Big Earth Data: the Film, the Experience, and some Thoughts

Abstract:

Scientists have to get out of the ivory tower and tell society, which ultimately finances them, about their work, their results, and implications, be they good or bad. This is commonly accepted ethics. But how would you "tell society" at large what you are doing? Scientific work typically is difficult to confer to lay people, and finding suitable simplifications and paraphrasings requires considerable effort. Estimating societal implications is dangerous as swimming with sharks, some of which are your own colleagues. Media tend to be not always interested - unless results are particularly spectacular, well, in a press sense. Again, sharks are luring. All this makes informing the public a tedious, time-consuming task which tends to receive not much appreciation in tenure negotiations where indexed publications are the first and foremost measure.

As part of the EU funded EarthServer initiative we tried it. Having promised a "video about the project" we found it boring to do another 10 minute repetition from the grant contract and started aiming at a full TV documentary explaining "Big Earth Data" to the interested citizens. It took more than one year to convince a TV producing company and TV stations that this is not another feature about the beauty of nature or catastrophies, but about human insight from computer-supported sifting through all those observations and simulations available. After they got the gist they were fully on board and supported financially with a substantial amount. The final 53 minutes "Big Earth Data" movie was broadcast in February 2015 in German and French (English version available from ). Several smaller spin-off features originated around it, such as an uptake of the theme (and material) in a popular German science TV series.

Of course, this is but one contribution and cannot be made a continuous activity. In the talk we want to present and discuss the "making of" from a scientist's perspective, highlighting the ups and downs in the process, in the hope that it contributes to our profession's quest for materializing its scientific outreach promise.