I’m UC Davis professor James Carey, co-author of the book Biodemography
that I wrote with my colleague Dr. Deborah Roach, and that appeared in 2020.
I am also producer of the collection of video mini-lectures that I collectively refer to as the
Biodemography Video Guidebook posted on the UC Berkeley Population Sciences website shown here.
My purpose in producing these mini-lectures was to complement the contents of our book
since video provides a medium in which to deliver content in ways that differ from print such as
Content animation
Ease of updating
Digital modularity
and Links to other demography-related video.
An additional goal was to make our book’s contents available worldwide free of charge
any language by closed captioning in English subtitles in up to 300 different languages.
My objective in this short video is to give you an overview of this video guidebook,
the main webpage organizational framework of which is shown here:
The main tabs include
About this project
The book’s Forward by James Vaupel
Then the chapters include Demographic basics
Life tables
Mortality
Reproduction
3 chapters on Population
Human demography
2 chapters on Applied demography
Video links are available with drop-down menus as shown here for Chapter 3 on Mortality.
The last three sections differ from the earlier ones in that Chapter 11 consists of what we refer
to as “biodemography shorts”—a total of 87 one to two minute videos on selected content that did not
fit neatly into any chapter but none-the-less is interesting or important, including the birthday
paradox and the demography of Napoleon’s Grand Army, and the Titanic Disaster.
The appendices cover best practices across a broad
spectrum of professional domains including information design,
typography, color, scientific storytelling and word processing, among other topics
The last section consists of videos repurposed from across the entire collection and grouped
into specialty topics such as human demography, actuarial sciences, and novelty.
Here is an example of video content, in this case a module on the human life table
with picture-in-picture video.
These videos can be viewed without close captioning or
with close captioning in English as shown here
or with subtitling in any number of languages, in this case in French.
Many of the videos contain what is called in YouTube “cards”
which are short callouts such as here with a video titled “one minute mortality models”
produced by a PhD student enrolled in the European Doctoral School of Demography.
All videos end with what YouTube refers to as
“End Sheets” including links to the next video in the biodemography video guidebook series
as well as the YouTube channel link to the entire collection, Biodemography.
The summary metrics for the main chapters are shown here
Total around 12 hours of scripted video
There's 172 modules
The mean duration is around 4.2 minutes
And it ranges from 1 to 15 minutes for the modules.
Here is the distribution in duration of 172 modules
Over half are three minutes or less
and about 15 are 10 minutes and more. I hope you find the collection of videos
and of course our book, as informative and interesting as I did while writing
the book with Dr. Roach and in producing the videos themselves.
Indeed, biodemography is inherently fascinating because
it is an inter-discipline that integrates content from the formal sciences
of mathematics and statistics with content from both the natural and the social sciences.
A good starting point for delving into and learning about biodemography
is the Forward by demographer James Vaupel
I hope you both learn from and enjoy viewing these videos. Thank you for watching.