Writing, reading, judging, and deciding, he explained at his PLAIN 2013 plenary session, are neurobiological processes that take place in different parts of the brain. Plain language can benefit some of them, but not all.

What can affect reading comprehension?

Word knowledge is critical for good comprehension. You need to know 85–90 percent of words to understand a document; to fully understand, you need to know 98–99 percent. Hochhauser was quick to add, “Common understanding of legal words is not the same thing as legal understanding of legal words.”

Vocabulary does not correlate with language comprehension or verbal fluency in adults with low literacy. Poor readers tend to recognize individual words but have not made the shift to stringing them together into sentences.

“All readers are not the same,” said Hochhauser. Reading, comprehension, and cognition are affected by

  • the aging brain, learning difficulties, and disorders like ADD/ADHD
  • how reading comprehension is measured: True/false questions, for example, are not good tests of comprehension, and some reading tests use only a few hundred words.
  • health problems: Acute coronary syndrome, intensive care, chemotherapy, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, drug addiction, traumatic brain injury, and menopausal transition can all affect how well we think.

How do we make decisions?

Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, noted a “law of least effort” in thinking and decision making. Hochhauser explained, “If there are several ways to achieve the same goal, readers will take the least demanding route.” We have two systems of thinking: logical and emotional. Decisions are emotional first, logical second. “We often feel a decision before we can verbalize it,” he said. Whereas logical decisions are slow, controlled, and require a lot of effort, emotional decisions are fast, automatic, and require little effort. Our brains can retain only so much information, said Hochhauser. Miller’s Law refers to 7 ± 2—the number of items we can retain in our short-term memory, but more recent research suggests we can retain only about 4 to 7, depending on age (peaking at 25–35).

When we make quick decisions, we rely on intuition, which Hochhauser defined as “knowledge without reasoning” and “knowledge without awareness.” We are influenced by heuristics—shortcuts to making decisions. “Affect heuristics” are tied to our emotional responses to previous experiences, and “effort heuristics” make us assign value to work based on the perceived effort that went into it. Our decisions are also strongly influenced by how information is framed: Would you prefer “75 percent lean” or “25 percent fat”?  “Ninety-one percent employment” or “9 percent unemployment”?

Hochhauser concluded with an anecdote about an amusing bit of legalese in a letter he received that read, “Please read and understand the enclosed document.” The problem is, of course, as Hochhauser put it, “You cannot compel understanding.”