science communication

Here’s an article from Hydrology and Earth System Sciences on better communication between scientists and the lay audience. An excerpt:

More theoretical knowledge on science communication can provide useful background knowledge for geoscience communicators, and thereby positively contribute to the geoscience debate in society. With this latter goal in mind, in this paper, we provide geoscientists with a review of relevant general science communication the- 5 ory. We focus on television appearances of (geo)scientists, though much of the research/themes/literature discussed also holds for popular-scientific presentations or for interactions with newspaper journalists. We use the term television loosely, also applying it to programs that appear online.

In this review we discuss six major themes in science communication research 10 related to television performances: scientist motivation (Sect. 2), target audience (Sect. 3), jargon and information transfer (Sect. 4), narratives and storytelling (Sect. 5), relationship between scientists and journalists (Sect. 6), and stereotypes of scientists (Sect. 7). For each theme we make the results from the literature tangible by analyzing a television appearance of a geoscientist from a science communication perspective. 15 For these case studies we use examples for which we had background information on behind-the-scenes discussions and negotiations, namely television appearances of authors Hut and Stoof.

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