Public Engagement Tool Research Articles

Summarizing Netizens’ Sentiments Towards the 1st Indonesian Presidential Debate using Lexicon Sentiment Analysis

Twitter is one of the popular social media platforms in Indonesia. This platform has been used as a media communication and public engagement tool for many purposes, especially in political and governance domains. During the process of 2019 Indonesian Presidential Election, many people use Twitter to express their opinion/sentiment towards the election process. In this paper, we investigate the nature of people’s opinion towards the Indonesian Presidential Election after the 1st debate. The goal of this study is to perform exploratory sentiment based analysis of Twitter data, and that was gathered after the 1st debate. We used lexicon sentiment analysis to calculate the sentiment of political tweets collected after the 1st debate. The identification of positive and negative opinion was automatically conducted using the available dictionary. Our result shows that sentiment of the netizen towards the 1st Presidential debate was mostly negative. In addition to this result, a predictive model was generated using CART and logistic regression to predict the netizens’ sentiment. This experiment shows that the accuracy of the prediction model reaches 90%. Therefore, our study suggests that Twitter data can be used to analyse citizens’ sentiment toward the Indonesian Presidential Debate and can generate a model to predict citizens’ future sentiment toward the next debate.

An emerging form of public engagement with science: Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions on Reddit r/science.

Originally, online public engagement with science tended to be one directional—from experts to the general population via news media. Such an arrangement allowed for little to no direct interaction between the public and scientists. However, the emergence of social media has opened the door to meaningful engagement between scientists and the general public. The current study examines scientists’ perspectives on the interactions between laypeople and scientists by asking questions and sharing information on social media platforms, specifically, through Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions on Reddit’s “Science” subreddit (r/science). By analyzing the content of six different r/science AMAs and surveying scientists who participated as r/science AMA hosts, our research attempts to gain a richer understanding of direct communication between scientists and lay audiences online. We had three main questions: (1) who are the participant scientists hosting r/science AMAs, (2) what are their experiences like as hosts, and (3) what type of discussions do they have on this platform? Survey results suggested that these scientists recognize the promising interactive nature of Reddit and are interested in continuing to use this platform as a tool for public engagement. Survey respondents generally had positive experiences as AMA hosts, but further research is needed to examine negative experiences. Overall, this study has significant implications for how scientists can engage public audiences online and more effectively communicate scientific findings to the general populace.

Innovative Education and Engagement Tools for Rheumatology and Immunology Public Engagement with Augmented Reality.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) affects around 1% of the population, which places a heavy burden on society and has severe consequences for the individuals affected. The early diagnosis and implementation of disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs significantly increase the chance of achieving long-term sustained remission. Therefore, raising awareness of RA amongst the general public is important in order to decrease the time of diagnosis of the disease. Augmented reality (AR) can be tremendously valuable in a teaching and learning context, as the coexistence of real and virtual objects aids learners in understanding abstract ideas and complicated spatial relationships. It has also been suggested that it raises motivation in users through interactivity and novelty. In this chapter we explore the use AR in public engagement, and detail the design, development and evaluation of a blended learning experience utilising AR. A set of informative printed posters was produced, enhanced by an accompanying interactive AR application. The main user testing was conducted with 27 participants at a science outreach event at the Glasgow Science Centre. Findings report mean positive attitudes regarding all aspects of the study, highlighting the potential of AR for public engagement with topics such as RA.

Educational programs as an interactive tool for public engagement by public archives repositories in South Africa

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article was to investigate whether public archives in South Africa’s educational programs serve as an interactive tool for public engagement. The study adopted a quantitative research approach involving all 10 public archival institutions in South Africa. Data was collected using survey questionnaires, analysis of the legislation on archives, and the national Department of Arts and Culture (DAC) and relevant provincial departments’ annual reports from the 2012–13 to 2014–15 financial years according to the relevant themes of the study. In South Africa, public archival institutions fall under and report to the DAC. The purpose of data triangulation was to collect as much, and as diverse, data as possible to help generate the best possible insight. The study revealed that the public archives’ educational activities were not effectively designed and implemented to bring potential users to archives. The study recommends that public archives engage with educators and curriculum developers to support the South African Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). This will enable archivists and public archival institutions to identify and incorporate developmental and topically relevant archival material into CAPS for use by educators and learners in a classroom environment.

Patient and public engagement in research and health system decision making: A systematic review of evaluation tools.

BackgroundPatient and public engagement is growing, but evaluative efforts remain limited. Reviews looking at evaluation tools for patient engagement in individual decision making do exist, but no similar articles in research and health systems have been published.ObjectiveSystematically review and appraise evaluation tools for patient and public engagement in research and health system decision making.MethodsWe searched literature published between January 1980 and February 2016. Electronic databases (Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CINAHL and PsycINFO) were consulted, as well as grey literature obtained through Google, subject‐matter experts, social media and engagement organization websites. Two independent reviewers appraised the evaluation tools based on 4 assessment criteria: scientific rigour, patient and public perspective, comprehensiveness and usability.ResultsIn total, 10 663 unique references were identified, 27 were included. Most of these tools were developed in the last decade and were designed to support improvement of engagement activities. Only 11% of tools were explicitly based on a literature review, and just 7% were tested for reliability. Patients and members of the public were involved in designing 56% of the tools, mainly in the piloting stage, and 18.5% of tools were designed to report evaluation results to patients and the public.ConclusionA growing number of evaluation tools are available to support patient and public engagement in research and health system decision making. However, the scientific rigour with which such evaluation tools are developed could be improved, as well as the level of patient and public engagement in their design and reporting.

Who Reads Science Fiction and Fantasy, and How Do They Feel About Science? Preliminary Findings From an Online Survey

This article describes findings from an online survey Science Fiction & Fantasy: Your Experiences, launched in November 2015 and closed 1 year later, which received 909 unique responses. The survey identified characteristics of readers of science fiction, their knowledge and experiences of works, authors, and subgenres. It examined their attitudes to science and science fiction and their judgment of the similarity between real and fictional scientists. Contrary to declining reading habits, the science fiction and fantasy audience read consistently high volumes of books, as well as watching genre TV and film. We discovered that reading science fiction and fantasy may have a role in sustained, and cognitively beneficial, adoption of reading by young people and is complementary to other forms of consumption, rather than competitive. Science fiction was also found to be an important influence on the perception and acceptance of science by the public. Implications of this are that science fiction and fantasy are now a normal part of life for a wide range of people, and science fiction has a positive influence on popular interpretation, acceptance, and support of scientific endeavors. These results support earlier work that suggests science fiction is a valuable research tool for public engagement with science.

The rise of BioBlitz: Evaluating a popular event format for public engagement and wildlife recording in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT“BioBlitz” events are popular local wildlife surveys often engaging public audiences in a race against time to find, identify, and record as many different species as possible in a given timeframe.This study provides baseline assessment of the value of BioBlitz as a tool for public engagement and collection of environmental data in the United Kingdom. We conclude that, collectively, BioBlitz events provide participants with an enjoyable learning experience, engage new audiences in biodiversity issues, and inspire positive action.Challenges of verification and consolidation of BioBlitz records make the value of these data to the wider environmental sector difficult to quantify.

Social networks as a tool for science communication and public engagement: focus on Twitter.

Social networks have been used to teach and engage people about the importance of science. The integration of social networks in the daily routines of faculties and scientists is strongly recommended to increase their personal brand, improve their skills, enhance their visibility, share and communicate science to society, promote scientific culture, and even as a tool for teaching and learning. Here we review the use of Twitter in science and comment on our previous experience of using this social network as a platform for a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) in Spain and Latin America. We propose to extend this strategy to a pan-European Microbiology MOOC in the near future.

Feedr and animalnexus.ca: A paired R package and user-friendly Web application for transforming and visualizing animal movement data from static stations.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) provides a simple and inexpensive approach for examining the movements of tagged animals, which can provide information on species behavior and ecology, such as habitat/resource use and social interactions. In addition, tracking animal movements is appealing to naturalists, citizen scientists, and the general public and thus represents a tool for public engagement in science and science education. Although a useful tool, the large amount of data collected using RFID may quickly become overwhelming. Here, we present an R package (feedr) we have developed for loading, transforming, and visualizing time‐stamped, georeferenced data, such as RFID data collected from static logger stations. Using our package, data can be transformed from raw RFID data to visits, presence (regular detections by a logger over time), movements between loggers, displacements, and activity patterns. In addition, we provide several conversion functions to allow users to format data for use in functions from other complementary R packages. Data can also be visualized through static or interactive maps or as animations over time. To increase accessibility, data can be transformed and visualized either through R directly, or through the companion site: http://animalnexus.ca, an online, user‐friendly, R‐based Shiny Web application. This system can be used by professional and citizen scientists alike to view and study animal movements. We have designed this package to be flexible and to be able to handle data collected from other stationary sources (e.g., hair traps, static very high frequency (VHF) telemetry loggers, observations of marked individuals in colonies or staging sites), and we hope this framework will become a meeting point for science, education, and community awareness of the movements of animals. We aim to inspire citizen engagement while simultaneously enabling robust scientific analysis.

Visual Storyboarding tools for public engagement and social justice

Visual Storyboarding tools for public engagement and social justice

From personal to public: field books, museums, and the opening of the archives

Large museums contain diverse collections, often including specimens, artefacts, archives, and publications. At the intersection of many of these are natural history field books, which are regularly treated as both museum objects and archival items, as scientific data and historical narratives, and as personal artefacts, organizational records and tools for public engagement. Field books contain key contextual information about collection items and are evidence for significant data in collection management systems, while also containing social and cultural observations, historical weather observations, jokes and recipes. In recent years, a number of museums have established projects intended to document, digitize, and transcribe their collections of field books, seeking to make these important research records available to the public online. This article examines the nature of field books, highlighting the ways in which they function as boundary objects between professions and disciplines. A summary of key field book projects is used to explore how institutions seek to pluralize these records, followed by an examination of the value of these records to science, history, museology and other disciplines. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these projects for museums, archivists, and archival collections more broadly.

Science, Twitter and election campaigns: tracking #auspol in the Australian federal elections

Social media is increasingly being used by science communicators, journalists and government agencies to engage in discourse with a range of publics. Despite a growing body of literature on Twitter use, the communication of science via Twitter is comparatively under explored. This paper examines the prominence of scientific issues in political debate occurring on Twitter during the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal election campaigns. Hashtracking of the umbrella political hashtag auspol was used to capture tweets during the two campaign periods. The 2013 campaign was particularly relevant as a major issue for both parties was climate change mitigation, a controversial and partisan issue. Therefore, climate change discussion on Twitter during the 2013 election was used as a focal case study in this research. Subsamples of the 2013 data were used to identify public sentiment and major contributors to the online conversation, specifically seeking to see if scientific, governmental, media or ‘public' sources were the more dominant instigators. We compare the prominence of issues on Twitter to mainstream media polls over the two campaign periods and argue that the potential of Twitter as an effective public engagement tool for science, and for politicised scientific issues in particular, is not being realised.

Incorporating mental health into health impact assessment in the United States: a systematic review

Purpose Health impact assessment (HIA) is a systematic research and public engagement tool used to elevate health and equity in public policies. However, HIA practitioners often overlook potential mental health impacts. The purpose of this paper is to review the degree to which mental health is included in HIAs in the USA. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a systematic review of 156 HIAs that were completed between 1993 and 2013 for their inclusion of mental health. HIAs were subdivided to assess if mental health conditions or their determinants were measured, and if predictions or mitigation strategies were made in the scoping, assessment, or recommendations phases. Findings Overall, 73.1 percent of HIAs included mental health. Of the HIAs that included mental health (n=114), 85.1 percent also included the determinants of mental health and 67.6 percent included mental health outcomes. 37.7 percent of HIAs measured baseline mental health conditions and 64.0 percent predicted changes in mental health as the result of implementing the proposed policy, plan, or program. Among the HIAs that made predictions about mental health, 79.5 percent included recommendations for potential changes in mental health, while only 46.6 percent had measured mental health at baseline. Research limitations/implications Although many HIAs included mental health in some capacity, this paper quantifies that mental health is not included in a robust way in HIAs in the USA. This presents a difficulty for efforts to address the growing issues of mental health and mental health inequities in the populations. Originality/value This paper represents the first academic endeavor to systematically assess the state of the field of HIA for its inclusion of mental health.

Sequential simulation (SqS) of clinical pathways: a tool for public and patient engagement in point-of-care diagnostics

ObjectivesPublic and patient engagement (PPE) is fundamental to healthcare research. To facilitate effective engagement in novel point-of-care tests (POCTs), the test and downstream consequences of the result need to be...

Game Based Cyber Security Training: are Serious Games suitable for cyber security training?

Security research and training is attracting a lot of investment and interest from governments and the private sector. Most efforts have focused on physical security, while cyber security or digital security has been given less importance. With recent high-profile attacks it has become clear that training in cyber security is needed. Serious Games have the capability to be effective tools for public engagement and behavioural change and role play games, are already used by security professionals. Thus cyber security seems especially well-suited to Serious Games. This paper investigates whether games can be effective cyber security training tools. The study is conducted by means of a structured literature review supplemented with a general web search.While there are early positive indications there is not yet enough evidence to draw any definite conclusions. There is a clear gap in target audience with almost all products and studies targeting the general public and very little attention given to IT professionals and managers. The products and studies also mostly work over a short period, while it is known that short-term interventions are not particularly effective at affecting behavioural change.

Influencing Urban Mobility Through Public Engagement Process: Traditional and Digital Methods for Public Participation in Urban Design

The purpose of this article is to show how we can influence urban mobility through public participation. On the one hand, this article focuses on exploring opinions of the public and professionals’ opinions regarding public participation (willingness to be involved, when and where they want to be involved etc.), and, on the other hand, it also deals with exploring traditional and digital methods and tools for public engagement (urban experiments, urban interventions, Virtual World Terf). More specifically, it focuses on exploring the role of users in urban mobility. Quantitative and qualitative research methods have been used for the purposes of this article (case study, survey and semi-structured interviews). The final part of this article offers guidelines for future development of methods and tools for public engagement, especially concerning the Terf Virtual World.

Internet Video Sharing as a Public Engagement Tool on Renewable Energy

Internet technology has made creating and sharing media content, including in audio and video format, easier and more accessible for public. Renewable energy technology has been utilizing internet video sharing technology for two main purposes. First, it is a promotional tool to disseminate information about the technology; second, internet becomes a tool for contemporary society to engage on renewable energy issues. This paper shows the importance beside the potential of internet video sharing to improve public engagement on renewable energy. The study shows how an internet video sharing, particularly featured by YouTube, may be an effective tool for renewable energy technology to engage with public.

The role of conservation partnerships between scientists and nonprofit agencies in freshwater science and management

The role of conservation partnerships between scientists and nonprofit agencies in freshwater science and management

Understanding attitudes towards the use of animals in research using an online public engagement tool

Using an online public engagement experiment, we probed the views of 617 participants on the use of pigs as research animals (to reduce agricultural pollution or to improve organ transplant success in humans) with and without genetic modification and using different numbers of pigs. In both scenarios and across demographics, level of opposition increased when the research required the use of GM corn or GM pigs. Animal numbers had little effect. A total of 1037 comments were analyzed to understand decisions. Participants were most concerned about the impact of the research on animal welfare. Genetic modification was viewed as an intervention in nature and there was worry about unpredictable consequences. Both opponents and supporters sought assurances that concerns were addressed. Governing bodies for animal research should make efforts to document and mitigate consequences of GM and other procedures, and increase efforts to maintain a dialogue with the public around acceptability of these procedures.

The current state of citizen science as a tool for ecological research and public engagement

Approaches to citizen science – an indispensable means of combining ecological research with environmental education and natural history observation – range from community‐based monitoring to the use of the internet to “crowd‐source” various scientific tasks, from data collection to discovery. With new tools and mechanisms for engaging learners, citizen science pushes the envelope of what ecologists can achieve, both in expanding the potential for spatial ecology research and in supplementing existing, but localized, research programs. The primary impacts of citizen science are seen in biological studies of global climate change, including analyses of phenology, landscape ecology, and macro‐ecology, as well as in sub‐disciplines focused on species (rare and invasive), disease, populations, communities, and ecosystems. Citizen science and the resulting ecological data can be viewed as a public good that is generated through increasingly collaborative tools and resources, while supporting public participation in science and Earth stewardship.