Science and Storytelling

This talk is about my recently completed science comic: Tales from the Chronobiology Lab. Produced in collaboration with the NFF Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR) at the University of Copenhagen. Developed and produced by Danish illustrator Sofie Louise Dam, myself, and scientists from CBMR; the comic is an experiment in communicating the science of circadian rhythms with the public. The story follows Amy, a chronobiologist, as she tells us more about the body clock, what it is, why it matters, and how it is studied in the laboratory.
Adventure through time, see the history of science to the present day lab, to understand more about the questions which drive chronobiologists. In this talk, I will describe my experience of collaborating with scientists to translate chronobiology beyond pure science communication, and into storytelling.

What processes do creative writers engage in as they produce and revise their work? Writers talk about this in different ways. Sometimes they seem to suggest fairly careful, explicit reasoning. Sometimes they describe it as more spontaneous and intuitive. The writer George Saunders says that writing is ‘more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ***' than simply having intentions and carrying them out.
Here we explore how ideas from pragmatics, the processes involved in communication, can help us to understand what writers do. We suggest that even our most careful and explicit reasoning involves spontaneous and intuitive processes.