Popular Science Writer Research Articles

Ludic stylistics: Narrating a thought experiment (A study of "The Science of Discworld" series)

This article addresses the phenomenon of ludic stylistics, viewed through the lens of interdiscursivity. The paper defines interdiscursivity as a narrative strategy that involves the blending of discourses of different types within a single literary text, thereby foregrounding its genre-bound nature. In the "The Science of Discworld" series, co-authored by Terry Pratchett along with the popular science writers Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, interdiscursivity is evident through the fusion of fictional and non-fictional discourses. The interplay of these discourses in the "The Science of Discworld" series facilitates the creation of its ludic stylistics. The paper regards ludic stylistics as an artistic phenomenon that emerges in literary text at both the micro- and macro-levels due to unconventional combinations of linguistic units of any rank. These elements, whether independently or in tandem with other literary devices, have a tendency to engender singular or multiple ludic effects. Ludic microstylistics in the "The Science of Discworld" series is primarily manifested through the innovative combinations of various figures of speech, such as metaphors, personifications, antonomasia, analogies, neologisms, puns, irony, and more. Ludic macrostylistics is represented by narrative games, predominantly of metafictional and intertextual varieties. Overall, ludic stylistics constitutes the ontology of the "The Science of Discworld" series, while shedding light on the innovative transformations of genre-bound literary forms.

Above the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Otherworldly Perspective and a New Racial Order

Abstract Though W. E. B. Du Bois was critical of traditional religion, he understood the power of religious orientations to the world, including religious attitudes of faith and hope. Although many scholars have commented on Du Bois’s secular faith, few have understood the secular, scientific sources that he used to develop it. In this article, we examine how Du Bois built a post-Christian otherworldly perspective in part by drawing from popular science writers who examined the possibilities, both real and imagined, of higher-dimensional spaces and planes of existence. We analyze Du Bois’s scholarship, visionary fiction, prayers, and poems to better understand how he repurposed higher-dimensional concepts to envision a post-racial God, reimagine the social order, and develop key ideas that informed his life’s work, including the concept of the “color line.”

Effects of Popular Science Writing Instruction on General Education Student Attitudes Towards Science: A Case Study in Astronomy

For many students, introductory college science courses are often the only opportunity in their formal higher education to be exposed to science, shaping their view of the subject, their scientific literacy, and their attitudes towards their own ability in STEM. While science writing instruction has been demonstrated to impact attitudes and outlooks of STEM majors in their coursework, this instructional strategy has yet to be explored for non-majors. In this work, we investigate student attitudes towards STEM before and after taking a writing-intensive introductory astronomy course. We find that students cite writing about science as beneficial to their learning, deepening their understanding of science topics and their perspective on science as a field and finding writing to be a ``bridge'' between STEM content and their focus on humanities in their majors. Students also report increased perceptions of their own ability and confidence in engaging with STEM across multiple metrics, leaving the course more prepared to be informed, engaged, and science literate citizens.

Scientists say: Patterns of attribution in popular and professional science writing

The research article (RA) has held unparalleled importance in several fields of applied linguistics but is only one genre among many that researchers produce and readers consume. This study compares RAs with a related genre called ‘popular science.’ More linguistic-oriented research of popular science genres is needed to account for the growing body of contemporary popular science discourse. This study collected 400 matching professional and popular science articles published online to compare their use of three lexicogrammatical patterns that often function to perform attribution. Results showed that the popular science texts were denser with attribution, often named human authors within instances of attribution, and utilized reporting verbs with a neutral or positive evaluative stance. This study argues that, while the function of attribution in RAs is to build ethos and build an argument through identifying a gap in previous literature, attribution in science news articles functions to portray study authors as the main actors in research stories and portray popular science writers as objective, though at times supportive, reporters of recent news, highlighting the journalistic function of this variety of popular science.

“A Delicate Equilibrium of the Most Complex Sort”

This article examines the intertidal ecological research of the commercial lab owner and popular science writer Edward F. Ricketts, best known as the prototype for John Steinbeck’s character “Doc” in the novel Cannery Row (1945). Ricketts’s friendship with Steinbeck and unconventional philosophical style have regrettably overshadowed his scientific work, particularly his novel faunal zonation surveys of the North American Pacific littoral in the 1930s and 1940s. These surveys resulted in a landmark handbook, Between Pacific Tides (1939), designed for novices and specialists alike. Ricketts’s work demonstrates how the place of ecological investigation (Billick and Price)—here Monterey Bay’s pounding surf, storm-tossed debris, eclectic bohemianism, and the collaborative energies at Hopkins Marine Station—“imprinted” West Coast animal ecology. At first, Ricketts adopted the physiological methods and conceptions of ecological holism he had learned at the University of Chicago under mentor Warder C. Allee in the early 1920s. Allee had conducted his investigations of intertidal organisms in the relatively placid bays and estuaries at the Woods Hole research center on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Allee envisioned animal aggregations as higher-order societies guided by “unconscious cooperation” and evolving toward a climax state. Yet Ricketts found that physiochemical factors, such as temperature and salinity, could not explain the distribution of organisms amid the Pacific’s far more precarious rough-and-tumble surf, nor could they account for fierce competition among organisms. Rejecting Allee’s cooperative metaphors, Ricketts came to see community structure as an unintended result of tidepool invertebrates’ Darwinian struggle to occupy resource niches—a “set of sieves” that transferred nourishment from one part of the aggregation to the next, binding it together in interlocking food webs. Through dialogue with Steinbeck about the implications of modern physics during their Sea of Cortez voyage (1940), Ricketts developed a “unified field hypothesis” to conceptualize the dynamic interwovenness created by transfers of metabolic energy. Yet Steinbeck ultimately held fast to a super-organismic understanding of ecological holism—a hierarchical relationship between constituents and the whole that underlays the novelist’s idea of the human “phalanx” in Grapes of Wrath and other works. The article offers new insights about the ecological origins of Steinbeck and Ricketts’s disputes over “non-teleological” reasoning and the pair’s divergent understandings of nature, society, and progressive politics.

Antonia Dickson: The kineto-phonograph and the telephony of the future

ABSTRACT We already know that Antonia Dickson co-wrote The Kinetograph, the Kinetoscope and the Kineto-phonograph (1895) with her inventor brother William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, published as a Raff and Gammon pamphlet and now considered the ‘first’ history of motion pictures. The late Paul Spehr was one of Antonia’s champions, and he suggested what a more careful reading of the prose style of that ‘history’ might reveal about the likely author. Also, a comparison with W.K.L. Dickson’s 1933 version of that history – published 30 years after Antonia’s death and after he had moved to the UK – reveals distinct differences not only in prose style but also in the conceptualization of the invention. Here is a re-introduction to Antonia Dickson relative to her talents (music historian, art historian, pianist, poet, translator, popular science writer) and achievements (including co-authorship of a biography of Thomas Edison), the single-authored ‘Nine Hundred and Fifty Miles by Telephone’, in Cassier’s Magazine (November 1892), written after she witnessed the first successful telephone call between New York and Chicago. Then, in ‘Wonders of the Kinetoscope’ from 1895 she published her own account of how moving pictures worked, significant for its grasp of how the device functioned. From there I offer another angle on the contradictory accounts of invention published in the newly illustrated engineering journals of the late nineteenth century.

Scientism and scientific fundamentalism: what science can learn from mainstream religion

ABSTRACT An increasing number of scientists, philosophers, and popular science writers claim that science is the measure of all. They assert that science can answer all questions, that there are no limits to science, or that only science provides reliable knowledge, either in a particular realm, such as morality, or about any subject matter whatsoever. This view is often referred to as ‘scientism’. But what exactly is scientism? What is to be said in favour of it and against it? This paper suggests, after a careful evaluation of the arguments for and against scientism, that a helpful way to think of scientism is as of a variety of fundamentalism. It turns out that scientism meets nearly all conditions formulated in family resemblance accounts of fundamentalism. Finally, it is suggested that science and scientists can learn much from religion when it comes to how to deal with scientific fundamentalism.

Narratives on the Large Scale: Historical Narrative Explanations in Popular Science Writing

In the recent past, narratives have been hailed as a promising instrument for improving the effectiveness of science communication to nonscientist audiences. Narratives play an important part in how individuals comprehend the world, and persuasive narratives may often be more successful in communicating complex scientific issues to the general public than evidence-based arguments. At the same time, however, narratives have the potential to perpetuate misinformation and inaccuracies about science due to their formal characteristics. Also, as narratives are not subject to the same truth requirements as scientific argumentation, they cannot be easily countered, which can lead to serious misconceptions about important scientific topics. In this article, the role of narratives and narrative explanations in science communication is discussed regarding the genre of popular science. The essay approaches the affordances and limits of narrative in this context with two primary examples representing recent popular-science best-sellers: Elisabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011).

Gender Dimensions in Popular Science Writing in India

Gender Dimensions in Popular Science Writing in India

The dinosaur from 600 BCE! Interpreting the dragon of Babylon, from archaeological excavation into fringe science

In 1918, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, excavator of Babylon, Iraq, observed that the depiction of the fantastical “dragon of Babylon” on the sixth century BCE Ishtar Gate must reference a real animal whose closest relatives would be dinosaurs like the iguanodon. Though ignored within archaeology, Koldewey’s comments were taken up in German-American popular science writer Willy Ley’s “romantic zoology” (1941), then by Bernard Heuvelmans (1955), founding figure in the fringe field of cryptozoology. Their interpretations would ultimately inspire expeditions by the International Society of Cryptozoologists in Central Africa to find the Mokele-Mbembe, a “living dinosaur,” and migrate into Young Earth Creationist and ancient aliens theories. An analysis of Koldewey’s marginal academic observation serves as a means of considering the process of knowledge formation and canonization and the unpredictable life of scholarly ideas.

Embracing Mystery: Radiation Risks and Popular Science Writing in the Early Cold War

Narrative form is crucial to the understanding of science in popular culture. This is particularly true with subjects such as radiation, in which the technical details at hand are often remote from everyday experience-as well as contested or uncertain among experts. This article examines the narrative choices made by three popular texts that publicized radiation risks to the public during the Cold War: John Hersey's Hiroshima, David Bradley's No Place to Hide, and Ralph Lapp's The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon. It contends that each author borrowed from well-established literary genres and that this borrowing was crucial to coherence and effective messaging of the argument. At the same time, placing the arguments in such a familiar form served to blunt some of the radical potential in those same messages.

The Tree Of Life: metaphysics vs. metaphor

The Tree Of Life: metaphysics vs. metaphor

Teaching Note—Popular Science Writing in a Social Work Program: From an Idea to a Student Anthology

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article is to describe how students, as part of their education, published course papers in an anthology. Over a period of 2.5 years, we followed students in an undergraduate social work program. The course, which focused on long-term illnesses and the functional barriers people with disabilities face in society, ended with a graded seminar in which students presented written manuscripts based on the course content. The papers were later compiled into a student anthology. The publishing process involved several participants, including teachers, a book publisher, and a disability organization. This article describes experiences based on the perspectives of the students, the disability organization, the publisher, and the editor. It ends with advice and recommendations for those who want to use this method.

Experimental Identities: Quantum Physics in Popular Science Writing and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Experimental Identities: Quantum Physics in Popular Science Writing and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

A teacher, a scientist, a wife: the complex self of Joséphine Schouteden-Wéry (1879-1954)

In early twentieth-century Belgium, a number of women started careers in teaching and furthered their education at university. This article explores how one of them, Joséphine Schouteden-Wéry – a teacher, a botanist and wife of a successful zoologist – built her public image as a professional “teacher-scientist” by tapping into various pre-existing cultural repertoires for the female popular science writer and for the scientist. I examine how several elements were instrumental in this process, for both the making and the circulation of her public self. Attention is thus directed towards the opportunities provided by the ambiguity of the field as a place of biological research and teaching, the fluidity and uses of the persona of the explorer by scientists and non-scientists alike, and the different impacts of scientific sociability. It is argued that while Schouteden-Wéry strove to construct an independent and consistent public self as a scientist, a teacher and a wife, the different sides of her multifaceted public self occasionally clashed with each other.

Meccano Magazine: boys’ toys and the popularization of science in early twentieth-century Britain

AbstractMeccano Magazine began publishing in 1916 to advertise the popular children's construction set. By the 1920s it had expanded into a substantial, well-illustrated monthly that eventually achieved a circulation of seventy thousand. Under the editorship of the popular-science writer Ellison Hawks it now devoted approximately half of its pages to real-life technology and some natural science. In effect, it became a popular-science magazine aimed at teenage and pre-teen boys. This article explores Hawks's strategy of exploiting interest in model building to encourage interest in science and technology. It surveys the contents of the magazine and shows how it developed over time. It is argued that the material devoted to real-life science and technology was little different to that found in adult popular-science magazines of the period, raising the possibility that Meccano Magazine’s large circulation may explain the comparative lack of success of the adult publications.

Placing Early Photography: The Work of Robert Hunt in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain

The invention of photography in the late 1830s is conventionally framed in terms of simultaneous rival developments by a few well-known figures in England and France. Less attention has been paid to how early photography was shaped by a wider cast of individuals placed in both metropolitan and regional networks of science and applied arts. Drawing in particular on recent studies on networks and the geography of science, this article examines the significant but frequently overlooked contributions made to early photography by the chemist and popular science writer Robert Hunt (1807–87) as a way to open up questions about the spatial networks of early photography. Based in southwest Britain, and from a relatively humble background, Hunt experimented widely with early photographic processes. He used correspondence with key figures of Victorian science, notably Sir John Herschel, to share his knowledge and build a reputation within influential networks of early science and publishing. This article argues that Hunt’s foundational contributions to early photography – which were widely recognised in the half century after his death – need to be better appreciated and understood within the setting of spatial networks of science and applied arts at various scales. These include regional networks, such as those in Cornwall; metropolitan circles in London; national networks, such as the British Association for the Advancement of Science; and national and international networks of publishers and readers. As an examination of Hunt’s work demonstrates, accounts of early photography may profit from paying more attention to the networks and places in which photographers, photographs and writings on photography were located.

A genre-based study of shell-noun use in the N-be-that construction in popular and professional science articles

This article investigates the N-be-that construction in popular and professional science articles with a focus on shell nouns. This examination of shell-noun use in two corpora, one consisting of popular science articles and the other of research articles, reveals the preferred ways of evaluation in these two genres. The study shows that, despite the overall similarity in semantic distribution, there are distinct variations in shell-noun use between the two genres. Popular science writers are more inclined to use this focus construction and tend to be more explicit in making evaluations than are professional science writers. In popular science articles, shell nouns express more epistemic certainty, news-worthiness, and subjectivity, whereas in research articles these nouns express more tentativeness, objectivity, and scientific rationality. This comparative study further expands current understanding of the evaluative functions of shell-noun use and can also help cultivate writers' genre awareness.

Are Clusters Races? A Discussion of the Rhetorical Appropriation of Rosenberg et al.’s “Genetic Structure of Human Populations”

Noah Rosenberg et al.'s 2002 article “Genetic Structure of Human Populations” reported that multivariate genomic analysis of a large cell line panel yielded reproducible groupings (clusters) suggestive of individuals' geographical origins. The paper has been repeatedly cited as evidence that traditional notions of race have a biological basis, a claim its authors do not make. Critics of this misinterpretation have often suggested that it follows from interpreters' personal biases skewing the reception of an objective piece of scientific writing. I contend, however, that the article itself to some degree facilitates this misrepresentation. I analyze in detail several verbal and visual features of the original article that may predispose aspects of its racial interpretation; and, tracing the arguments of one philosopher and one popular science writer, I show how these features are absorbed, transformed into arguments for a biological basis of race, and re-attributed to the original. The essay demonstrates how even slight ambiguities can enable the misappropriation of scientific writing, unintentionally undermining the authors' stated circumspection on the relationship between cluster and race.

Andrew Groover.

Andrew Groover.