Can Argumentation Help Understand How Scientific Information Reaches the Public? @asist_ec #ist23

My third liveblog from the Information Science Trends conference taking place in Uppsala, Sweden and online. The photo was taken in the park next to the building where the conference takes place. This is Can Argumentation Help Understand How Scientific Information Reaches the Public? from Heng Zheng and Jodi Schneider. The abstract is at https://zenodo.org/record/8023747 Again, these are my impressions of the talk recorded on the spot. 

Zheng started wih a cake model of how infomation raches the public - the top layer the underlying science, the second policy and practice, the third are the news media and finally social media. He identified that there can be misunderstanding because of differing levels of expertise of different groups (e.g. scientist, journalist, layperson). Using the example of mask wearing during COVID, Zheng proposed argumentation as approach to map and understand the situation. He then explained their interpretation of argumentation and argumentation theory - with arguments containing premises and conclusions, and visualisations helping to enlighten controversy. He identified that different arguments were being presented in multiple places, with people defending their particular positions. He defined polylogue - with more than 2 players and more than two positions, and it was the polylogue aspect of the research was distinctive.

For the COVID example, the in-science layer in this research study focused on a Cochrane review on evidence about mask wearing, and the out of science layer focused on public discussion of this review. For the in-science layer, for an article,  the "players" were the authors, the "position" was the conclusion of the research, and the "place" was the country where the research took place, but also where it was published. Zheng highlighted that there were different "positions" - some concluding that masks did reduce transmission, and others that they did not, and others again saying that the evidence was not sufficient either way. The visualisations would map each aspect (player, position, place) and the relationships between them.

For the out of science picture, "Players" were journalist social media, "positions" were views on masks, "places" were different social media sites and newspapers. The researchers selected news articles using altmetrics, and then analysed them and visualised them considering the political position of the media. They intend to use a similar polylogue approach to research other issues (e.g. climate change) and conduct further research including creating information behaviour models