Tag Archives: storytelling

A Picture CAN Tell a Dozen Tables’ Worth of Data

10 Dec

[The following was originally written for the UMCCTS December Newsletter.]

When it comes to summarizing and sharing information with an audience, one important thing to remember is the audience itself. It’s a pretty simple concept, yet too often forgotten or dismissed when we’re preparing a talk, an article, a policy statement, patient education materials, and the myriad of other containers into which we fit our message.

Most recently, I’ve been working to pull together sections for the Final Progress Report for our initial Clinical and Translational Science Award. This is not my first time writing such a report and as has been the case in the past, we follow a template that goes something like:

Overall Objectives and Goals > Aims > Accomplishments Associated with Each Aim > Milestones Reached for the Same > Challenges Faced > Future Plans

These reports are lengthy and dry, filled with lots of bullet points and tables and numbers. I’m not privy to how these reports are read at NIH, but I imagine that the format fits how they are reviewed and makes it easier for funders to see a bigger picture across similar awards. Funders and reviewers are the audience, thus we present our information to them in the way they’re accustomed – the way that they understand.

Taking a break from all of the writing, I decided to turn one of the bigger tables of information I’ve received into something for a different audience. Sarah Rulnick, MPH, Project Manager for the Conquering Diseases Project, recently compiled some information regarding the work of the Biorepository and Volunteer Database. These are both integral pieces in the UMCCTS efforts to support clinical trials. I read through the narrative portions of Sarah’s summary and took in the full-page table giving yearly counts of things such as the number of patients consented for the biorepository, MiCARD searches performed, outreach events organized, and the like.

I started to think about a way that I could summarize this information for both people who have already enrolled in the Volunteer Database and those who might potentially do so, if they only understood a bit more about the importance of participation. It’s an audience that Sarah and her colleagues are charged to reach. I pulled out the data points that I thought best addressed this goal. I also brainstormed what came to my mind when I thought about conquering something. What I ultimately came up with is this:

Conquering Diseases

Coincidentally, right in the middle of writing this newsletter piece, I watched a 20-minute “Coffee Break” webinar from the American Evaluation Association. I hadn’t connected the webinar with this piece, but they certainly appear to be related. The webinar was entitled, “How to Develop Visual Summaries and Inforgraphics from Your Evaluation Findings,” and presented by Elissa Schloesser, a graphic designer and visual communicator based in Minneapolis. She, too, talked about knowing your audience and she offered an excellent example of how she prepared two very different materials for two groups; both from the same report. I felt I was on track with my message here.

Elissa has some other nice examples on her My Visual Voice. If you’re thinking of communicating some of your work visually, they might inspire you.

Tags: , ,

Fancy Doodles

23 Jul

One of my favorite parts of my still relatively new job as an evaluator is being able to tell the stories of our programs not only in words, but also in pictures. Regular readers of my blog know how much I enjoy and value sketching, doodling, and drawing as part of my work process, and I’ve enjoyed sharing my sketchnotes over the past few years here on my blog, but my new role allows me to create infograms for each newsletter produced by the UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science. I thought I’d share some here.

When I had to report on the current work of our funded clinical scholars, I decided to highlight how a small group of people (6) can lead to much larger groups and connections and ultimately, outputs such as subsequent funding and peer-reviewed papers. Turning those facts into pictures, I came up with this:

Slide1

For those curious, I used PowerPoint to draw this graphic. The dollar signs and presentation screens are clip art, but the rest I was able to draw by hand. You can draw pretty much anything with triangles and rectangles and circles. 🙂

Next, I had to report on the progress of another group of funded researchers – our Pilot Project Program Awardees. I took the information given to me via lengthy written reports and turned it into this graphic to show the importance and value of Team Science. For this one, I tested out the infographic site, Easel.ly. It allows you to do many things via their free version.

PPPSummaryUpdateSpring2015

Most recently, the Principal Investigator for our Center wanted to know about the funding of these Pilot Projects since we began doing so, back in 2007. What could we say about this program, since we initiated it? I decided one thing worth evaluating was our return on investment. Since 2007, the UMCCTS has awarded around $5 million to fund research that promotes collaboration between basic science and clinical researchers, provides seed funding for ideas to grow, and advances translational science. What’s been the return on that investment? Turning back to PowerPoint, I created this graphic:

PPP Investment

It’s a challenge to collect and analyze the data behind these images, but in many ways the bigger challenge is to figure out which story is the one to tell and how best to tell it. It’s a skill of an accomplished evaluator, something that I can’t really call myself only 8 months into the job, but I’m happy to report that it’s both interesting and rewarding to work towards such a goal.

Tags: , , , ,

The Next Step(s)

22 May

Spring is a whirlwind in my workaday world. It’s chocked full of meetings, presentations, science boot camp, and all of the many things that make my job such a great one to have. While many academic librarians may be looking forward to the end of another semester and a few months of a quieter summer life in their libraries, those of us in medical schools rarely notice the ticking of the academic clock. Our students never leave, but just roll from one clerkship to another; one lab to another; one class to another. When I first started working in this environment, it took a little while to figure this out. I kept waiting for people to go away for the summer. I kept waiting for the parking lot to be a little bit less full. It’s true that during the height of July and August, there’s a little bit of a lull, but mostly we just keep rolling. Roll on!

One of the dates on my calendar is an upcoming talk at Tufts Medical School’s library, part of a staff development day for the University’s librarians around the idea of embedded librarianship. I feel like I’ve talked so much (and written so much) about my new(ish) role the past 9 months that I could do it in my sleep, but after writing that poetic welcome for the opening of “One Health” a couple of weeks back, I fear I’ve set my bar quite high in terms of public appearances. I should’ve known better. Regardless, the pressure is on to do something new – to share some new thoughts, ideas, and experiences; to hopefully offer some encouragement and/or inspiration for my colleagues in this area.

Embedded-Librarian This being the case, I’ve been spending a good bit of my early morning and evening reading time taking in some of the writings on the topic that I’d put aside for awhile. One of these is David Shumaker’s book, The Embedded Librarian, that came out last year. David is a member of the faculty at the School of Library and Information Science at Catholic University. For a good while, he has written “The Embedded Librarian” blog and much of his book is an expansion of the thoughts, ideas, interviews, and more that he’s shared on the blog. If you’re interested in this topic at all (and I imagine that if you read my blog, you must have some interest), I recommend it. I’ve found it to be a keeper, one for your professional bookshelf or, in my case, my Kindle.

In defining “embedded librarianship,” and in particular, distinguishing it from traditional librarianship or liaison librarianship, David captures a characteristic that I’ve been struggling to put a name to:

Embedded librarians go a step further than responsiveness – they anticipate. A senior academic administrator I interviewed recently described the embedded librarian she works with as a ‘fount of ideas.’ A corporate administrator told me his embedded librarian suggested ways of accomplishing tasks that others on the team wouldn’t think of – ways that save the team time and effort. Embedded librarians don’t wait to be asked. They use their close working relationships to identify needs and find solutions.

Along with the talk at Tufts, I’m also putting together my part of the presentation that I’ll be giving at Science Book Camp for Librarians next month. Its focus is upon interviewing researchers. Part of what I want to share in these talks (and here) is the idea found in this quote. It’s about anticipation. It’s about building on relationships. It’s something that Daniel Pink calls “problem finding.” I’ve also been reading articles in psychology books on attentive listening. I think it’s kind of that, too. I’ve been reading articles on narrative medicine, the practice of getting patients to tell the story of their illness. I think there’s some of that in it, as well.

It’s a bit of all of these things, this thing that I can’t quite put a single name to. It’s the marriage between your skills and expertise, and your patron’s need. It’s being able to readily identify that relationship and then act on it. It’s the next step after someone invites you to a meeting to discuss doing a literature review. It’s the, “And … what else?” The trick is that 9 times out of ten (or maybe 99 out of 100), the researcher doesn’t know the answer to that question. S/he hasn’t a clue. It’s the informationist’s and/or embedded librarian’s job to know. It’s our responsibility to be able to listen for the opportunities. And if I’ve learned one thing in these past months, it’s that there is NO shortage of opportunities. People are awash in a sea of information, communication breakdown, and disconnection.

I came away from the annual meeting of the Medical Library Association with a bubbling research question centered on our readiness to do this work, as well as the barriers that prevent us from doing it. Stay tuned for updates on where I go with this, but for now just take it as a comment that I see some interesting questions/issues around our abilities and desires to take this next step.

If you have any thoughts, suggestions, or models of what this elusive characteristic is called, I’d be delighted if you share them in the comments to this post.

claimtoken-519e49c9e7b90

Tags: , , , , , ,