I’ve put my paper for the ‘Public Engagement With Science and Web 2.0′-session on the Biomedicine on Display-blog, see here. Comments (also detailed) are extremely welcome — it’s very much a draft paper and need a lot of re-writing to be journal-publishable. All constructive comments will of course also be formally acknowledged in due time.
Th
Ask a journalist, and they’ll most likely say that scientists are contrary, stubborn and awkward interviewees. Ask a scientist, and probably they will complain that journalists have no understanding of scientists’ working condition or the problems you encounter as a researcher if you are misquoted in the media.
This discussion arises from time to time (one of its biggest installments ever took place on Scienceblogs last summer), and its content seems to change but little between countries. Its most recent Swedish incarnation takes place on the blogs of journalist Anders Mildner (1st, 2nd), archaeologist Åsa Larsson - and on my blog (here and here).
I mentioned this problem briefly in my PCST session presentation, and argued that blogging would be a solution for the researcher (who would no longer have to fear being misquoted, or in vain try to persuade a journalist to let them into a newspaper/magazine/TV- or radio show). Mildner also argues that more researchers should use social media to reach out to the public.
I am not sure it solves the underlying conflict of interest, however. And how would it help the journalists?
And here’s my abstract:
Within a few years, science blogging has emerged as a new genre for science communication. But is science blogging really best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’? Or does the phenomenon of science blogging suggest other dichotomies? This paper argues that ’science communication’ is better conceptualized in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global ’scientific field’ entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively.
Thomas
CPU cycles and citizens: A study of the distributed computing communities Seti@home and Folding@home
Computer simulation and large-scale data analysis used to be the province of scientists proper. Distributed computing is a kind of public engagement with science that involves large numbers of participants. The worldwide user-base of citizens interested in donating computer power to protein science and bioastronomy are modern examples of the mutual interaction between scientists and nonscientists. This paper will look into questions such as why people decide to collaborate in the distributed computing projects and analyze the discourse surrounding bioastronomy and proteomics. It will look at how ideas about protein dynamics and bioastronomy are articulated through various participatory platforms: weblogs, computer fora, wikis, YouTube videos and the Folding@home software. The paper also analyses the flow of skills from subsets of the user pool into the core of the distributed computing project, suggesting that a group of users have knowledge about the intricacies of software technologies that have been useful in the evolution of the Folding@home project.
Abstract presented at the PCST-10 Conference i Malmö, June 26, as part of the session “The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0”
(Full abstract title: Beyond the “cool stuff”: science blogging as a democratic tool)
Traditionally, media’s reporting of non-medical science rests on a small subset of articles published in a few of the major journals; with a heavy emphasis on the “cool stuff” and often also framed in a way which is poorly adapted to science reporting. The common use of the scientist as an aloof, impersonal expert does little to foster interaction between the scientific world and the public. In contrast, blogging leaves the choice in the hands of the blogger – blogging researchers can decide for themselves what to say, how and when. The blog by its nature is personal and interactive, making it a convenient and attractive platform for contact between scientists and laymen.
Outside of the scientific world, access to published research is very limited: few persons have the expensive journal subscriptions and superior grasp of specialist English required. Scientists blogging in
their native language can do much to alleviate this gap. Furthermore, science blogging – especially interactions between science bloggers - can incorporate and spread other underreported fundamentals of the research process, such as patterns of reasoning and how to judge the validity of results.
Malin Sandström
PhD student (Computational Neuroscience) at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden
Science blogger (in Swedish) since March 2005
This weblog is the on-line archive of a seminar at the TCSP-10 conference. This session consists of three studies that look at the intersection of science and the public on the web, presented by Malin Sandström, Thomas Söderqvist, and Gustav Holmberg