Science and Video: a roadmap

Once again I find myself in the position of having collected slides from talks, and having audio from the sessions. I need a simple way to pin these together so they form a coherent narrative and I need a common sharing platform. We don’t really have to see the speaker to understand the message but we needs the slides and the audio to play in tandem with the slides changing at the correct points. Some of the files are quite large: slides decks can be over 100MB and right now the audio file I have is 139MB (slideshare has size limits that don’t accomodate this).

I’m writing because I feel the messages are important, and need to be available to a wider audience. This is often our culture, our heritage, our technology, our scientific knowledge and our shared understanding. These presentations need to be available not just on principled open access grounds, but it is imperative that other scientists hear these messages as well, amplifying scientific communication.

At a bar the other night a friend and I came up with the idea of S-SPAN: a C-SPAN for science. Talks and conferences could be filmed and shared widely on an internet platform. Of course these platforms exist and some even target scientific talks but the content also needs to be marshalled and directed onto the website. Some of the best stuff I’ve even seen has floated into the ether.

So, I make an open call for these two tasks: a simple tool to pin together slides and audio (and sides and video), and an effort to collate video from scientific conference talks and film them if it doesn’t exist, all onto a common distribution platform. S-SPAN could start as raw and underproduced as C-SPAN, but I am sure it would develop from there.

I’m looking at you, YouTube.