Popular Science Communication Research Articles

Specifics of Objections in Polemics about the History of Scientific Discoveries

The relevance of the work is based on the growing interest in popular science journalism. At the same time, there is a lack of research into the area of scientific history popularization of. This work is devoted to the study of hypermedia text dedicated to the invention of radio. The empirical base consists of publications on the dzen.ru platform, as well as comments from platform users. The category of objection creates polemic. The intentional-stylistic characteristics of objection in the fields of implication and involvement are determined. The following models of objection have been identified: for implication — an objection as a tool for searching for truth, as a means of confirming semantic position; for involvement — manifestation of a semantic position, frustration, refusal to argue. A system of linguistic means of objection marks the selected models. The most active and potentially effective means are particles and conjunctions. These means indicate the instrumental nature of the objection. In the field of implication, lexemes with the semantics of doubt and opposition were found. Emotionally expressive vocabulary was found in the field of involvement. If the vocabulary of an objection contains an ideological component, then the type of objection can be distinguished: frustration. It goes beyond traditional popular science communication. On the contrary, the use of ameliorative assessments allows us to speak about the desire of the participants to harmonize communication. However, the effectiveness of such aspiration in the hypermedia text under study turns out to be extremely low. The study will be useful to media theorists. It will expand the subject field of research in popular science journalism. The work will also be useful to practitioners who talk about conflict-prone scientific topics in the media space.

Interdisciplinary Analysis of Science Communication on Social Media during the COVID-19 Crisis

In times of crisis, science communication needs to be accessible and convincing. In order to understand whether these two criteria apply to concrete science communication formats, it is not enough to merely study the communication product. Instead, the recipient’s perspective also needs to be taken into account. What do recipients value in popular science communication formats concerning COVID-19? What do they criticize? What elements in the formats do they pay attention to? These questions can be answered by reception studies, for example, by analyzing the reactions and comments of social media users. This is particularly relevant since scientific information was increasingly disseminated over social media channels during the COVID-19 crisis. This interdisciplinary study, therefore, focuses both on science communication strategies in media formats and the related comments on social media. First, we selected science communication channels on YouTube and performed a qualitative multi-modal analysis. Second, the comments responding to science communication content online were analyzed by identifying Twitter users who are doctors, researchers, science communicators and those who represent research institutes and then, subsequently, performing topic modeling on the textual data. The main goal was to find topics that directly related to science communication strategies. The qualitative video analysis revealed, for example, a range of strategies for accessible communication and maintaining transparency about scientific insecurities. The quantitative Twitter analysis showed that few tweets commented on aspects of the communication strategies. These were mainly positive while the sentiment in the overall collection was less positive. We downloaded and processed replies for 20 months, starting at the beginning of the pandemic, which resulted in a collection of approximately one million tweets from the German science communication market.

Термины когнитивной лингвистики в научной коммуникации

The article was prepared during the work on the dictionary of cognitive terms. It highlights some results of the project work: aspects of the cognitive terms description in a new educational dictionary, methodological and instrumental approaches taken during the dictionary project. The research approach is based on the methodology of cognitive semantics.
 The dictionary may become a textbook for those who study cognitive linguistics and a reference book for researchers in the field of cognitive science. The main goal of this lexicographic source is to describe a term both as a minimal component of scientific knowledge and as a unit of the lexical level of language. Modeling of the knowledge format is carried out with the help of corpus and software instruments, including cognitive (associative) experiment. The novelty of the dictionary is that this thesaurus-encyclopedic sourse presents terms in their system nature. The term use is analyzed on the material of modern scientific communication and illustrated with examples from scientific discourse. The corpus of examples from scientific communication and the subcorpus of popular science communication examples are compiled by the project participants according to technologies and rules of corpus linguistics. The data collected as a result of the scientific communication analysis is verified by comparing it with the results of an associative experiment and with the data of popular science communication subcorpus. This explains the fundamental novelty of the dictionary and its applicability for clarifying the issues of scientific communication in cognitive aspect.

Evaluation of science communication on social media

Worldwide social media platforms are used for communication purposes apart from entertainment. One of the most widely used social media sites in the world is Facebook. With 2.85 billion monthly active users as of 2021, Facebook is the most popular social media network on the planet. This platform has now become an important avenue for raising awareness. The way society utilizes these platforms is a matter of study. There is a lot of research on how politicians and celebrities throughout the world used it for communication. On the other side, there is a scarcity of studies on the use of social media for science communication. With the growing importance of social media as a source of knowledge, it's become a matter of whether these online platforms can present science news in a way that even non-scientists can grasp. The present study is fruitful in gaining knowledge that how science communicators used Facebook pages as a tool to reach a massive following. The researcher selects the most popular science communication facebook pages from the Google web browser. Later, through purposive sampling researcher select six popular pages. The study is based on the method of content analysis.

Strategies for scientific popularization in the digital media environment

The proposed article is devoted to the analysis of the characteristic features of popular science communication in the digital media environment. The current models of scientific communication are analyzed, the key trends of modern society are identified — mediatization and digitalization, which set the specifics of scientific popularization today. The mediatized forms of science communication testify to the unfolding process of mediatization of science — the growing involvement of media communications in the implementation of scientific activities. The mediatization of science also has its own specifics, which, in particular, is manifested in the growing convergence of the spheres of science and politics. Such politicization of science sets the features of mediatization, which covers the field of scientific activity very unevenly. Those areas of scientific knowledge that are politically in demand are subjected to mediatization to a greater extent. The politicization of science, which is unfolding along with mediatization, makes it possible to identify a similarity between political and scientific communications. The digital media environment of science communications is largely built in a similar way with the space of political communications. It is characterized by polarization and differentiation of the audience. The acceptance of scientific communication is largely determined not by the quality of scientific content, but by the cognitive and value attitudes of users. The principal feature of digital media architecture is its dual nature, which allows it to be equally used both for the dissemination of scientific information and its refutation and approval of false information. Under these conditions, strategies for effective science communication may include measures aimed at increasing the media literacy of the audience, the flexible use of media framing of scientific knowledge, aimed at expanding the audience of science communication and overcoming prejudices regarding new scientific achievements.

Analysis of the visual communication path of popular science content based on WeChat official account

For the Novel Coronavirus, which started in Wuhan, Hubei province, in early 2020, it has spread rapidly around the world at a super speed. Wechat, an instant messaging app, "forcibly" loaded the latest news of the daily epidemic in its official account function and released the epidemic dynamics in real time, so that the epidemic information it pushed every day was read by a huge number of one billion people and became the main platform for the audience to obtain information during the spread of the epidemic. The visualized elements such as charts, videos, H5 interface and MG animation presented in the epidemic information of "Top and Push" are in line with the production process of data news in the new media environment and the audience's personalized and socialized content consumption needs. At the same time, it also puts forward a new idea for the content production of local government popular science communication public account in the "post-epidemic" era.

Animals of Instagram: taxonomic bias in science communication online

There are currently no published studies examining taxonomic bias on Instagram. To address this knowledge gap, this study examined seven popular science communication accounts for a year and found that the majority of posts featured vertebrates. However, non-insect invertebrates attracted the highest measures of positive audience engagement (likes, views and comments), suggesting a mismatch between the preferences of science-seeking audiences online and the information being offered to them. These results challenge traditional notions of charismatic megafauna and could improve conservation outcomes of traditionally under-represented species like invertebrates.

From Classic to COVID-Related: Some Communication Highlights of the 2021 AAAS Meeting

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) chose “Understanding Dynamic Ecosystems” as the theme of its 2021 annual meeting, held February 8–11. This theme gained new meaning with the pandemic’s advent, the resultant conversion of the meeting to an online event, and the inclusion of meeting content on coronavirus-related concerns. As in past years, though, the meeting included panels, workshops, and other sessions on topical and other aspects of the communication of science. The following are some highlights that might interest science editors and those in related realms. Institution, Journal, Reporter: Strategically Mitigating COVID-19 Misinformation By Christina B Sumners This session brought together a university public information officer, a journal press officer, and a freelance journalist to discuss the use of preprints in popular science communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sarah McQuate, a public information officer at the University of Washington, discussed how she decides whether to promote her faculty’s research at the preprint stage. Before the pandemic, the university’s news office had published only 1 press release on a preprint. Between March 2020 and February 2021, it published 7. McQuate listed the criteria each preprint had to meet: It had a trusted author with whom she had worked before. It had a timely message or findings necessary to share now, not after lengthy peer review. The research methods had to be standard in their field. The research findings had to be expected, or at least unsurprising. The preprint had to have […]

Scientific Communication 2.0: Features of Presenting Scientific Content on German Popular Science YouTube Channels

The article is devoted to the feature’s analysis of the presentation of scientific content on the German-language popular science YouTube channels maiLab and Terra X Lesch & Co . It has been established that, in general, the popular science YouTube channels maiLab and Terra X Lesch & Co. are oriented towards the strategies and forms of presentation of scientific content adopted in the field of science: types of thematic progression characteristic of theoretical discourse (descriptive, explicative and argumentative) are used, as well as scheme of an argumentative statement. It is shown that, in contrast to the objectification mechanism of information exchange, which determines the presentation of scientific content within the scientific community, a personalization mechanism operates in the network of popular science communication, which is determined by the peculiarities of the interaction of the participants in network communication and the polymodality of the Internet as a medium. The authors consider in detail the techniques of intimization, emotionalization, dialogization, metaphorization, visualization and implementation of a narrative pattern. It is noted that these techniques allow bloggers to maintain the attention and interest of their channel subscribers, as well as simplify the presentation of scientific content, making it easier to understand. It is proved that the use of the strategy of personalization of information exchange, which is characteristic of mass media discourse, leads to a consistent violation of the prohibitions existing in theoretical discourse on any explicit manifestation of the subject of speech in a statement. The analysis of the material allows the authors to conclude about the active interaction of different discourses — theoretical and mass media — in their peripheral zones and describe the mechanisms of this interaction.

Spanish newsreel NO-DO (1943-1975). The diffusion of science as a legitimizing instrument of the Franco regime: polio and other immuno-preventable diseases

The official NO-DO newsreels were screened in Spain on a weekly basis from 1943 to 1981. These official news and documentary programmes were compulsory in cinemas from the moment they were first produced until the end of the Francoist dictatorship (1975). NO-DO held an information monopoly and was used as the regime's propaganda tool to indoctrinate the population, building stories tailored to the regime's interests and masking social realities. In this study, we examined newsreels on medical subjects relating to diseases preventable by vaccination. A majority of reports centred on poliomyelitis, and two differentiated periods could be defined, coinciding with the development of Franco regime's foreign policy. Further, from the gender perspective, we analyse the female stereotypes in the battle against vaccine preventable diseases Therefore, the news coverage of polio is of special relevance. In conclusion, this topic offers a good opportunity to reflect on the political role of popular science and science communication in a specific historical context.

Parasites and Post‐Truth Climate

This article argues that the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an exemplary climate change skeptical organization, attains persuasive power by striking up a parasitic relation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and associated discourse genres. Drawing upon theories of citationality and genre, along with conceptual accounts of the parasite (Serres 2013 [1980]; Nakassis 2013; Kockelman 2010, 2017), I construe parasitism as an asymmetric structure of relation that recurs across various sites and scales. As parasitic actors, corporate climate change skeptics like the NIPCC imitate and incorporate host institutions and discourses in order to mine scientific authority while undermining scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change. At the same time, this relation between organizations and their respective discourse genres generates informatic noise or static (French parasite) within established channels of popular science communication. In the case examined here, the NIPCC interrupts an economy of expertise within which the UN‐sponsored IPCC holds a privileged position. An uncanny resemblance between the two organizations, between parasite and host, erodes the latter's claims to authority, just as a counterfeit coin erodes public trust in the currency it mimics.

The Microbiome as TED Knows It: Popular Science Communication and the Neoliberal Subject

Background Although criticized for a variety of reasons, TED platforms and conventions have been engaged, often uncritically, as tools for popular science communication. This article critically examines four TED Talks that engage the relatively recent biomedical concept of the human microbiome. Analysis Neoliberal values underpin both the TED universe and the marketization of science. TED conventions produce a discursive regularity that brings together neoliberal subjectivity and bioeconomic imperatives of contemporary scientific research. This neoliberalization is supported by uncritically championing citizen science and the so-called democratization of science alongside crowdsourcing and crowdfunding appeals. Conclusions and implications Uncritically embracing TED Talks can implicate science communication in the reproduction of problematic ideological positions that favour economic interests over the social good or even individual health.

Christian Baron Peter Nicolai Halvorsen Christine CorneaScience Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition

397 BOOKS IN REVIEW The book would have benefitted from a stronger editorial focus on sf, fantasy, or monstrosity, and the essays might then have had more space to develop discussions more fully. It will nonetheless be a useful book to have in libraries, and the above-mentioned essays could easily be used in courses on the global fantastic.—Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, University of Oslo The Good, the Bad, and the Scary. Christian Baron, Peter Nicolai Halvorsen, and Christine Cornea, eds. Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017. vi+246 pp. $119.99 hc. This useful collection of papers is distilled from a conference in Denmark that involved scholars and scientists from a range of disciplines, plus input from local sf fandom. The contributors present varied perspectives, including some that are not narrowly academic. In their introductory chapter, Christian Baron, Peter Nicolai Halvorsen, and Christine Cornea outline the book’s concern with the ethical implications of future technologies and whatever social practices they might bring. In that context, as the editors observe, science fiction can provide a laboratory for thought experiments: Indeed, one of the aims of this book is to demonstrate what can be achieved in approaching science fiction as a kind of imaginary laboratory for experimentation , where visions of human (or even post-human) life under various scientific, technological or natural conditions that differ from our own situation can be thought through and commented upon. (2) The remaining chapters are grouped thematically into three parts, though the allocation of particular chapters sometimes appears a touch arbitrary. Part I relates to science, technology, and sf, Part II to questions of identity and what the editors call “the post-human condition,” and Part III to sf’s engagement with political and ethical questions. Part I is focused as much on science and technology themselves as on sf narratives. Christian Baron’s chapter considers the scientific credibility of Alien (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979) and its successors, with brief discussions of other scientifically informed works such as the film Quest for Fire (dir. JeanJacques Annaud, 1981). Baron argues that sf narratives (and their creators) often take sides—sometimes deliberately, sometimes by inadvertence—in live scientific controversies. In a thoughtful contribution to ongoing debates about an anticipated technological singularity, Mikkel Willum Johansen expresses what seems to be well-reasoned skepticism. On his assessment, there is no likelihood that research on artificial intelligence will cause a mind-boggling technological liftoff. Johansen explains the limited ability of computers to do creative work in mathematics that requires sophisticated high-order concepts. He argues that the increase in cognitive advantage brought about by computers has happened far more slowly than the steady doubling and redoubling of raw processing power described by Moore’s Law. Rather than computers developing the field of mathematics through their autonomous problem-solving power, they have become increasingly effective as tools to aid human intelligence. Johansen then ponders the ethical implications. We should, he concludes, abandon our hopes 398 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) for (or fears of) a technological singularity, however exactly we define the concept, and instead concentrate attention on real, imminent problems caused by AI applications—which we need to identify, examine, and debate. Peter Westermann’s chapter, “A Greenhouse on Mars,” analyzes the prospects and, importantly, the ethics of colonizing the red planet, including whether we should disturb even bacterial life if we find it there. Westermann makes perceptive comments about Kim Stanley Robinson’s MARS TRILOGY (Red Mars [1992], Green Mars [1993], and Blue Mars [1996]). He is mainly concerned, however, with the actual science of interplanetary travel and colonization. Also in Part I, Gitte Meyer’s chapter bears the longiloquent but rather splendid title “Fascinating! Popular Science Communication and Literary Science Fiction: The Shared Features of Awe and Fascination and Their Significance to Ideas of Science Fictions as Vehicles for Critical Debate About Scientific Enterprises and Their Ethical Implications.” The “science fictions” that Meyer has in mind are not novels, stories, or films; they are sensationalist reports and speculations relating to actual or postulated scientific innovations. These, Meyer argues, merit a level of scrutiny and skepticism that they seldom receive. Part II of...

Terms in Popular Science Communication: The Case of TV Documentaries

Science documentaries on television aim to provide easy and entertaining access to research findings. To do so, producers need to know how to explain complex content for non-expert audiences in a comprehensible way. At the same time, they have to decide what aspects of a subject might be relevant for viewers, or how the subject matter could be rendered more interesting by employing strategies such as personalisation or emotionalisation. One specific decision concerns the use of terms. Both existing research and journalistic handbooks suggest that terms should be or are, in fact, avoided in popular science contexts. However, there is only little empirical research on the topic. This contribution seeks to test several pre-existing hypotheses on terms in documentaries for adults and show how often terms are used and whether/how they are explained when they appear. Examining terms in four English and four German science documentaries, the analysis points out which communicative resources are used to facilitate the comprehension of terms, and where an explanation seems to focus primarily on entertainment rather than ease of comprehension. The results challenge some of the previous views on terms in popular science communication and reveal that documentaries display highly idiosyncratic strategies when it comes to the use of terms.

Use of videos in traditional and online classes as instruction and assessment accessibility tools

Learning comes in many forms and the need for new instruction and assessment tools is imminent in a world that is highly visual and interactive. The use of videos as instructional media in online, hybrid, and flipped classrooms in higher education is not new. Such videos can improve comprehension and accessibility of the material for many students (e.g. non-majors, alternative media learners, and non-traditional students), and the use of instructor-produced videos is a powerful tool to connect faculty and students. For five years a dual mode instructor (online and traditional) has used self-produced short videos (5–8 minute) to provide content for a freshmen general biology yearlong course sequence. These videos are fully ADA-compliant being captioned, American Sign Language interpreted, and color adjusted. While these videos have been well received by most students in both learning environments, they convey information only in one direction, faculty to student. To “flip communication” in both the online and traditional classes, the students are now producing their own videos on assigned topics to demonstrate and apply their knowledge surrounding course content. These videos range from 10–12 minute productions in an online lecture course three times per term targeting three different audiences (6th grade students, a professional non-science audience, and a policy-maker), to 30-seconds of science in a 250-student traditional course focused on conveying quick information to anyone, to a virtual poster session by an online lab course focused on their independent research project. Further, in the traditional large lecture course for non-biology majors, videos are part of a three-part cumulative project that replaces an historic multiple-choice final exam (project = 2-page white paper overview of topic, 3-minute video focused on science communication, and an 18Prime;x24Prime; infographic focused on popular science communication). In this session, instruction and assessment video examples will be shown, assessment tools will be shared, and measurements of learning outcomes will be presented. Changing the direction of information flow and implementing opportunities for demonstration of understanding beyond exams are improvements to assessment and provide the learners with a non-traditional skill set in a science classroom. Example of an instructional video used in a general biology online course. American Sign Language interpretation by Christine Spencer. Video available through YouTube channel RITgenbio. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

MOVING BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES OF ENGINEERING COMMUNICATION: TEACHING MEDIA SAVVINESS TO ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Abstract – Engineering communication is most frequently thought of and taught as technical communication for academic and industrial purposes, and considered best taught in deeply integrated and discipline specific contexts. While productive, this focus neglects an increasingly important aspect of the communication many engineers will need to do in their careers – communication with and to the public.
 This paper describes an elective course for undergraduate engineers designed to fill this gap through a media literacy approach, developing a theoretical foundation for popular science communication and applying it to various high profile case studies. This approach has been effective in developing a positive learning environment within a small seminar classroom and engaging students on the topic of how their work is communicated to non-expert audiences.

To make a long story short: A rubric for assessing graduate students’ academic and popular science writing skills

Abstract Graduate students are future scientists, and as such, being able to communicate science is imperative for their integration into the scientific community. This is primarily achieved through scientific papers, mostly published in English; however, interactions outside of academia are also beneficial for future scientists. Therefore, academic writing courses are prevalent and popular science communication courses are on the rise. Nevertheless, no rubrics exist for assessing students' writing in academic and science communication courses. This article describes the development and testing of a rubric for assessing advanced L2 STEM graduate students’ writing in academic (abstract) and popular science writing (press release). The rubric was developed as part of a longstanding academic writing course, but was modified to include a module on science communication with the lay public. Analysis of student needs and the literature inspired a pre-pilot that assessed 16 descriptors on 60 student works. A subsequent, adjusted pilot version on 30 students resulted in adaptations to fit each genre and course goals. In the third round, a modified, final rubric tested on 177 graduate students was created that can be used for both assessment and comparison of the genres. This rubric can assess scientific genres at the graduate level and can be adapted for other genres and levels.

Visual communication, popular science journals and the rhetoric of evidence

While the use of scientific visualisations (such as brain scans) in popular science communication has been extensively studied, we argue for the importance of popular images (as demonstrated in various talks at #POPSCI2015), including pictures of everyday scenes of social life or references to pictures widely circulating in popular cultural contexts. We suggest that these images can be characterised in terms of a rhetorical theory of argumentation as working towards the production of evidentiality on the one hand, and as aiming to link science to familiar visualities on the other; our example is da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man".

Public communication from research institutes: is it science communication or public relations?

There is growing competition among publicly funded scientific institutes and universities to attract staff, students, funding and research partners. As a result, there has been increased emphasis on science communication activities in research institutes over the past decade. But are institutes communicating science simply for the sake of improving the institute’s image? In this set of commentaries we explore the relationship between science communication and public relations (PR) activities, in an attempt to clarify what research institutes are actually doing. The overall opinion of the authors is that science communication activities are almost always a form of PR. The press release is still the most popular science communication and PR tool. There is however disagreement over the usefulness of the press release and whether or not gaining public attention is actually good for science.

A call for increased public engagement in geology higher education

Rising fees are forcing higher education institutions to think critically about what students are offered for their money. In geology courses there appears to be a lack of guidance for alternative careers in academia or industry, and even a lack of education about wider social, political and economic impacts of the discipline. It is possible to detect a lack of high-impact geoscience among the popular science communication communities, such as online multidisciplinary blogging platforms. In order to enhance the student experience and the impact of geoscience on the wider public, universities need to look inwards at what they can do to help inspire and educate students to have broader career horizons and bigger public impacts through their research.