Public Understanding of Science Blog

By Anastasiya Fiadotava, Anastasiya Astapova, Rebecca Hendershott, Merryn McKinnon and Anna-Sophie Jürgens. Sharing funny memes on social media is a way of making others laugh, but recent research shows it can also be a useful way of making controversial issues, like vaccination, more understandable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination has become a popular topic for jokes, memes and other forms of humour. But heated debate - and hilarious humour - about vaccination has been around for decades. Despite the omnipresence of vaccination humour, little is known about its role and impact on public responses to highly politicised mass vaccination. In science communication, humour effectively makes content more entertaining and accessible; therefore, it is important to know what layer it adds to the vaccination debates. We collected and analysed humorous content and memes from social media and websites dedicated to popular culture between December 2020 and February 2021 to try to addre...

By William Allen (University of Oxford) Visualisations aim to be straightforward, but they actually involve many processes and brokers that complicate how users engage with them. Researchers across several disciplines use data visualisations to communicate with public audiences. It may be tempting to think visualisation provides straightforward windows into scientific studies, helping people access significant findings quickly and efficiently. But, by studying how non-academic users in Great Britain engaged with visualisations about international migration, I found that creating, communicating, and perceiving data visualisations are anything but straightforward. This is especially true now, when lots of groups use visualisation for advocacy and persuasion. In response, I develop the idea of ‘ visual brokerage ’ to describe how these processes—and visualisations themselves—exist within social, political, and cultural contexts. This matters for bringing the practice of both data vi...

by Jacopo Sacquegno Science has always benefitted from the use of visualization. We can almost say that since the very beginnings of enquiring into nature in the 17th Century, producing visuals and images to describe phenomena and explain theoretical models has been intrinsic to science. Today, the evolution of advanced software tools allows researchers to generate a huge amount of visual content, such as high-definition pictures and 3D realistic models of microscopic structures. Nevertheless, simple, hand-made drawing even in its most basic form is still fundamental in science understanding and communication. From the drawings of the magnetic fields lines by Faraday to graphical representations of atomic orbitals and chemical bonds; from the sketched lines and ellipses, Kepler used to describe planetary orbits to the original phylogenetic tree first drawn by Darwin on his notebook. Now, as then, scientists imagine new relations, test ideas and elaborate knowledge through do...

By Jane Gregory and Guoyan Wang Images on journal covers raise the citation rates of academic papers. According Wang, Guoyan and two of her graduate students, Cheng, Xi and Yao, Yuting, from University of Science and Technology of China, and Jane Gregory from the UK, papers published in prestige journals enjoy 120% of the citations of comparable research papers. However, when a research paper is represented by the journal’s cover image, the relative number of citations is over 200%. Being published in these journals is good for citations, but being on the cover is even better. Expressing science through images is a long-standing practice. Among the various senses of human beings, the sense of sight can receive much more information than the senses of listening, smell, taste, or touch: over 80% of the total amount. Human beings are visual creatures. In the 1930s, philosopher Martin Heidegger proposed that we are moving toward an era of the image. Now, whenever we look a...

Those communicating science for a living are likely familiar with the criticism of “dumbing down.” It’s an accusation that suggests simplification is inevitably a bad thing, and that it is possible to communicate a message without in some way shaping its meaning. More subtly, it also suggests that communication is a one-way street. It holds practitioners of science communication responsible for the meaning “the public” draws from a particular message: If  “the public” fails to get the message, it is that communicators did not get it across effectively. The story, however, is more complicated than that. Scholarship about science in the public sphere shows us how. So too does the experience of encountering a work of art. Scholars reflecting on knowledge and communication show that the “dumbing down” of scientific observations is actually part of the process of forming facts. Fleck  and Whitley , for instance, clarify that observations in the laboratory come wrapped in unce...

About crowdfunding science and panda bears The study at hand  shows that projects presented on science-only crowdfunding platforms have a higher success rate.  At the same time, projects are more likely to be successful if their presentation includes visualizations and humor, the lower their targeted funding is, the less personal data potential donors have to relinquish and the more interaction between researchers and donors is possible. by Mike S. Schäfer, Julia Metag, Jessica Feustle and Livia Herzog Read full article  Follow Mike S. Schäfer