A shoal of Deeplings will be attending this week’s Science Online conference in North Carolina. If you’ll be there, come say hi to Craig, Al, Kim, Holly, and me. (Sadly, Rick and Kevin can’t make it.) We’ll be joined by many equally lusty ocean compadres. Come say hi! You can find us at our sessions (see below) or by following the sounds of clinking glasses and/or shanty singing.

If you won’t be at the conference, you can still participate! You can join a watch party if there’s one in your locale, follow the conference on Twitter at #scio13, and follow our shenanigans at #DSNsuite.

Sessions that the Deeplings are moderating:

Session 1B & 2A : Why should scientists ‘do’ outreach? – Miriam Goldstein, Matt Shipman & Karen James

Session 1D: Impressions matter: Embracing art & design in research and science communication – Holly Bik and Liz Neeley

Session 8B: What happens when people start taking your online ramblings seriously – Miriam Goldstein and Holly Bik

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This week 4,000 ocean scientists are descending upon the very landlocked Salt Lake City for the 2012 Ocean Sciences Meeting. This meeting, co-sponsored by The Oceanography Society, the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography and the American Geophysical Union, is one of the biggest in ocean science and is only held every other year.

Dr. Bik and I will be there getting our science on, looking good (well, Holly always looks good, but I’ll actually be in conference-wear and not dirty jeans and ship-themed t-shirts!) and representing Deep Sea News. We’re running a social media workshop on Monday evening, with Andrew Thaler of Southern Fried Science. (RickMac, alas, is off saving coral reefs and couldn’t make it.) While there is a glorious proliferation of science outreach workshops at Ocean Sciences Meeting, I suspect that ours will be the most hilarious and borderline inappropriate. Here’s the description:

Social media platforms have made it possible to access and disseminate information quickly, while bypassing gatekeepers common to traditional media. Ease of accessibility and the pervasiveness of social media provides a powerful tool for reaching many people directly. Experts can interact with the general public, leaving it to the audience to judge the value of their work. These tools for education, outreach, and activism have drawbacks. Without the quality control provided by editors and fact checkers, misinformation can be rampant and credibility compromised. Complicated messages can be difficult to deliver, target audiences can be challenging to segment, and there are few metrics for success. The objective of this session is for participants to share and discuss their experiences using social media for public outreach. We encourage participants to present specific examples, challenges, and lessons learned, and to discuss positive or negative interactions with online media. We also encourage broader, conceptual discussions of the role of social media in scientific and conservation discourse. This workshop will be a moderated but informal discussion, and we encourage participation from all attendees.

For more information visit: http://science-social-media.wikispaces.com/

After the workshop we’ll all head out for some cavorting for the first Ocean Sciences Meeting tweet-up. If you ever wanted to drink with the infamous ocean bloggers, now’s your chance.

If you’re interested in our research:

• WEDNESDAY: Dr. Bik will be presenting a poster in the 174 Ecosystem Science In The Gulf Of Mexico session.
• WEDNESDAY: Andrew Thaler of Southern Fried Science is presenting a poster co-authored with our own Kevin Zelnio in the 162 Advances In Phylogeography And Connectivity Of Marine Metazoans.
• THURSDAY: I’ll be presenting a poster in the 186 Biological Oceanography General Session.

Come say hi!

The post Deep Sea News at Ocean Sciences Meeting 2012 first appeared on Deep Sea News.