4 days ago
Darwin uni's inaugural TEDx event welcomes regional expertise to global stage
Storytelling is key to creating an engaging TED talk — but breaking down a subject you understand so deeply, to share that knowledge with the world, comes with a whole lot of nerves.
Ten experts from various fields are gearing up to speak on the global TED stage for the first time, and the ABC has been given an insight into how it all works.
This Saturday's sold-out TEDx Charles Darwin University (CDU) show will hear from wildlife gurus, tech experts, environmental academics, social thought-leaders and more.
PhD candidate and crocodile expert Brandon Sideleau said preparing for the big event was "very much a team effort" between the university and its academics.
"I sent my script to the team and they said 'that's not going to work' because I was using some [technical] terminology," he said.
Mr Sideleau ditched the jargon in favour of storytelling, using real-life examples and photos to help the audience understand why crocodile attacks happen and how interactions with the predator can be limited without culling.
It's a timely reminder since the reptile has already been hunted to extinction in six countries and remains "critically endangered" in others.
"I'm nervous for sure, being on a stage of that scale and impact, but I'm also looking forward to getting the information out there," he said.
Mr Sideleau said it was important he pointed out "just how rare saltwater crocodile attacks are" locally.
Despite the fact at least a quarter of the global saltwater crocodile population lives in the Top End, Mr Sideleau's work exploring "the true extent" of fatal attacks found most of them happened overseas.
He discovered, across 14 countries, there were almost 300 crocodile attacks each year — about 150 of them proving fatal.
"I was noticing that that there were a lot of incidents in Indonesia especially," he said.
The NT researcher found "massive differences" in attack numbers due to the need for people in developing nations to bathe, fish and collect water around crocodile habitat.
"Here in Australia, almost all victims are attacked while engaging in leisure activities … compared to middle-income countries in general, 30 per cent of people are attacked while engaging in activities related to sanitation," he said.
Mr Sideleau said work needed to happen to help developing nations access plumbing, water pumps and wells.
CDU research fellow Sharna Motlap, who is presenting this weekend, has spoken at conferences in the past but never on the TED stage.
She's also feeling nervous ahead of the big show, but has a similar story-led strategy to Mr Sideleau that she hopes will engage the audience.
Ms Motlap said academic papers were "just love letters to other researchers", so she'll use storytelling to unpack complex ideas in a way the average viewer can understand.
"There's this great analogy in this book [which] discusses the concept of 'the best story wins,'" she said.
Ms Motlap's work, which looks to safeguard traditional dance by creating digital replicas, will be framed in an entertaining way — so the audience can expect to see video snippets from her lab and references to the famous Macarena.
She said it was important to help the crowd understand the research because "it's not about the technology, it's about what it can do".
In the same way Mr Sideleau's TED talk hopes to influence a better future, Ms Motlap wants to explain the benefits her project can have on future generations.
She's studying the same kind of technology that was used to produce the movie Avatar but, rather than creating for entertainment's sake, her work is protecting traditional culture and knowledge.
While director James Cameron's team used motion capture to make Na'vi movements reflect the actors playing the fictional blue characters, Ms Motlap has used the technology to digitise Indigenous dance.
"We place reflective markers on the dancer's body and then we use the system of cameras to track the reflective markers," she said.
It's a significant step forward from standard video recordings, with computer models able to calculate the angles of a dancer's joints and how force is applied to parts of their body.
Beyond immortalising the movements, her research protects the Indigenous culture and knowledge associated with those dances from being lost over time.
She described the territory as "a unique part of the world" and said there was plenty of excitement about the chance to share local research with a global audience.
