Notes from the trenches on science communication.
Most of the ways people communicate, from research papers to news articles, are effectively forms of storytelling. But there’s a special power associated with spoken-word storytelling and listening to someone tell a story well. Continue reading “How Humans Make Sense of the World: a Q&A with Story Collider’s Liz Neeley and Erin Barker”
In North Carolina, where I live, blueberries ripen between June and August. But I can buy blueberries throughout the year. That’s because most people only eat a few kinds of food, so farmers around the world grow the same crops, meeting the demand of consumers that live in another hemisphere. As Rob Dunn points out in his new book, that practice poses some significant risks. Continue reading “The Importance of Seeds: a Q&A with Rob Dunn”
I grew up during the Cold War. My memories of childhood include a constant anxiety that ran just beneath the surface; the fear that, at any minute, someone would push a button that unleashed nuclear war. Continue reading “Scared, But Resolute: Thoughts on the First Few Days of a Trump White House”
News releases can play a significant role in shaping how news stories cover research findings: if a news release exaggerates aspects of the work, stories are more likely to do the same. By the same token, if releases incorporate important caveats, news stories are more likely to follow suit.
Those are some of the interesting findings in a new paper from the journal PLOS ONE, which I wrote about for HealthNewsReview.org. The paper is worth a read. Hopefully, my piece is too. Check them out.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Chanapa Tantibanchachai, a public information officer (PIO) at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Keep reading to learn what tips Tantibanchachai picked up at EurekAlert’s 2016 seminar for PIOs. Continue reading “Communicating Science in the Clickbait Era: Tips and Lessons From EurekAlert’s 2016 PIO Seminar”
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Iara Vidal, a Ph.D. student based in Brazil whose work focuses on altmetrics and scholarly communication. If you’re curious about altmetrics, or how they may be relevant to science communication, read on.
Being overwhelmed by information is not a new phenomenon, but it is a very real problem. We struggle to keep up to date with all the discoveries, papers, and books in our fields of interest. It often seems as though new fields of study, methods, and/or tools are created every month. Buzzwords are all around, and it can be hard to know if there’s anything useful behind the buzz.
One of these buzzwords is altmetrics. Continue reading “Altmetrics, ‘Altmetric,’ and Science Communication”
A photograph taken at a Trump rally has been making the rounds on social media recently. It shows a man wearing a t-shirt that reads: “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.” It is a direct reference to lynching, and it should piss you off. Continue reading “If You Love Democracy, Buy a Newspaper”
