When diving into our own domains of study, it becomes really hard to realize that what we see as common truth or “one plus one equals two” is actually difficult to comprehend by people from outside of our professional backgrounds. This can even include someone that’s also in the same institution but just coming from another department, let alone people we meet in the society and in our daily lives.
As a matter of fact, I even have doubt about explaining my field of study here on 803 Seminar’s WordPress community, where people are essentially SIAT grads and profs. Let me make an attempt here: I have a background in Network Engineering, and my lab currently works on Data-Visualization for meditation assistance purposes, and I can also say that I focus on one of many HCI aspects. You hear these terms, and because your works also feature interdisciplinarity, you might feel that “okay, at least I know which part of the world that is”.
This gap might not be that wide-open when we are talking to our peers at school regardless of whether they are from other disciplines or other departments, but more often the case is, I hopelessly find the need to give some info about my coursework when making a self introduction, where I always ended up with the most general terms regarding my study: what I do, where my focus is, how I foresee my road ahead. And the case just worsens if your big major doesn’t seem that commonly-known. Earlier this January, I was eating Japanese Ramen with my friend at a restaurant on Broadway, and encountered a friendly next-table family. They were a cross-culture couple with their daughter, who was taking K-12 education in town. We chatted casually, and then it came to the classical question, “Are you a student here?” “Yes, I am currently studying at SFU as a grad student.” “Oh, wow, what’s your major?”. I literally got stuck: unlike most common majors, there isn’t even a “Errr, my major is called Interactive Arts and Technology””What is that?””It’s about Human Computer Interaction, or HCI.””I’ve never heard of that.””It’s computer science related, but not Computer Science. It’s like helping people better use computer technology to communicate and…””Okay, well, sorry, but that’s too geeky..””No problem.” I did not even get to finish the primitive concept, and it happened that I was the one who felt embarrassed, not my friendly conversation companions. Later in similar situations, I just said that I am a programmer, or study computer science related stuff, and hastily pushed conversations to the next phase.
I am hence wondering (as well as seeking) if there are any explicit and concise way to explain my work and research to someone totally unfamiliar with my field. As we go deeper and deeper to generate new knowledge as grad students, it seems that conveying something on an academic journal is far easier than explaining it to the public, since the latter of which require considerably fewer words, and endless clarity.
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I had a dentist appointment today and in the chit-chat, I faced the same issue you mention. I went with the reductionist approach to try to abstract what I did in a manner that could be explained shortly.
I started pondering – “Ok Aldo, we’re in HCI in Visual Analaytics and your research line is about visualizing uncertainty from genetic sequencing data”.- but such a statement would have proven completely void of meaning to the attentive ears.
So I started deconstructing my original idea. If I started with visual analytics and what I’ll be trying to accomplish with the data, I thought that I was pretty much trying to tell a story out of it, so I summarized it to “storytelling”. In terms of visualization, people usually refer to it as “bars and charts”, and while that’s an oversimplification of my research, my dentist had enough idea about what a visualization was for me to convey her my point.
So I said: “I use visualizations to tell you a story about your own genetics”.
While not the description I would use in academic circles, I found an easy way to tell what I actually was doing. I hope it helps 🙂