Video Podcast: Taylor Johnson joins Wipster to talk video, collaboration, and science education at the Society for Neuroscience

Ted Schera:
Hey, Ted here from Wipster, and I'm meeting with Taylor Johnson with the Society for Neuroscience. Taylor, thanks for taking the time with me today. Can you start just telling us a little bit about Society for Neuroscience and your role there?

For sure. So Society for Neuroscience is an association that is committed to promoting the research and advocacy and understanding of neuroscience and understanding of the brain and the nervous system. And we're headquartered in Washington dc. We have many components including advocacy, membership services. We are a member driven community. We have an in-house journal and a lot of different types of just services for the international neuroscience community. Myself, I lead the multimedia team, which is essentially the in-house team at Society for Neuroscience. That produces various forms of multimedia, including video, animation, webinar, web recordings, podcasts, to serve the variety of audiences that the society focuses on, which as I said before, can include members, but there's also a public outreach advocacy. So we have a lot of different audiences we work with. And in the multimedia we produce, there's a lot of different stakeholders, but it's all centralized on our team now.

Can you tell me a little bit about your stakeholders? Just who they are, what they're interested in?

 Well, it's great because I think what's so interesting about this job besides being a part of what is a very worthy cause and a very important cause, of course, brain science, brain health, everything like that. There's also just a lot of different facets because you of course have the scientific research facet. So you have a lot of members, and of course, just people out there who are interested in the detailed science, not just general science, but they are interested in current research that's going on. So for example, our in-house journal, the Journal of Neuroscience, as well as EUR and History of Neuroscience, they focus on research, very in depth research. So there's an audience that just wants to know what's the latest that's happening, right?

But then there's of course an audience that in the more sort of traditional science communication and science outreach is the science curious public. And so they're looking at wanting to know more about neuroscience and brain research, but maybe from a middle school level of understanding as opposed to heavy research. And then there's also within, we have our sort of member focused side, which is called neuro online, and that is for members of the society, providing them resources such as professional development, whether that's from how to design a poster or how to talk about your poster to how to apply for grants to finding the right lab for you, finding the right career space. So a lot of different audiences. And actually even another one too is neuroscience advocates, which is of course extremely important, very topical. Another reason why our headquarters is in Washington DC because we do engage legislature, we do engage legislators in order to make sure that there is funding, government funding for neuroscience research. And my team produces multimedia for all of those. So we really have to know our stakeholders. We have to know who the audience is. And it's very different with a lot of different levels of engagement, but also knowledge, but also the end game, the point,

Yeah. What's the goal of this thing you're making and knowing how to achieve that goal. 

Taylor :
Exactly.

What are some of the challenges that you face with not just meeting that goal with those external stakeholders, but even just working and collaborating within your own team? What are some of the roadblocks?

So in terms of, obviously I come from a background in science communication, but also video editing, video production, so the creative side too. And of course when you have stakeholders, you're looking for this balance of creating high quality material that's also engaging, but also gets the point across to the audience slash the stakeholder. So sometimes it can be a challenge, but it's really about negotiating to find the right balance. But sometimes you need to know when the creative side should be pushed, especially for, say, public outreach or something like that. That's kind of like an opportunity for more creative engagement to get the curious public interested, versus if you're looking at researchers, they really just want to get to the science as soon as possible. So maybe ease up on the creative, maybe give them something that's a little bit engaging. But for the most part, they just want the science right there. And so the challenge is trying to do the best we can for the given audience, and that changes so much.

Right. Yeah. I would imagine especially spanning that gamut between your research professionals and your middle school level science interest, having to satisfy both audiences is a challenge there.

Yes.

And when you're working on whether it's a video project or a podcast or anything, what do you use to measure its success? What metric do you say this was successful or this was not?

That's a really good question. So I, I guess it all comes back to the audience, right? Because sometimes you might have an audience of one, or let's say an audience of five people. There's sort of a great scenario where it's like, well, the audience is actually these five people that maybe have the money for the funding or whatever, that that's who you're targeting. So in that case, it's like five. If you reach those, correct, five people and you move them or interest them or engage them, that's success. Other times, I will say, especially maybe in some of the more public outreach, you are looking for numbers, looking for hits, vanity metrics, we might say. But at the same time, I think if we've sort of engaged a critical mass of the audience, I would say that success, I would say, if we aren't getting feedback from our members or they aren't as much aware of what we're doing, that's probably what I would say is something that isn't very successful. But yeah, it's funny because pure numbers aren't necessarily the indicator. It's really if we are getting feedback from the right audience and that it's cutting through.

Makes sense to me. And I would assume that with a donor, it's pretty direct that you have that line to them, and the feedback would be pretty direct. But do you ever have a chance to get feedback from a broader audience as well?

Yeah, so that's a great question. So our team, exactly. We really are, because we're the in-house production team a lot beyond the production of the multimedia, some of the liaising and liaison with certain stakeholders, we're usually working with other members from different departments, and they might have the direct beat on to that given audience. But we're usually a part of the conversation, at least during the production point. And especially honestly, when we use Wipster, that's probably where we can engage with stakeholders, whether it's external stakeholders, internal stakeholders, both. It really actually, probably mostly would happen on Wipster where the comments come in. And that, I would say, has really made that job very convenient because everyone can be a part of literally a conversation on creating this material without getting lost in email threads, if that makes sense. So yeah, even though officially our team might be a little bit more behind the scenes, it's kind of during that review process, especially on Wipster, where the curtains pulled back a bit on us, and we can almost directly talk to the stakeholders, or at least have a bit more of a beat on their feelings.

Great.

Or their feedback. Yeah.

Yeah. And then just one last question. This is kind of diverting course here, but just because talking about it lately, and I'm interested to hear your thoughts, do you see either, whether it's generative AI or whether it's more just a refinement process, do you see AI playing any role in your team's workflow in the future?

I definitely see a future for certain aspects of AI in the work that our team does. I would say probably less a creative side, but I would say where we've kind of started doing this and where it's been most helpful is obviously the advancements in auto captioning and auto transcripts. That is huge because there is so much material that our work covers, especially if we're looking at podcasts, especially scientific podcasts, we have a whole range of podcasters. One is more like a mentorship one, so that's a little bit more conversational. And then we have another one that is talking about current hot research, basically that is very detailed. So the ability to at least get a pass of a transcript captioning or something like that is immensely beneficial. I will also say to what is helpful is using AI to get out sound bites or something like that. Because we do so many webinars, we do so many podcasts, a lot of different types of interviews, sometimes self recorded given to us. Sometimes it's web recording, sometimes we are actually filming with cameras in a studio setup, but it can traverse all types of those audiences. So the ability to, in a pinch, get some nice sort of soundbites from that, that can be used on social media and everything like that, that saves an enormous amount of time, especially when we're looking at recordings that on average are probably 45 minutes,

And there can be up to 10 of those a month at least. So that's I think, where we see the real benefits of ai. However, when it comes to the creative choices and our ability to, when we're working more on, say, animation or infographics, that we like to keep the human side once it all. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, that makes sense. It's funny, quickly it's been advancing and how good some of it has gotten lately, but also there are still those little cracks that you see in anything that doesn't have that human touch, at least on the generative side.

Yes. Yeah, that's the thing, because what I'm talking about, these have been things that have been a part of our programs and softwares for years, and they've just gotten better and better. I feel like the explosion of the generative AI has, I don't know if it's caught most people off, off by surprise, but it's certainly shocked them. I would say it's sort of like, oh my gosh. But the sort of technical AI that are more tools that are saving us time, but not sacrificing the vision that I think is the best part. Let's be honest, if a noise reduction filter, especially with all the audio work we're doing, if something like that continues to improve, that's great because it means we're spending less time EQing something on a small scale, whereas we have a bit more faith in the AI passes that are just making things quick.

However, that when it comes to our actual podcasts and the full flagship project, we're still editing that. We're not going to let artificial intelligence decide what the episode's going to be like. We might, like I said before, get them to pick out some snippets because we might not have time to go through hours if the social media team is like, we need something in five minutes. So it's a bit of give or take. But I will say the ultimate creative direction is something I think we very much want to keep ours, very much want to keep human. And also, I still think you can tell, fortunately, I know that's getting into Turing test stuff or Blade Runner esque, but there's still ways to kind of tell that It's like, yeah, this isn't quite human. It's either too clean or there's something that's just throwing you off.

Yeah, it's that uncanny valley that exists,

Right? Yeah. It's absolutely a variation of the uncanny valley. Awesome.

Well, Taylor, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it, and I think that was really insightful.

Yeah, happy to be a part of it. And yeah, again, Wipster has been a wonderful tool and it's also, as we've been talking about ai, it actually has been, especially in this post Covid time, just wonderful. It actually does bring people together on projects. Even if we're not physically there, we're all able to kind of comment and work towards creating a product that hits that right balance for the right audience.

Well, thank you so much, Taylor. I.