Journalism Course Open to Draper Students: Writing for a Wide Readership

The Carter Journalism Institute has opened one of its spring courses, "Writing for a Wide Readership," to outside students. This class is not crosslisted with Draper, but can be taken toward our degree requirements. If you have any questions about credit distribution, contact Draper at draper.program@nyu.edu. Otherwise, you can contact Matthew Stehney directly at mcs579@nyu.edu for information on how to enroll.

JOUR-GA 60.001 Writing for a Wide Readership:

How to translate the specialized languages of particular disciplines in order to reach a larger public is at the heart of this course. Too often, specialists find themselves hostage to the arcane tongues of particular disciplines. Yet they possess knowledge that often cries out to be understood by a broader public. The course will concentrate on the structure of good storytelling, the marshaling of evidence, the unfolding of convincing narrative, and the rhetorical style necessary for turning useful work into memorable writing. Good writers are good readers and this course will explore some of the more successful practitioners of public writing and the art of advancing an argument for a general readership, including, among others, Lewis Thomas, George Orwell and Joan Didion.

Draper Alumna Brooke Borel Published in Popular Science

Great news from Draper alumna Brooke Borel, who has been working as a successful freelance science journalist since she graduated in 2007: her first long form article, entitled "Almost a Mile Below South Dakota, a Race to Find Dark Matter," has been published in January's issue of Popular Science. She also has pieces forthcoming in the same outlet later this year. Congrats, Brooke!

The piece begins:

"Between 1876 and 2002, the people of Lead, South Dakota, extracted $3.5 billion worth of gold from the Homestake mine. It was the town’s main business, and when falling prices and diminishing returns finally shut it down, no one was sure what to do with the remaining 8,000-foot hole in the ground. Then, in 2007, the National Science Foundation decided that an 8,000-foot hole would be the perfect place to put its proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL, a massive research complex that will include the world’s deepest underground lab.

Now a team of physicists and former miners has converted Homestake’s shipping warehouse into a new surface-level laboratory at the Sanford Underground Laboratory. They've painted the walls and baseboards white and added yellow floor lines to steer visitors around giant nitrogen tanks, locker-size computers and plastic-shrouded machine parts. Soon they will gather many of these components into the lab’s clean room and combine them into LUX, the Large Underground Xenon dark-matter detector, which they will then lower halfway down the mine, where—if all goes well—it will eventually detect the presence of a few particles of dark matter, the as-yet-undetected invisible substance that may well be what holds the universe together."

To read Brooke's article in full, see the Popular Science website, here: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-12/mining-dark-matter

To read a 2009 interview Draper conducted with Brooke about science journalism, check out in.ter.reg.num's archives, here: http://draperprogram.blogspot.com/2009/05/interview-with-draper-alumna-brooke.html

Guest entry by Nina Hien, Art Worlds

SEMINARRATING
Serial Memories of Seminars
[part 1]

The word seminar comes from the term seminarium or “seed plot”. Add a “y” and you have “seminary”, which attaches a religious institutional connotation to it. Discipline, dissemination, and devotion are clearly written into the success of this process of the germination and cultivation of knowledge. Like gardening, it is a hands-on pursuit that ideally relies on communal efforts. Someone lays out the plot with the intention of inseminating and reproducing his ideas. I say “his” because this is the role of the professor, who, by no small note, has commonly been gendered as male through these seminal terms. But the growth of the patch also falls into the dutiful hands of the group, the students, who are supposed to reap the greatest amount of fruits from the harvest. Beyond the roots of patriarchy and agriculturing found at the bottom of the concept of the seminar, a utopian strain seems also to be grafted onto it. (But perhaps I am reading these qualities into the practice because I spent so many years at Cornell University—a land-grant institution in a rural upstate farming community that had been founded by a former Quaker.)

With all that in mind, even with all of the variations that a seminar can take due to diverse subject matter, disciplinary modes, institutional contexts, and individual pedagogical styles and professorial personalities, it seems that perhaps some tiny seedlings of insight about them can be culled from a private conservatory filled with snaps and shoots of memories from the more than two decades in which I was a participant and witness in university seminars (both as a student and as a teacher). With the following recollections, I have no intention of asserting any grand, generalized or scientific claims about the current state of “the seminar”. However, from these seminal fragments (and their contexts) perhaps this rarefied form of language and interaction and academic construct can be demystified a speck, which could then be particularly relevant to us here at the Draper, a program based on seminar learning and positioned on the ground and in the air between the more square plots of traditional disciplines.

The Seminar of the Confusion of Tongues (tied or babbling), circa late 1980s at The University of Missouri Journalism School—Columbia, MO

During this period, two earth-shattering shifts that would change our perception of the world as we knew it were underway. The first could be spotted through what turned out to be the tragic fate of an innovative professor at the J-School who had been formulating ideas about what he called, “The Knowledge Tablet”. Conceiving this to be the ultimate tool in which anyone could punch in a question and get spit out an answer, his research was likely blown to bits as soon as the World Wide Web and Google—the ultimate knowledge tablet—exploded onto the scene a few years later. The second shift could be marked when the multi-cultural management program at the school published its "Dictionary of Cautionary Words and Phrases"—a list of politically incorrect words. The student reporters working at the J-School newspaper—one of the two daily papers in the city—could no longer use terms like “Dutch-treat”, “illegal aliens” and “third-world countries” in their articles. “Black”, once an acceptable word to identify an “African-American” person, was also to be avoided for that objective. Needless to say, these constrictions resulted in much convoluted and repressed thought within an enterprise in which clarity and concision are major goals. They were also the cause of many daily practical blunders. But at play as well at this point when racial and ethnic categories were being reconfigured through a strong wave of identity politics, were the J-School’s own black-and-white categorical binaries and hierarchies that transcended skin color. People were either pegged as innate “word people” or “picture people”. I believed that the basic word-image distinction was ludicrous because in my experience as a writer, sights and visual senses informed the images that were used to produce good writing.

So in this technologically transforming, racially charged and dichotomizing environment, I enrolled in a seminar on cross-cultural mass media. The teacher, who had a doctorate in communication studies, was a new professor (and was, if not the first “black” female professor in the history of the program, definitely the first “African-American” woman faculty member). The course content included press systems in “developing countries” and interrogated the strategic power maneuvers and values that determine what becomes newsworthy in the United States. This was a loaded focus because it directly considered “racial” and “minority” injustices as well as “ethnic” and “cultural” “issues”. The discussions throughout the semester were pretty stilted and stifled with only certain students speaking up, and others remaining silent. Attempting to explain this awkward imbalance, the professor remarked that the class was comprised of two kinds of people—adding to the order a new set of binaries, which resonated with the word/picture one.

The broadcast journalists (the image people) were articulate, chatty, expressive, and could work magic with surfaces. The print journalists (the text people)—and I was in this print-concentration camp—were reticent, but better at writing papers and achieving depth. As much as I hated tags, there did seem to be some truth to these. I then started to think that what may have actually been squelching the speech of some students had a lot to do with their anxiety about using the wrong terms and language, especially when discussing these sensitive topics with an African-American professor in this awkward environment of political correctness. And perhaps the text folks were more easily susceptible because of their attachment to word craft, which clearly affected newspapers more than televisions. The broadcasters were not only more comfortable with different modes of self-presentation, but they were taught to speak in sound bytes and be led by the lines of teleprompters. They also dealt with a much more glossy and general form of news, much of which they hadn’t written themselves. Beyond that, some of them had been instructed in public speaking and had developed stellar verbal gate-keeping skills so they were more adept at thinking appropriately in public spheres.

But through these apparent differences, I began also to contemplate the diverse ways and speeds at which individual people acquire knowledge, process information and then articulate it. And also, how aptitude is largely conditioned by professional background and training, as well as the circulating political ideologies, the media technologies already on the table, and the new media impulses coursing throughout the air. At that point, I imagined being a teacher who would bring forms of visual media into active play in the seminar—on the one hand to create engaged discussions, and on the other, to observe the relationships between visual, verbal and textual content and communication. (I knew there would never be an answer to these questions on any old Knowledge Tablet.)

So, in this land located on the edge of the fertile Missouri River bottoms, the seeds of experimentation with vision, visuality, virtuality, textuality, verbality and verbosity were implanted. Here at the Draper Program, they have started to sprout as I plot my seminars, prod the students to really toil the soil, and cultivate courses, always with many more seeds in hand (and pocket).

[More to come…Part 2: “The Seminars of Striking Poses, Seminar Vogue-ing and Blush Exchanges". Part 3: "The Seminars of Artificial Insemination & Artificial Intelligence"]

Interview with Draper Alumna Brooke Borel

Brooke Borel graduated from Draper in 2007. Since her graduation, she has embarked on a successful career as a freelance science journalist. Brooke took the time to answer some questions about her career path and her time at Draper.

For those who may not be familiar with the field, what kind of stories does a science journalist cover, and for what kind of publications?

I write for a few different publications: Popular Science, Cosmos, and G: The Green Lifestyle Magazine. The latter two are based in Sydney, Australia, and I interned with them there around a year ago, which is how I got started in the field. I also do research and fact checking for Science Illustrated, which is a sister publication of Popular Science here in New York.

Science journalists write about a number of different topics-- basically anything science related. Some have specialties, but right now I'm writing about any science topic that I personally find interesting. My undergraduate work in biomedical engineering covered a wide range of areas, from chemistry and biology to mechanics and electronics, so I feel pretty comfortable covering a number of different fields. My work for Cosmos has been mainly reporting on basic science. G is an environmental magazine, so all of my articles for them are green-themed. And for PopSci, I've done a number of different projects, including consumer product reviews, a book review, and basic science coverage. I write fairly regularly for their blog at PopSci.com, and I have an article coming out in their May print issue, which is the first time I'll have a byline in a print magazine here in the US (I've had a handful in Australia). It's a pretty small piece, but check it out if you see it on the newsstand!

As social awareness and interest in topics such as climate and environmental issues increases, it seems likely that scientific reporting will be increasingly in demand. How do you think the field is changing and developing, and how do you see yourself involved in that development?

I think that there has been a vast improvement in science journalism over the past decade or so, and it is continuing to improve. I think the main challenge is finding reporters who both understand the science that they are covering and can write about it in ways that the general public can understand. I see myself as part of a larger movement of people with science backgrounds who have moved to journalism as a way to participate in science communication and to bring science news to the public. I think the current issues today, from climate change and other environmental issues to medical breakthroughs and controversies, will really impact people's lives directly, and that more people are realizing this and are seeking ways in which to become better informed. Hopefully this demand will continue, and the need for people like me will continue to grow with it.

How has your interdisciplinary background been useful in your career?

Although I really liked many things about my undergraduate program, and it covered a wide range of topics in science and technology, it was a pretty narrow program on a larger scale. I had hardly any opportunity to study anything outside of science and math. I think we were required to take a total of six social science or humanities courses during our entire four years as undergraduates. I don't think this gives students a broad enough view of the world, or the opportunity to see how their field might connect with other, seemingly disparate fields.

My work at Draper allowed me to explore so many different areas of study, including the history of science and science's relationship to both social and cultural forces. I think this gave me a unique perspective on science, and I'm not sure I'd be where I am now without that perspective. Also, just on a personal note, I liked that each Draper student had a unique curriculum, yet we were all able to take classes together. Each person really brought an interesting set of skills to the table. There aren't many programs out there that allow for such a broad set of academic interests.

What were your research interests when you started at Draper? Did these change throughout the course of the program?

I was actually pretty unfocused when I first started-- all I knew is that I wanted to write and that I wanted a better basic understanding of the humanities and social sciences. After a semester or so, I started realizing that I could pull from my experiences with science in both my writing and my research at Draper. I mainly took science studies and gender politics classes, as well as some science education classes outside of Draper. At the time, I hadn't considered the possibility of being a journalist, otherwise I probably would have tried to take classes at SHERP, which is a great program. Instead, I was focusing my work on the debate on gender bias in university science and engineering faculties and labs, which is what I wrote my thesis on.

So yes, my interests evolved during my time at Draper, and they are still evolving. I think it takes some time to figure out exactly where your niche is in the world.

What advice would you give current Draper students, particularly those who are interested in pursuing a career in your field?

This is actually advice that was given to me by Andy Jewett, my thesis advisor. He said this during a seminar at Draper a couple of years ago: be tenacious. And he's right. It's easy to get discouraged when you are looking for jobs, particularly in the current economic climate. But you just have to keep trying, submitting your resume and letters of interest, networking. Something is bound to come from all of that, but you have to keep trying in order to make it happen.

For those interested in pursuing a career in science journalism, or any kind of journalism for that matter, I think the best thing you can do is find an internship. One way to get jobs is to show what you've done in the past, which means you need published clips. But it's sort of a Catch 22, because in order to get published, you first need some sort of writing job. Most internships give you a chance to write, and you have a handful of bylines by the time you are finished, as well as some good connections. After that, you just have to be tenacious until you find solid work. Also, I know the climate isn't that great right now, particularly in publishing. But even if print is dying, there is still a need for people to write content for websites and other electronic media, so don't be discouraged. Just get your name out there and see where it takes you.