Public Understanding of Science Blog

By Sofía Villa Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and now Tiktok are becoming strong platforms for communicating science. Nevertheless, the most visible science influencers are Northamerican publishing content in English. To explore new perspectives for science in social media, we talked with Astromaiky, a Colombian astrophysicist who started a career as a science influencer. Throughout his profiles on Instagram (1.400 followers) and Tiktok (13.500 followers), he is building an environment to share science with short videos about physics, climate change, teaching, and astrophysics, engaging the public with fun and creativity. We talked with Astromaiky about beginning a career as a scientific influencer and about engaging with young people using social media. Why did you start doing science outreach on social networks? Because I wanted to reach people and make them like science a little bit the way I like it.  That's why I tried to start with Youtube, which I already knew, but I fell i...

By Sofía Villa In the vast continent of Africa -which includes 54 countries- different cultures, languages and social contexts converge. This diverse audience demands specific formats and language to engage with them. To better understand the picture about Science Communication in Africa and particularly in South Africa, I talked with Marina Joubert. She is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer in science communication at The Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Marina collaborates with the scientific committee of the global Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) network, with the editorial board of Science Communication and with the Journal of Science Communication. Marina, what have been the main challenges in sharing science information about Covid-19 in South Africa and Africa? I can really only speak from the South African perspective. As usual, the challenges in communicating information about Covid-19 are...

BY Sofía Villa The year 2020 was very challenging in many aspects, also for Science Communication that has to struggle in the chaotic relationship between science and society in the middle of a pandemic. For talking about this and the perspectives of the field in Brazil, I spoke with Luisa Massarani on the most visible authorities in Brazilian scicomm. Massarani is a journalist, coordinator for Latin American of SciDev.Net, of the master on Science Communication at House of Oswaldo Cruz and the National Brazilian Institute of Public Communication of Science and Technology. Luisa, do you think that the Covid pandemic changes somehow the communication of science and the relation between science and society in Latin America?  As the World Health Organisation has been highlighting, fake news and misinformation can spread as quickly as the SARS-CoV-2 and can be as harmful as this virus. In Latin America, we have been flooded with misinformation and fake news – meanwhile, 900,000 deaths ...

BY Sofía Villa From Galileo’s observation until the first flight on Mars...all scientific milestones needed a catchy and clear way to be communicated to reach the public. This “style” is the subject of the mini-course "Style in Science Communication" created by Massimiano Bucchi, Professor at the University of Trento, and Jordan Collver, freelance illustrator, comic artist, and science communicator. Both of them work together to create the illustrated cards of the mini-course for  Lifeology.    scenes on our SciComm Program course "Style in Science Communication" with @MassiBucchi and @JordanCollver ! What does it mean for #scicomm to have style, and why is that an important signal of its quality? https://t.co/3gIowctnpG #scicomm #sciart #SciArtTweetStorm pic.twitter.com/NjHALClS5I — Lifeology (@LifeologyApp) April 7, 2021 To know more about this experience, I interviewed professor Bucchi (who is also the Director of the SciComm Master) about exploring ...

An interview with Catherine Williams by Cristina Rigutto "Altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analysing, and informing scholarship."  Jason Priem, 2010 "Altmetrics are an indicator of engagement and a real-time record of the online attention surrounding an individual research output."  Catherine Williams, 2016 Is altmetrics a suite of metrics for research impact evaluation based on data from the social web that is going to disrupt the primacy of citation-based metrics? Or is it an indicator of how a research is connecting with its target audiences after publication data that helps researchers to identify potential impact stories and gather evidence for case studies? To answer this question (and a few more), I interviewed Catherine Williams, Chief Marketing Officer at Altmetric. Dear Catherine, are altmetrics aiming to complement or to replace traditional bibliographic rankings? Altmetrics are very much ...

While senior scientists are often uneasy using social media, Ph.D. students and early career researchers favour the use of social media to benefit their scholarly communication practice, disseminate their work, make new connections to build their network and discover and share information with society. I asked Beth Raps to interview two of them: Amanda Freise and Laura Haney, founders of SciComm Hub and Signal To Noise Mag , two interesting and popular social media projects totally managed by Ph.D. students. Cristina Rigutto An interview with Amanda Freise and Laura Haney BY BETH G. RAPS PH.D.  Beth Raps: Is SciComm Hub trying to empower readers though accurate information (filling the knowledge deficit)? Or trying to stimulate a process of democratic dialogue over science and technology-based issues? Or creating engagement activities to promote STEMM ?  Laura and Amanda: The main purpose of SciComm Hub is to provide resources and information about ...

There's an old journalism trick that says: "If you want to get something original out of an interviewee, say nothing and wait". Thus, when I was due to interview Beth Raps, one of six winners of the essay competition on the ‘deficit concept’, instead of looking for those questions that make people comfortable enough to speak freely, I only asked her to talk about her latest publication in an unconventional way that could show the readers a partisan angle. I stopped talking and waited, and this self interview was the result. Cristina Rigutto Beth interviews Beth By Beth G. Raps Ph.D. Dear Beth, This is an interview with you about your latest publication, "In Science Communication, why does the idea of a public deficit always return?" First off, that's an incredibly boring title. How did you happen to choose it? Well, Beth, yes, it is, you're right. I chose it to ensure I focused entirely on the topic and nowhere else, as I have a tendency...