Big ideas in small packages

A video project demonstrates how academic research can be communicated in an engaging format that puts across complex ideas in a nutshell. If you're immersed in your subject, it can be really hard to know how to distil your ideas into concepts that the public can grasp without much prior knowledge. Dr Suzanne Pilaar Birch A project to make academic research more readily accessible to the public has led to the creation of a collection of short videos that feature archaeological themes.In just four minutes, and using an immediately engaging format, each video encapsulates an aspect of the original work undertaken by a Cambridge PhD student or postdoctoral researcher. Three videos have so far been produced and a fourth will appear shortly. The published videos (all on YouTube) are: Where Did Humans Go During the Last Ice Age', which features the research of Dr V Pia Spry-Marques; What Do Bones Say About Belief? (Rosalind Wallduck); and What Diet Can Tell Us About Social Relationships (Lauren Cadwallader). The forthcoming video (based on the work of Dr Isla Fay) will look at the digitisation of images at the Whipple Museum. The aim of the Digital Research Video Project is to help early career researchers communicate their work simply and effectively.