Communication

The ability to communicate in print and person is essential to the life of a successful scientist. But since writing is often secondary in scientific education and teaching, there remains a significant need for guides that teach scientists how best to convey their research to general and professional audiences. The Craft of Scientific Communication will teach science students and scientists alike how to improve the clarity, cogency, and communicative power of their words and images.

Comprehensive yet accessible, this key Handbook provides an up-to-date overview of the fast growing and increasingly important area of public communication of science and technology, from both research and practical perspectives.

The proposal to vaccinate adolescent girls against the human papilloma virus ignited political controversy, as did the advent of fracking and a host of other emerging technologies. These disputes attest to the persistent gap between expert and public perceptions. Complicating the communication of sound science and the debates that surround the societal applications of that science is a changing media environment in which misinformation can elicit belief without corrective context and like minded individuals are prone to seek ideologically comforting information within their ownself-constructed media enclaves. Drawing on the expertise of leading science communication scholars from six countries, The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication not only charts the media landscape - from news and entertainment to blogs and films - but also examines the powers and perils of human biases - from the disposition to seek confirming evidence to the inclination to overweight endpoints in a trend line. ...

Scientific Communication in History attempts to illuminate the various ways that science has developed and interacted with communication tools and mechanisms throughout the history of human thought. Drawing on a wide range of human history, Vickery presents a compelling and coherent background and probes into questions of science as a discipline, communication between scientists, its relationship to technology and to other academic and professional disciplines, and knowledge in general. ...

Mr. Wizard's World. Bill Nye the Science Guy. NPR's Science Friday. These popular television and radio programs broadcast science into the homes of millions of viewers and listeners. But these modern series owe much of their success to the pioneering efforts of early-twentieth-century science shows like Adventures in Science and Our Friend the Atom. Science on the Air is the fascinating history of the evolution of popular science in the first decades of the broadcasting era. Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette transports readers to the early days of radio, when the new medium allowed innovative and optimistic scientists the opportunity to broadcast serious and dignified presentations over the airwaves. ...

An argument for extending the circulation of knowledge with new publishing technologies considers scholarly, economic, philosophical, and practical issues. Questions about access to scholarship go back farther than recent debates over subscription prices, rights, and electronic archives suggest.

Scientific arguments--and indeed arguments in most disciplines--depend on visuals and other nontextual elements; however, most models of argumentation typically neglect these important resources. In Assembling Arguments, Jonathan Buehl offers a concentrated study of scientific argumentation that is sensitive to both the historical and theoretical possibilities of multi-modal persuasion as it advances two related claims.

Language is the most essential medium of scientific activity. Many historians, sociologists and science studies scholars have investigated scientific language for this reason, but only few have examined those cases where language itself has become an object of scientific discussion. Over the centuries scientists have sought to control, refine and engineer language for various epistemological, communicative and nationalistic purposes.

Case studies and pedagogical strategies to help science and engineering students improve their writing and speaking skills while developing professional identities. To many science and engineering students, the task of writing may seem irrelevant to their future professional careers. At MIT, however, students discover that writing about their technical work is important not only in solving real-world problems but also in developing their professional identities. MIT puts into practice the belief that "engineers who don't write well end up working for engineers who do write well," requiring all students to take "communications-intensive" classes in which they learn from MIT faculty and writing instructors how to express their ideas in writing and in presentations. ...

Here is the essential how-to guide for communicating scientific research and discoveries online, ideal for journalists, researchers, and public information officers looking to reach a wide lay audience.

JCOM is an open access journal on science communication. Since the world of communication and the scientific community are now undergoing a rapid and uncertain transition, JCOM wants to provide some theoretical guidelines both for scholars and practitioners in the field of public communication of science and technology.

Science Communication (SC) is an international, interdisciplinary journal that examines the nature of expertise, the diffusion of knowledge, and the communication of science and technology among professionals and to the public.

This is the main article index for the field of Communications and Mass Media.

The online version of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and, Social Sciences Citation Index.

Devices of Curiosity excavates a largely unknown genre of early cinema, the popular-science film. Primarily a work of cinema history, it also draws on the insights of the history of science. Beginning around 1903, a variety of producers made films about scientific topics for general audiences,inspired by a vision of cinema as an educational medium. This book traces the development of popular-science films over the first half of the silent era, from its beginnings in England to its flourishing in France around 1910.

Science-communication scholarship focuses on the hows, whys, and impacts of science messages aimed at nonscientific audiences. This popular audience emphasis distinguishes science communication from technical communication, which privileges audiences who work within scientific disciplines and who can negotiate the languages relevant to those disciplines. Science communication, in contrast, assumes an audience without expertise and, importantly, without a priori interest in the topic at hand. Thus, the field places great emphasis on aspects of messages that explain complex concepts and processes, that lure audiences through narrative—both verbal and visual—and that attend to the complex interplay of evidence with other variables that influence lay audiences’ understanding of such things as controversial science issues. ...

Ever since the threads of seventeenth-century natural philosophy began to coalesce into an understanding of the natural world, printed artifacts such as laboratory notebooks, research journals, college textbooks, and popular paperbacks have been instrumental to the development of what we think of today as "science." But just as the history of science involves more than recording discoveries, so too does the study of print culture extend beyond the mere cataloguing of books. In both disciplines, researchers attempt to comprehend how social structures of power, reputation, and meaning permeate both the written record and the intellectual scaffolding through which scientific debate takes place. Science in Print brings together scholars from the fields of print culture, environmental history, science and technology studies, medical history, and library and information studies.

This book is designed to enable non-native English speakers to write science research for publication in English. It can also be used by English speakers and is a practical, user-friendly book intended as a fast, do-it-yourself guide for those whose English language proficiency is above intermediate. The approach is based on material developed from teaching graduate students at Imperial College London and has been extensively piloted. The book guides the reader through the process of writing science research and will also help with writing a Master's or Doctoral thesis in English. Science writing is much easier than it looks because the structure and language are conventional. The aim of this book is to help the reader discover a template or model for science research writing and then to provide the grammar and vocabulary tools needed to operate that model.

English is the language of science today. No matter which languages you know, if you want your work seen, studied, and cited, you need to publish in English. But that hasn't always been the case. Though there was a time when Latin dominated the field, for centuries science has been a polyglot enterprise, conducted in a number of languages whose importance waxed and waned over time--until the rise of English in the twentieth century.