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“Ironically, a lot of these tools are about not having people sit in front of a screen all the time,” says computational biologist Mark Gerstein at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “I don’t think that helps people think.” Instead, he says, researchers spawn creativity when talking and scribbling down ideas together, be that on a phone, tablet, laptop or in person.
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Like Brown, Gerstein prizes face-to-face conversation and
collaboration in his group, which works on large-scale analyses of biosensor and wearable data. As such, it attracts “hard-core computer geeks”, he says, so he’s thought deeply about how to entice them out from behind their screens.
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“Computers now let us dictate, write and draw with our hands in much more relaxing and natural ways,” he says. Gerstein sets his phone on a nearby table, then uses Google Recorder to capture discussions, and the app (which is available only on Pixel phones) transcribes it in real time. The transcript is coupled to the audio and can be searched by keyword. Another dictation app, known as Rev, offers
quick-turnaround manual transcriptions for $1.25 per minute of recording. Gerstein also uses the app Grammarly to “take the yucky voice-to-text transcript and fix the language up quickly”.
Gerstein describes his group’s use of these tools together as a “stack” to go from conversation to a rough draft of a manuscript in just a few clicks, he says. He estimates that the tools cut the time they spent on that task in half.
Gerstein has also investigated tools that digitally recreate the experience of scientists gathered around a whiteboard. Zoom’s Annotate feature is one option, which he has deployed during remote meetings both before and during the pandemic. Another is Rocketbook, a reusable physical notebook ($16–45) that has whiteboard-like paper paired with a mobile-phone app that converts photos of notebook scribbles, cartoons and diagrams into digital files. Both Rocketbook and Google Lens use optical character recognition to interpret handwriting and translate it into searchable text. “I’ve saved thousands of sheets of paper this way,” says Gerstein.
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