Lab livestreaming leaves lasting impression

Despite the fact that I wasn’t the only one in the lab, my work area was still quite empty, and well, creepy. I’d been experimenting with streaming at home as a method of showing some online acquaintances what this ‘crystallography’ stuff I spend so much time doing is, so I decided to make the lab feel less empty by livestreaming my lab work.

I set my laptop on a clean chair, arranged so it could see me working at the balance, posted a link to Twitter’s #realtimechem hashtag and a few other places, then set about measuring out the reagents for a series of lanthanide reactions on camera.

I was surprised by the result. Based on the people I see using the #realtimechem hashtag, I was expecting to have a few other bored grad students and other assorted chemists drop in and say hello in the associated chat room. What I had not expected was for my stream to get posted to Reddit’s r/chemistry forum and for a bunch of high school students to show up.

The streaming service I used gives me some statistics, telling me that I had approximately 100 people watching the stream over the course of the day, and a further 140 or so people watched some of the stream on replay either that day or the next, with visitors from the United States, the Czech Republic, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, and possibly others.

During the four hours I was streaming there was a constantly rotating list of names in the associated chat, and while I couldn’t touch the keyboard with my gloves on, my girlfriend stepped in and moderated the chatroom for me from home.

It was interesting seeing the types of questions high school students and other members of the public asked while watching someone do basic lab work: labelling vials and measuring reagents. It was also a chance to show people the side of science that isn’t talked about at pick-your-major nights or in the movies; the boring, monotonous work is necessary to gather the data science needs to advance.

While far from glamorous, I feel seeing a scientist at work humanizes science to the public. I got to brighten up a repetitive and dreary afternoon, chat with new people about some of my favourite topics, and introduce my audience to the day-to-day work of science.