ABOUT

All scientific research involves attempts to resolve a mystery, overcome an obstacle or solve a problem. This circumstance gives to scientific papers a formidable narrative potential. However, most scientific papers lack basic storytelling mechanisms, reducing in this way their potential audience. The idea of the Scientific Evolutionary Writing (SEW) Workshop comes precisely from acknowledging the intrinsic limitation every scientific paper can suffer. The starting point is the assumption that writing is an evolutionary process. By writing and rewriting, authors create variants (mutations), merge different sections (horizontal transfer), select the preferred version (selection), and, after a certain number of versions (generations), they converge to the final text (fixation). Tracking this complex process is far from being trivial, and no systematic tools focused so far on microscopic monitoring of the process of writing. This workshop aims at filling this gap by exploring storytelling techniques and how they can be used in scientific papers while maintaining the world’s top journals’ scientific rigour. Participants will be guided through an evolutionary process of creation to rewrite and polish their text in a way that significantly increases its quality. A dedicated monitoring tool (WeWrite) will follow the whole process, allowing for deep insight into creativity mechanisms.

SEW COORDINATORS

Vittorio Loreto
Sony CSL Paris, Sapienza University of Rome and CSHV

Vittoria Colizza
INSERM

TEACHERS

Mark Buchanan

Mark Buchanan is a physicist and science writer based in Europe. A former editor with the international science journal Nature and also New Scientist, he is the author of four books and numerous articles exploring the ideas of modern physics. He writes regular columns for Bloomberg Opinion and Nature Physics.

Justin Mullins

Justin Mullins is a consultant editor at New Scientist where he has covered topics ranging from Chernobyl to the emergence of artificial intelligence. He was New Scientist’s San Francisco bureau chief during the first dotcom boom and later its Boston Editor and Technology Editor. He is a former teaching fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

SEW COLLABORATORS

Elisabetta Falivene
Sony CSL Rome

Pietro Gravino
Sony CSL Paris

Ruggiero Lo Sardo
Sapienza Università di Roma

Martina Galletti
Sony CSL Paris

PROGRAM

The workshop will last four full days, on March 1-4, 2021.

We will not disclose details of the program in order not to bias the expected evolutionary

process of the writing.

MATERIALS

Workshop handout

Day 1

Introduction (Vittorio Loreto)

The editing platform (Pietro Gravino)

Writing an initial draft (Mark Buchanan)

Topic sentences: telling a story (Mark Buchanan)

Day 1 session recording

Day 2

Sentences (Justin Mullins)

Sentences exercises

Editing as an evolutionary process (Mark Buchanan)

Abstracts (Justin Mullins)

Abstracts exercises

Some editing guidelines

Explore or exploit (Ruggiero Lo Sardo)

Day 2 session recording

Day 3

Group editing (Mark Buchanan)

Recoding (Justin Mullins)

Recoding exercises

Recoding animation

Complexity (Ruggiero Lo Sardo)

Day 4

Diary of a paper (Mark Buchanan)

The shapes of stories (Kurt Vonnegut)

The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes (Dodds et al)

The billboard paragraph (Mark Buchanan)

Editing recap (Justin Mullins)

Day 4 session recording

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

– 4 full days of workshop
– you are willing to engage actively in the workshop
and are interested in writing a scientific text
– you will use your laptop
– you agree to release the rights for using your whole production
at the workshop to Sony CSL Paris and INSERM for scientific purposes only;
you will keep the intellectual property rights in your creations.
– the entire writing process will be fully monitored to gather relevant
data for the scientific investigation of the underlying evolutionary
dynamics
– participants must come prepared to write an article or paper on a scientific
topic of their choosing. There will be dedicated writing time during the
workshop

LOCATION

Our workshop will be held at using our Big Blue Button platform

PAST EVENTS

Sew Workshop 1′ edition was held
@Institut des Systèmes Complexes Paris, Île-de-France, 113 rue Nationale, 75013, Paris, France
on January 30-31 2019.

Please, visit SEW Workshop Paris 2019 website for more!

Sew Workshop 2′ edition was held
@Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Josefstaedter Strasse 39, 1080, Vienna
on February 19-20 2019.

Please, visit SEW Workshop Vienna 2019 website for more!

Sew Workshop 3′ edition was held
@Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics, Building “Exakte Wissenschaften”, Sidlerstrasse 5, 3012, Bern
on January 14-16 2020.

Please, visit SEW Workshop Bern 2020 website for more!