Science Communication Online: Engaging Experts and Publics on the Internet

By Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher

Uncloistered by the web, science is finding its way into previously unimagined audiences. Whether collecting data in one’s backyard to help wildlife experts manage wolf populations or even funding research out of one’s own pocket, nonexperts can engage science at an unprecedented scale. As science communication has moved online, a range of important new genres have emerged that put professionals and the public into conversation with each other. In Science Communication Online: Engaging Experts and Publics on the Internet, Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher takes up these “trans-scientific” genres to explore how scientists are adapting their communications, how publics are increasingly involved in science, and how boundaries between experts and nonexperts continue to shift.
Bringing together genre studies and the rhetoric of science, Mehlenbacher examines a range of new forms of science communication that challenge traditional presumptions about experts and nonexperts—including Twitter and Reddit AMAs, crowdfunding proposals such as Kickstarter and Experiment.com, civic-minded databases such as Safecast, and the PLOS blogging network. Science Communication Online illustrates the unique features of these genres and connects them to their rhetorical functions and the larger context leading to their emergence and evolution—from the democratization of science, challenges to expertise and expert status, and new political economies. Science Communication Online captures the important moment we find ourselves in now—one not defined by science and society but science in society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9780814276952

Book preview

SCIENCE COMMUNICATION ONLINE

Copyright © 2019 by The Ohio State University.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mehlenbacher, Ashley Rose, 1983– author.

Title: Science communication online : engaging experts and publics on the internet / Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher.

Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018051713 | ISBN 9780814213988 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 0814213987 (cloth ; alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Science—Computer network resources. | Communication in science. | Internet research.

Classification: LCC Q224.5 .M44 2019 | DDC 302.23/1015—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051713

Cover design by Susan Zucker

Text design by Juliet Williams

Type set in Adobe Minion Pro

In memory of Sandra, because of Brad, and for Carolyn.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 Theory and Method: Genre Studies and Rhetorical Criticism

CHAPTER 2 Crowdfunding: Genres for Funding Research

CHAPTER 3 Databases: Genres for Knowledge Production

CHAPTER 4 Blogging: Genres for Scientific Engagement

CONCLUSION

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

FIGURE 1 Lab Note Images from an Experiment Proposal

FIGURE 2 Early Safecast Visualization

FIGURE 3 Safecast Interpolation Map

FIGURE 4 Safecast Web Map

FIGURE 5 PLOS Biologue Home Page

FIGURE 6 PLOS Ecology Community Home Page

FIGURE 7 PLOS Biologue Blog Text and Graphic, and Original PLOS Computational Biology Article

FIGURE 8 PLOS Image Viewer Technology

TABLES

TABLE 1 Swales’s Revised Create a Research Space (CARS) Model

TABLE 2 Moves Found in Crowdfunding Proposals

TABLE 3 Summary of Blog Posts from PLOS Network Blogs

TABLE 4 Rhetorical Moves in Science Blog Posts

PREFACE

THIS BOOK can be traced back to ideas that took shape in a book chapter Carolyn R. Miller and I coauthored for Alan Gross and Jonathan Buehl’s (2016) Science and the Internet, now reprinted in the second edition of Landmark Essays in the Rhetoric of Science: Case Studies (2017), edited by Randy Allen Harris. In that chapter, Miller and I explore the changing landscape of science communication with a case study of nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi site in March 2011. We look specifically to microblogs, Wikipedia, and an online database of radiation contamination readings as emerging forms of science communication online. Exploring how these platforms were used to share information in response to crisis, we advance the notion of para-scientific genres, borrowing and expanding upon the term from Sarah Kaplan and Joanna Radin’s (2011) article Bounding an Emerging Technology: Para-scientific Media and the Drexler-Smalley Debate about Nanotechnology, published in Social Studies of Science.

When Carolyn and I completed our work, the world of science communication looked somewhat, although not altogether, different from the vantage we have here in early 2019. Much of what I was seeing continued in traditions to share science with broader publics, but revealed some of the internal workings of science to those who may not have previously had access. There were new actors emerging on the scene as well: citizen scientists and civic scientists, as John Angus Campbell (2015) parses them up. Much of my work has attended to citizen scientists—everyday people who participate in scientific research and not-so-everyday people who design their own grassroots research enterprises in response to technoscientific disaster. In the latter case, the situations serving as case studies in grassroots citizen science generated a more overtly political situation than we might normally see for scientific research and work. After all, the kinds of grassroots citizen science that emerge in response to technoscientific disaster often form either in the absence of professional research dedicated to the problem, or when corporate and statal entities seem to obscure the data or science that affected citizens want to know. Miller and I explored how citizen scientists worked in response to such failures following the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. And in this book, the group Miller and I examined, Safecast, will be revisited as an example of how boundaries between experts and nonexperts continue to be complicated. However, citizen scientists are not the focus of this book. Instead, we might call those civic scientists the rhetors of interest here. Some of our civic scientists have long been motivated to engage a broader public with scientific research, and these are the civic scientists often engaged in conversations about science communication and perhaps popularization of science. There are those civic scientists, too, who are concerned with the public accessibility of data and research findings. Others find online a new way to excite others about their science and even garner support for their work. And, among civic scientists are those who wearily enter a new communicative space when partisan politics seems to stifle research.

It seems there has been something of a shift in how politically—how civically—engaged scientists are as a broader constituency. Images appearing on social media feature protestors holding up signs about the need for peer review and evidence-based policy. With the challenges that experts face in matters of vaccination, climate change, and genetic modification, it does seem we can say that in this moment something is unfolding that changes how we understand the rhetorical world that scientists inhabit, and the rhetorical strategies they will need to navigate that world.

This book puts rhetorical theory and criticism to work to better understand what appear to be evolving strategies of science communication, and I necessarily had some help charting out these strategies. Crucially, I want to express sincere gratitude and thanks to my editor, Taralee Cyphers, at The Ohio State University Press. Her dedication to the intellectual substance of the book and her editorial excellence are highly commendable and made this a stronger and more engaging book. I also owe the anonymous reviewers great thanks; their feedback was substantive and essential to the book in its current form. A number of fine research assistants kept this project moving, or other projects on track while I focused my energy on the book, including Catherine Lemer at Purdue, as well as Lillian Black, Devon Moriarty, Paula Núñez de Villavicencio, and Cailin Younger at Waterloo. Thanks also to many inspiring and motivating colleagues in rhetorical studies and allied fields at Waterloo, including Frankie Condon, Bruce Dadey, Jay Dolmage, Randy Allen Harris, Andrea Johnas, George Lamont, Michael McDonald, Aimée Morrison, and special thanks to an exemplary department chair, Kate Lawson. The Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo generously provided funding support for this book. Thanks also to Caren Cooper and Darlene Cavalier for opportunities on PLOS Citizen Science, Discover Magazine’s Citizen Science Salon, and SciStarter. Also some others deserve special thanks, notably Lamees Al Ethari, Chelsea Ferriday, S. Scott Graham, Molly Hartzog, and Josh Scacco. Thanks, as well, to Sune Auken, who is conducting timely and important work in genre studies through the Centre for Genre Research at the University of Copenhagen.

On a personal note, I want to thank my husband, Brad Mehlenbacher. Our joints are now well set, and Brad’s engaged and enthusiastic support contributed crucially to the completion of this book. I don’t mean that with the kind of banality it invokes. Brad didn’t simply encourage me and bring cups of coffee or tea at all hours (although he did pour more than his share); he also spent time listening to me talk through methodological decisions, theoretical commitments, and pragmatic implications. Brad’s family has been supportive, too, including his father, Bryan, who indulged me talking about work, and Brad’s late mum, Sandra, whose encouragement was energizing. Thanks also to my family for their continued support, especially Nancy, Jennifer, CJ, and Daniel, who motivated me to finish.

Importantly, I want to thank Carolyn R. Miller. It is far too early in my career for me to fully understand the gifts Carolyn has given me over the years we have worked together. My thanks are a clumsy attempt to account for what gifts I’ll certainly discover as my career unfolds. I hope, then, Carolyn will forgive what I’ve gotten wrong in the book with the knowledge I’ll likely figure it out, eventually—if only I’d listened more carefully, sooner.

INTRODUCTION

UNCLOISTERED BY the web, science and science communications are finding their way to new audiences through once unimaginable media. By playing the citizen science game Foldit while on the subway to work, recording videos of their backyards to help wildlife experts manage populations, or even funding scientific research out of their own pockets, nonexperts and amateurs can engage science in unprecedented ways at an equally unprecedented scale and rate. As science communication has moved online, a range of new forms for communicating have emerged, such as crowdfunding proposals, blogs, and databases, to name a few. Such forms of online science communication are responses by scientists to adapt their communication strategies to meet the demands of changing academic and disciplinary expectations, audiences of and participants in science, and the broader cultural climate within which scientists work. Indeed, we are steeped in science.1 Where once the public was privy to only a taste of science’s rich discourse, now scientific conversations are reaching broader audiences at a much greater volume—due, in part, to the evolution of online science communication. This book reveals how scientists can now communicate with broader and more complex audiences through online genres and, importantly, how those audiences communicate back.

Scientists have developed sophisticated, typified responses to recurrent rhetorical situations they face in their work (Miller, 1984). Creating these responses provides them with mechanisms that allow the transfer or sharing of complex technical knowledge. This transfer or sharing of knowledge is crucial for the meaning-making work that scientists accomplish through argument and for building consensus through a community effort to test and challenge what we believe we know. Without conventionalized forms of discourse, it becomes difficult to assess what information is being shared, for what purposes, and how to interpret this information. To see why this is necessary, take the example of a stock prospectus. Assuming you have no knowledge of investing, imagine how challenging it would be to look at a stock prospectus and interpret the information that is being presented to you—as you have not developed the tacit knowledge that someone who regularly reads these texts will have by virtue of immersing themselves within that discourse. Likewise, scientists are acclimated to the forms of science communication they use and encounter as they progress from students into independent researchers.

Scientists also communicate with publics, and such work has been traditionally characterized as popularizations. Material is written for a broad audience to be consumed, often for general interest or entertainment. However, the online forms of science communication previously described—crowdfunding proposals, blogs, databases, and so on—do not fit neatly into the category of popularizations; nor do these forms of science communication fit into what we might call professional scientific discourse. Instead, these forms exist somewhere between professional and popular discourses about science. We can call these emerging forms of science communication trans-scientific genres.

Trans-scientific genres operate alongside conventional forms of science communication without fully inhabiting either sphere. Sometimes trans-scientific genres rely on the discursive norms of professional science, and sometimes they employ strategies used to communicate science to the public. To elaborate, trans-scientific genres are characterized by their attention to a heterogeneous audience including experts and broader publics,2 and while they operate along a spectrum of expert–public engagement, they are never wholly research-based genres, on the one hand, or popularizations, on the other. Trans-scientific genres provide grounds where we can bring scientific knowledge together with moral and ethical, policy-driven, and social discourse. In this sphere, somewhere in a liminal space between the strongly codified and normalized discourses internal to science and the more epideictic genres of external or popular genres of science communication, trans-scientific genres seem to have been called into existence.

This book investigates how genres of science communication online challenge simple distinctions between professional and public communications. By charting the unique genre features across multiple science-focused media platforms, their rhetorical purposes, and their movement in complex media ecologies, I aim to illustrate the overlapping rhetorical strategies and functions in these trans-scientific genres. Describing unique genre features, such as the inclusion of both expert discourse and also celebratory features common to popularizations, this book charts specific rhetorical strategies in written genres, and also details how other modalities operate rhetorically in these online science communications. Investigating these genres reveals a complex constellation of elements creating an exigence for their emergence and evolution. Namely, we can see how the democratization of science, challenges to expertise and expert status, new political economies, and the encroachment of professional science are shaping these complex communicative environments. We will return to the theoretical trajectories of genre studies and rhetorical studies of science in chapter 1, but before we do it is useful to survey the kinds of communication changes that have been afforded by the web, and how scientists are responding to those changes.

NEW GENRES OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATION

I provide two vignettes that illustrate some of the affordances and constraints offered by new media forms and the genres that emerge within those spaces. Situated in a broad conversational ecology, both vignettes reveal the heterogeneous audiences and purposes they serve, along with the constantly evolving nature of the genred activity in a rapidly unfolding discourse sphere. First, an example from the microblogging platform Twitter offers an interesting case of scientists engaging in political discourse. Appeals are made on the basis of conventional scientific argument as well as political argument. Although the topic of discussion is science, the focus is not scientific research alone, but also funding and support for science. Necessarily, the conversation moves into the domain of public debate, but it does not wholly inhabit a public dialogue, as the work these tweets undertake also includes an effort to marshal scientists. Second, the news and social sharing aggregation site Reddit provides an example of the complex audiences that can be found in online spheres of discourse. Reddit has a forum, called a subreddit, focused on science. In this forum, a type of post called an Ask Me Anything (AMA) allows scientists to engage with broader publics and answer questions about the kind of research the scientist and their team conducts. This engagement illustrates the interest of the broader public in talking to scientists about science, beyond mere popularization, and both of these examples begin to illustrate the kind of complex sphere of discourse that this book aims to chart. In subsequent chapters, these spheres of discourse are explored through a close analysis of rhetorical strategies. The following vignettes articulate some of the features of what I call trans-scientific genres.

Rogue Twitter and Trans-scientific Communication

If you want an introduction to the bleeding edge of science communication, you might very well find it in 140 characters. Although tweets from famous scientists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) could be characterized as public communication of science, there is in fact a more varied range of activity than popularization. Scientists on Twitter vary in discipline and demographics, and the purposes of their tweets encompass the conventional forms of public communication for outreach or popularization to disciplinary discourse and debate. Not without controversy, Twitter has become a tool that scientists use to communicate with each other and with broader publics.

Morrison (2019) offers a useful example of how Twitter can be used by scientists to address disciplinary issues. Her work examines hashtag humour as a response to sexism in science. The story begins when Nobel Laureate and Fellow of the Royal Society Sir Tim Hunt made a controversial statement about the trouble with girls in labs during a conference lunch toast. His comments on women in science were shared via Twitter, and these tweets generated debate about the meaning of his remarks. The exact nature and phrasing of Hunt’s comments have been debated, as there is not, in fact, a transcript of his remarks. A series of tweets responded to the idea that women in the lab are distracting from the regular, professional operations of a lab. Tweets in response to Hunt’s comments included images of women working in labs in camp poses, appended with the hashtag #DistractinglySexy. The professional sphere of science is necessarily in conversation with the personal lives of women as they experience and respond to the larger sexist refrain that Hunt’s comments invoke. Use of the hashtag interrogates this refrain with humor to suggest the preposterousness of Hunt’s remarks. Rulyova (2017) explains that hashtags are often dominated by irony and the carnivalesque in an effort to draw attention to their tweets and to provoke other users (p. 83). Hashtags facilitate broad conversation—conversations beyond individuals’ own cultivated feeds. Indeed, Morrison (2019) explains that unlike typical social media feeds cultivated by our network of connections, hashtags facilitate a content- or topic-based conversation among users of the platform. Twitter illustrates how merging discourses may take shape in new media environments. For Morrison (2019), hashtag can movements deploy context collapse between humour and seriousness, between pop culture and matters of law and politics for productive social justice work (p. 23). In the case of #DistractinglySexy, images of women in the lab—posing in full lab gear, for instance—take aim at sexist presumptions. The hashtag functioned to broadly connect scientists from a variety of disciplines to discuss their own encounters with sexism or challenge sexist perceptions. The platform affords the possibilities for this kind of community building, and in turn, community-building functions—including keywords, sources of amplification, and expressive positions—can help us better understand the rhetorical situation to which these typified forms respond. For example, hashtags mark humor, irony, and sarcasm, along with political action or shared experience. Although a shared community is facilitated among hashtag users, a number of vituperative responses litter this seemingly progressive conversation about challenges women face in the sciences.

Devitt (2017) notes that in addition to the network-building capacity of the hashtag, there is a possibility for reinforcing certain kinds of information bubbles. Using the example of partisan political division in the United States, she writes,

The # is potentially a new means of persuasion as it makes a statement or a joke about a person or position. But are you trying to persuade anyone if you use a hashtag that clearly marks your position? I imagine the people who use and those who search for posts with #PEEOTUS or #LockherUp have already made up their minds about the president-elect or former Secretary of State and are seeking others like them, not new input to change their minds. (para. 7)

Here Devitt recalls the importance of logos, or good reason, in the rhetorical tradition, but asks readers to reflect on the struggles of fake news. And, she explains that sometimes facts or evidence are irrelevant, saying, It doesn’t matter to some people when the evidence is shown to be false because they still believe it’s true in spirit (para. 11). Or, some use the platform to bully others into submission, a clear form of coercion and not persuasion of any sort. Devitt makes explicit the consequences of silencing effective rhetoricians, writing, Maybe the difference today is how widespread and accepted are the less drastic means of silencing. . . . The rhetoric that persuades through logic, goodness, and positive emotions has to struggle to be heard in the midst of post-truth bullying and fearful prejudices (para. 22). We can see promise in what Morrison (2019) describes, but Devitt accounts for those who aim, with vituperative responses, to silence others who are making an effort to engage in social commentary and discourse. Tension among these possibilities, and the silencing that occurs through these platforms, is an ongoing concern. In addition to silencing that may be motivated by certain individual ideologies, there is equally a circumstance where scientific findings will be seen as oppositional to those with power, who sometimes enact mechanisms to generate controversy and delegitimize the science to their own benefit (see, for example, Ceccarelli, 2011).

Concerns about such delegitimization of science prompted the proliferation of what have been dubbed alt-Twitter accounts—that is, alternative counterparts to the official government accounts responsible for communications about science, from the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—which appeared in response to what was believed to be government muzzling of scientists. When the 45th president of the United States enacted sweeping restrictions on federal agencies’ communications, including through social media, scientists quickly responded (Eilperin & Dennis, 2017).3 Broadly, the president’s actions were seen to target environmentally oriented agencies, as demonstrated by this large-scale response on Twitter, through alternative government (AltGov) agency accounts. At the time of this writing, there is little scholarship on this event, and the anonymity of the accounts poses significant challenges to identifying those who legitimately have ties to government or are working scientists.

The website Snopes, a resource dedicated to verifying claims that range from urban legends to memes, contains an article that discusses the origins of these AltGov accounts and also vets which accounts seem to be run by persons with legitimate connections to the government agencies or, at least, the topics they are tweeting about. Snopes attributes the origins of these accounts to the activities of a National Park Service Twitter account. On January 20, 2017, the National Park Service tweeted about webpages on climate change, civil rights, and health care being removed from the White House website. The account was also used to share an image of the crowd at the 45th president’s inaugural address, which has been the cause of much contention about just how many people attended. Reactions proliferated across mainstream media and social media platforms at what was seemingly a remarkable moment of political resistance. A meme that appeared on Reddit’s r/politicalhumor forum on January 29 characterizes a refrain that would tie scientists to political