ABSTRACT
Journalists need to become more effective at communicating science and countering post-truth activities that seek to undermine scientific processes and evidence. Digital support for journalists when investigating and writing about science-related topics is one means of improving this science communication. However, little bespoke digital support is available. This paper reports the research and development of one new form of such digital support. During a participatory design process, experienced science journalists and other professionals were interviewed about their challenges experienced and understanding of good practices in science journalism. These challenges and good practices informed the development of a prototype of a new form of digital tool that was evaluated by journalists without specialist science training. A new version of the prototype, called INQUEST, was implemented to automate some parts of good practices in order to augment journalists’ capabilities. These practices included the retrieval of science information from diverse sources, targeting different science audiences, and providing different forms of guidance for explaining science to the target audience. This prototype is presented, and an early evaluation of it is reported.
- Matthew Ancona. 2017. Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back. Ebury PressGoogle Scholar
- Martin W. Angler. 2017. Science Journalism: An Introduction. Routledge.Google ScholarCross Ref
- James Ball. 2017. Post Truth – How Bullshit conquered the World. Biteback Publishing.Google Scholar
- John C. Besley. 2018. Audiences for Science Communication in the United States. Environmental Communication 12, 8, 1005-1022, DOI: 10.1080/17524032.2018.1457067Google ScholarCross Ref
- John C. Besley and Matthew Nisbet. 2011. How Scientists View the Public, the Media and the Political Process. Public Understanding of Science 22, 6, 644-659. DOI 10.1177/0963662511418743Google ScholarCross Ref
- Balázs Bodó (2019) Selling News to Audiences – A Qualitative Inquiry into the Emerging Logics of Algorithmic News Personalization in European Quality News Media. Digital Journalism 7(8), 1054-1075, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2019.1624185Google ScholarCross Ref
- Massimiano Bucchi. 2013. Style in science communication. Public Understanding of Science 22, 8, 904–15. DOI 10.1177/0963662513498202Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sarah Castell, Anne Charlton, Michael Clemence, Nick Pettigrew, Sarah Pope, Anna Quigley, Jayesh Navin Shah and Tim Silman. 2014, Public Attitudes to Science, UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, accessed April 9, 2020. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/348830/bis-14-p111-public-attitudes-to-science-2014-main.pdf.Google Scholar
- Mwenya Chimba and Jenny Kitzinger. 2010. Bimbo or Boffin? Women in Science: An Analysis of Media Representations and How Female Scientists Negotiate Cultural Contradictions. Public Understanding of Science 19, 5, 609–24. DOI: 10.1177/0963662508098580Google ScholarCross Ref
- Evan Davies. 2017. Post Truth: Why we have reached peak bullshit and what we can do about it. Little Brown, Great Britain.Google Scholar
- Nick Davies. 2009. Flat Earth News. Vintage Books, London.Google Scholar
- Emily Dawson. 2018. Reimagining publics and (non) participation: Exploring exclusion from science communication through the experiences of low-income, minority ethnic groups. Public Understanding of Science 27, 7, 772-786. DOI: /10.1177/0963662517750072Google ScholarCross Ref
- DBpedia Spotlight. 2017. https://github.com/dbpedia-spotlight/, accessed December 21, 2017.Google Scholar
- Sharon Dunwoody. 2014. Science Journalism: Prospects in the Digital Age. In Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology (2nd ed.), Massimiano Bucchi and Brian Trench (editors), 27–39. Routledge, New York, NY.Google Scholar
- FactCheck.org, https://www.factcheck.org/scicheck/. Accessed April 9, 2020.Google Scholar
- Andrew Garbett, Rob Comber, Paul Egglestone, Maxine Glancy and Patrick Olivier. 2014. Finding "real people": trust and diversity in the interface between professional and citizen journalists, In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'14), ACM Press, New York, NY 3015-3024. DOI: 10.1145/2556288.2557114Google ScholarDigital Library
- Winifrid Goepfert. 2007. The strength of PR and the weakness of science journalism. In Journalism, Science and Society, Martin W. Bauer M and Massimiano Bucchi, M (editors). Routledge, New York, 215-226. DOI: 10.4324/9780203942314Google Scholar
- Suzanne Goldenberg. 2012. Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/15/leak-exposes-heartland-institute-climate, accessed April 25, 2020.Google Scholar
- Lars Guenther, Jenny Bischoff, Löwe, A., and Hanna Marzinkowski. 2017. Scientific evidence and science journalism: Analysing the representation of (un)certainty in German print and online media. Journalism studies 20(1), 40-59. DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2017.1353432.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Anders Hansen. 2009. Science, Communication and Media. In Investigating Science Communication in the Information Age, Richard Holliman, Elizabeth Whitelegg, Eileen Scanlon, Sam Smidt, and Jeff Thomas (editors). 105–127. Oxford, Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
- Joan M. Herbers 2007. Watch Your Language! Racially Loaded Metaphors in Scientific Research. BioScience 57, 2 (February 2007), 104–105. DOI: 10.1641/B570203Google ScholarCross Ref
- Maja Horst, Sarah R. Davies and Alan Irwin. 2016. Reframing Science Communication. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (4 th ed), Clark A. Miller, Laurel Smith-Doerr and Ulrike Felt (editors), Cambridge, MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Cherilyn Ireton and Julie Posetti (Editors). 2018. Journalism, Fake News and Disinformation. Handbook for Journalism Education and Training UNESCO Series on Journalism Education. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/journalism_fake_news_disinformation_print_friendly_0.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky. 1982. Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- David Kaiser, John Durant, Thomas Levenson, Ben Wiehe, and Peter Linett. 2014. Report of Findings: September 2013 Workshop. MIT and Culture Kettle. www.cultureofscienceengagement.netGoogle Scholar
- Silje Kristiansen, Mike S. Schäfer, and Sabine Lorencez. 2016. Science journalists in Switzerland: Results from a survey on professional goals, working conditions, and current changes. Studies in Communication Sciences 16(2), 132-140. DOI: 10.1016/j.scoms.2016.10.004Google ScholarCross Ref
- Trudie Lang and Peter Drobac. 2020. How journalists can help stop the spread of the coronavirus outbreak. Reuters. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/how-journalists-can-help-stop-spread-coronavirus-outbreakGoogle Scholar
- Markus Lehmkuhl and Hans Peter Peters. 2016. Constructing (Un-)Certainty: An Exploration of Journalistic Decision-Making in the Reporting of Neuroscience. Public Understanding of Science 25, 8, 909-926. DOI: 10.1177/0963662516646047.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Raymond Liaw, Ari Zilnik, Mark Baldwin and Stephanie Butler. 2013. Maater: crowdsourcing to improve online journalism. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13), ACM Press, New York, NY, 2549-2554. DOI: 10.1145/2468356.2468828Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tommy Carl-Gustav Linden. 2018. Algorithms for journalism: The future of news work. The Journal of Media Innovation 4(1), 60-76. DOI: 10.5617/jmi.v4i1.2420Google ScholarCross Ref
- Neil Maiden, George Brock, Konstantinos Zachos, Amanda Brown, Lars Nyre, Dimitris Apostolou and Jeremy Evans. 2018, Making the News: Digital Creativity Support for Journalists. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18), ACM Press, New York, NY, Paper No 475. DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3174049Google ScholarDigital Library
- Neil Maiden, Konstantinos Zachos, Amanda Brown, Lars Nyre, Balder Holm, Aleksander Tonheim, Claus Hesseling and Andrea Wagemans. 2019. Evaluating the Use of Digital Creativity Support by Journalists in Newsrooms’, In Proceedings 2019 SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C19), ACM Press, New York, NY, 222–232. DOI: 10.1145/3325480.3325484Google ScholarDigital Library
- Henry Mance. 2016. Britain has had enough of experts, says Gove. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c, accessed April 25, 2020.Google Scholar
- William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson. 1988. Rhetorical structure theory: toward a functional theory of text organization, Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 8, 3, 243–281. DOI: 10.1515/text.1.1988.8.3.243Google ScholarCross Ref
- Oliver Marsh. 2018. "Nah, musing is fine. You don't have to be 'doing science'": emotional and descriptive meaning-making in online non-professional conversations about science. PhD thesis, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London, London, UK.Google Scholar
- Anne-Lyse Minard, Manuela Speranza, Eneko Agirre, Itziar Aldabe, Marieke van Erp, Bernando Magnini, German Rigau and Ruben Urizar. 2015. SemEval-2015 Task 4: Timeline: cross-document event ordering. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, 778-786.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lene Nielsen. 2013. Personas. In Encyclopaedia of Human-Computer Interaction (2nd ed), Mads Soegaard Mads and Rikke Friis Dam (editors). Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation, 2013, http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/personas.html, accessed April 28, 2020.Google Scholar
- Polyglot's documentation, 2017, http://polyglot.readthedocs.io, accessed December 21, 2017.Google Scholar
- QUEST. 2020. Summary Report: European Science Communication Today. Deliverable D1.1, EU H2020-funded 824634 QUEST project.Google Scholar
- Cecilia Rosen, Lars Guenther and Klara Froehlich. 2016. The question of newsworthiness: A cross-comparison among science journalists’ selection criteria in Argentina, France, and Germany. Science Communication 38(3), 328-355. DOI: 10.1177/1075547016645585Google ScholarCross Ref
- Alan Rushbridger. 2018. Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now. Canongate.Google Scholar
- Mike S. Schäfer. 2011. Sources, characteristics and effects of mass media communication on science: a review of the literature, current trends and areas for future research. Sociology Compass 5(6), 399-412. DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00373.xGoogle ScholarCross Ref
- Mike S. Schäfer, Tobias Füchslin, Julia Metag, Silje Kristiansen and Adrian Rauchfleisch. 2018. The different audiences of science communication: A segmentation analysis of the Swiss population's perceptions of science and their information and media use patterns, Public Understanding of Science 27, 1, 836–856. DOI: 10.1177/0963662517752886Google ScholarCross Ref
- Scholarcy, https://www.scholarcy.com, accessed April 9, 2020.Google Scholar
- Sophie Schünemann. 2013. Science Journalism. In Specialist Journalism. Barry Turner and Richard Orange (editors). Routledge, London, 134-146. DOI: 10.4324/9780203146644Google Scholar
- C. Estelle Smith, Eduardo Nevarez and Haiyi Zhu. 2020. Disseminating Research News in HCI: Perceived Hazards, How-To's, and Opportunities for Innovation. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’20), ACM Press, New York, NYGoogle ScholarDigital Library
- Helle Sjøvaag. 2014. Homogenisation or Differentiation? The Effects of Consolidation in the Regional Newspaper Market. Journalism Studies 15, 5. 511-521. DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2014.885275Google ScholarCross Ref
- Saniat Javid Sohrawardi, Sovantharith Seng, Akash Chintha, Bao Thai, Andrea Hickerson, Raymond Ptucha, and Matthew Wright. 2020. DeFaking Deepfakes: Understanding Journalists’ Needs for Deepfake Detection. In Proceedings of the Computation + Journalism 2020 Conference. Northeastern University.Google Scholar
- Ivor Shapiro. 2010. Evaluating Journalism. Journalism Practice 4(2), 143-163. DOI: 10.1080/17512780903306571Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jon Sopel. 2018. From 'alternative facts' to rewriting history in Trump's White House. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44959300, accessed April 25, 2020.Google Scholar
- Annika Summ and Anna-Maria Volpers. 2016. What's science? Where's science? Science journalism in German print media. Public Understanding of Science 25(7), 775-790. DOI: 10.1177/0963662515583419Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mico Tatalovic. 2018. AI writing bots are about to revolutionise science journalism: we must shape how this is done. Journal of Science Communication 17, 1. DOI: 10.22323/2.17010501Google ScholarCross Ref
- Cynthia Taylor and Bryan M. Dewsbury. 2018. On the Problem and Promise of Metaphor Use in Science and Science Communication, J Microbiol Biol Educ 19, 1. 46. DOI: 10.1128/jmbe.v19i1.1538Google ScholarCross Ref
- Peter Tolmie, Rob N Procter, Mark Rouncefield, Dave Randall, Christian Burger, Geraldine Wong Sak Hoi, Arkaitz Zubiaga and Maria Liakata. 2017. Supporting the use of user generated content in journalistic practice. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’17), ACM Press, New York, NY.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Raghuram Vadapalli, Bakhtiyar Syed. & Nishant Prabhu. 2018. Sci-Blogger: A Step Towards Automated Science Journalism. In Proceedings 27 th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM’18). ACM Press, New York NY. 1787-1790.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Host, Magnus C. Ohlsson., Bjorn Regnell and Anders Wesslen. 2000. Experimentation in Software Engineering: An Introduction. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston/Dordrecht/London.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Designing Digital Content to Support Science Journalism
Recommendations
Designing Digital Musical Instruments: Adopting an ecological lens to identify design considerations
DIS '21 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems ConferenceImportant considerations for the design of a Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) arise at the intersection of the disciplines of New Musical Interface design (NMI), Human-computer Interaction (HCI), and Interaction Design (IxD). A review of existing ...
Designing Together?: Group Dynamics in Participatory Digital Badge Design with Teens
IDC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and ChildrenBalancing the dynamics between industry, academia, and stakeholders in a participatory design (PD) project can be challenging, particularly with teens as design partners. In this reflective case study of digital badge design, we attempt to untangle ...
Designing for Play that Permeates Everyday Life: Towards New Methods for Situated Play Design
HTTF 2019: Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019In this paper we discuss strategies to support our design research agenda of promoting playful engagement within everyday activities and situations. We argue that this agenda is in alignment with the ethos of the third wave of HCI. To support design in ...
Comments