Application Form: https://forms.gle/Jza1rAVy6Aubu7wc8 (form closes Friday June 14, 2024 at 11:59PM US Eastern Time)
Applications to participate will close on Friday June 14th, and selected participants will be notified of acceptance the following week (week of June 17th). Due to space and funding constraints, this year's workshop will be capped at 20 participants. Travel, lodging, and meal expenses will be fully covered for all workshop participants.
This workshop is targeted towards graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, although we will consider applications from other early-career scientists who would especially benefit from participating. All participants are expected to have some basic familiarity with command line tools and scientific programming (e.g. Unix, R, and/or Python) in order to fully benefit from the workshop trainings. This is NOT an introductory programming course; we will focusing on -Omics workflows and downstream data visualizations of target datasets.
Any questions about this workshop should be directed to Holly Bik at UGA (lead organizer and NSF grant PI) - [email protected]
Sunday August 4th - Arrival, take 4:30PM ferry to Sapelo Island
Mon August 5th - Friday August 9th: Main Workshop program
Mornings - Bioinformatics Data Visualization / Storytelling for scientific audiences (Instructor: Holly Bik, Associate Professor at the University of Georgia)
Afternoons - Science Communication Training / Storytelling for general audiences (Instructor: Virginia Schutte, freelance science communicator)
Saturday August 10th - Departure, take 8:30AM or 12:30pm ferry back to mainland
This workshop series is designed to foster practical skills in both bioinformatics and science communication, training participants in how to “tell stories through data.” Most practicing researchers do not have formal training in storytelling or science communication. Yet, evidence has shown that storytelling is a persuasive communication tool because humans connect with the narrative format more than isolated facts (Dahlstrom 2014). Storytelling can be defined as “how to convey ideas to a specific audience using evidence and narrative”, and since this process involves a formal underlying structure (Reagan et al. 2016), it is equally useful for both scientific manuscripts and public outreach materials.
"Telling Stories Through Data" workshops will be centered around two overarching questions: How do you find the story? and What do you do with the story? Morning sessions (led by Holly Bik) will focus on how these questions are applied to bioinformatics data analyses, guiding participants in how to visualize data, conduct appropriate statistical analyses, and build narratives for scientific manuscripts. Afternoon sessions (led by Virginia Schutte) will provide complementary training on storytelling for public audiences, teaching participants how to identify compelling public narratives and prepare science outreach products.
We anticipate a number of discrete outputs from each workshop. First, participants will compile a set of open-source bioinformatics workflows (scripts, code, and figures/visuals published on GitHub) that are specifically tailored towards a particular data analysis application. These workflows will emphasize rapid and novel data visualizations to identify subtle data patterns using a variety of software tools, and will be broadly useful for anyone working with marine or terrestrial -Omics datasets. Secondly, these workshops will produce a suite of digital science outreach products (drawings, photographs, infographics, videos, etc.) that instructors and participants will disseminate through various platforms (Twitter/BlueSky, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.). Digital outreach products will be designed to raise awareness of marine biodiversity and spark conversations about the importance of understudied benthic and deep-sea habitats.
This is a series of three summer workshops funded through Holly Bik's CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation DEB-2144304. The data analysis focus of each year's workshop is as follows:
2024 - Metabarcoding / eDNA data analysis (dataset: 18S rRNA amplicons obtained from bulk marine sediments in Southern California; Illumina short read sequence data)
2025 - Host-Associated Microbiome data analysis (dataset: Holobiont metagenomes and complementary bacterial isolate genomes; Illumina short read and PacBio long read sequence data)
2026 - Meiofaunal Phylogenomics (dataset: marine nematode genome skims and metatranscriptomes; Illumina short read and PacBio long read sequence data)