{"id":2665,"date":"2019-11-07T15:08:35","date_gmt":"2019-11-07T20:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/?p=2665"},"modified":"2019-11-12T15:05:39","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T20:05:39","slug":"painting-visual-abstract-medium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/index.php\/2019\/11\/painting-visual-abstract-medium\/","title":{"rendered":"Painting in a Visual (Abstract) Medium"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Justin<\/a>

Justin Davis, MBBS, is a Chief Resident at Barwon Health in Geelong, Australia.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m not creative. I wish I were. I listen to music (with my particular choices being classical and music from video games) and wonder to myself how people are able to come up with such amazing pieces of art and media. I\u2019ve tried it myself. I used to play piano back in med school, before the constant house moving and having to pay to get the piano moved separately and tuned each time made it non-financially viable (my old piano is elsewhere now, and my current time is taken up by way too many non-creative things to realistically pick it back up). I tried to create music, tried to rack my brains to come up with something. But my brains just won\u2019t rack, not in that way. In a similar fashion, I don\u2019t learn in a visual manner. I\u2019ve seen people draw beautiful flow charts and mind maps while they were studying, but mine are simply walls of text with nary a colour, paragraph, or picture in there. It\u2019s just how I work.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to today\u2019s topic and why I find it rather fascinating that use of the visual abstract is increasing in social media to create engagement as well as to disseminate scientific information. If you haven\u2019t heard of visual abstracts, it might be because they are a relatively new thing \u2014 only a mere 3 years old. They were first coined by a clever chap by the name of Andrew Ibrahim who showed that use of these constructs on social media platforms increased engagement with the post compared with a simple text-based design, despite them carrying essentially the same information. (Regular readers of my blog posts may have noticed there\u2019s a social media theme here once again. In my earlier discussion of the Nephrology Social Media Collective (NSMC)<\/a> and the fantastic work they do promoting free online medical education through social media, I failed to mention that the NSMC has strongly taken up use of visual abstracts and are actively teaching others how to make them.)<\/p>\n

When you stop to think about it, why wouldn\u2019t visual presentations be better? How many of us have stood there, bored in a line, waiting for coffee or public transport or whatever it might be, and scrolling through Instagram or Reddit? These platforms are visual places. Things catch your eye, and you stop to read more about them. It\u2019s so much easier to blithely scroll past several posts that are just blocks of text than it is to pass something that is colourful, creative, and (especially in our case) conveying important results of the study in an easily digestible fashion. A social media platform can be used for some amazing online education, but it is the same platform that can be shallow and cause your personal presentation to be easily missed if it\u2019s simply conveyed in text. And we wouldn\u2019t want that, now would we?<\/p>\n

This way of disseminating information is becoming increasingly common. You may have noticed The New England Journal of Medicine<\/em>, for example, doing just that. A quick perusal of NEJM\u2019s twitter feed reveals several visual abstracts pertaining to some recent articles, such as the article about transcatheter aortic valve replacement in low-risk patients, to pick one example. The same information as the text. A better style of presenting it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

An example of a visual abstract I’ve done for an ongoing manuscript (hence the removal of certain pieces of text. You understand).<\/p><\/div>\n

You might wonder why I talked about creativity at the beginning of my blog post. One reason \u2014 I like to start my post with something relatable (although I\u2019m sure many of our constant readers are much more artistically talented than I am), but another reason was to convey that I don\u2019t think you have to be creatively minded to design and produce an engaging visual abstract. Don\u2019t get me wrong \u2014 it doesn’t hurt! I\u2019m sure the ones I have created have terrible colour choices that clash and a layout that definitely could be improved on with some creative flair. But despite my total lack of creativity, I can still produce an abstract which is probably kinda ok. Because, like reading and playing music, they follow a structure (which again, I\u2019m sure others can and have improved on, but my type A personality brain just doesn\u2019t stretch in that fashion) to convey their information, which can be replicated. And while there is a learning curve as to what is\/isn\u2019t important and how to convey information in a minimalist manner, once you\u00a0get the basic components of it down, it\u2019s definitely something many people can pick up and use to produce amazing work. You can even make them in PowerPoint, that staple of presentations everywhere.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m fortunate once again that during my NSMC internship, I was mentored in the use of visual abstracts, and completed a project in which we produced them for various publications and honed our skills. I\u2019ve even started to incorporate them into my manuscript submissions to journals as I feel that such things only serve to strengthen a paper (please see one slightly redacted version here \u2014 it’s a work in progress). I certainly find them a lot easier to read and engage with on Twitter or other social media platforms. And perhaps you do, too? (It\u2019s slightly ironic, isn\u2019t it, that I\u2019ve written a wall of text in order to champion a simple minimalist visual format? Ah, well).<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can see everything. You can unsee nothing.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"NEJM<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not creative. I wish I were. I listen to music (with my particular choices being classical and music from video games) and wonder to myself how people are able to come up with such amazing pieces of art and media. I\u2019ve tried it myself. I used to play piano back in med school, before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,19],"class_list":["post-2665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","tag-art-of-medicine","tag-communication"],"yoast_head":"\nPainting in a Visual (Abstract) Medium - Insights on Residency Training<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dr. Davis discusses how visual abstracts of complex ideas are changing the way we learn.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/index.php\/2019\/11\/painting-visual-abstract-medium\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Painting in a Visual (Abstract) Medium\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dr. Davis discusses how visual abstracts of complex ideas are changing the way we learn.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/index.php\/2019\/11\/painting-visual-abstract-medium\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Insights on Residency Training\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-11-07T20:08:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-11-12T20:05:39+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/07\/AU000_jdavis.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Justin Davis, MBBS\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Justin Davis, MBBS\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/index.php\/2019\/11\/painting-visual-abstract-medium\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/index.php\/2019\/11\/painting-visual-abstract-medium\/\",\"name\":\"Painting in a Visual (Abstract) Medium - Insights on Residency Training\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2019-11-07T20:08:35+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-11-12T20:05:39+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/#\/schema\/person\/f009a6f8df8a0f4d9cfb1110486780c9\"},\"description\":\"Dr. Davis discusses how visual abstracts of complex ideas are changing the way we learn.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/index.php\/2019\/11\/painting-visual-abstract-medium\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/index.php\/2019\/11\/painting-visual-abstract-medium\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/index.php\/2019\/11\/painting-visual-abstract-medium\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Painting in a Visual (Abstract) Medium\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/\",\"name\":\"Insights on Residency Training\",\"description\":\"Observation of residents across diverse medical specialties\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/general-medicine\/#\/schema\/person\/f009a6f8df8a0f4d9cfb1110486780c9\",\"name\":\"Justin Davis, MBBS\",\"description\":\"Justin was born and raised in Geelong, a city in the southern (less-warm) part of Australia. 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