Society and Information Research Group

The next Society and Information Research Group seminar takes place on Wednesday 25 January @ 2 pm in the David Gorham Library. All welcome — details follow.

SIRG Seminar
Wednesday 25 January @ 2 pm
David Gorham Library, Open University (first floor Venables, N1015)

Joe Trenaman’s Investigation of BBC Listeners’ Understanding of Science

Allan Jones

During 1949, Joe Trenaman of the BBC’s Further Education Department conducted an experiment into listeners’ comprehension of science broadcasts (and some non-science broadcasts). Subjects listened to a recorded broadcast and then wrote everything they could recall. Their recollections were marked and correlated with their educational qualifications and level of interest. The major findings were that subjects who understood the talk best were not the ones who found it most interesting. Rather, subjects for whom the talk was only just comprehensible found it most interesting.

This ‘scientific’ test of comprehension had a number of outcomes for the interested parties. Trenaman conducted further experiments and eventually become an academic educationalist. For the BBC, the findings supported existing institutional practices, in particular the three-service network that had been developed just after the War. For scientific advisors to the BBC, however, the findings played into a current debate with the BBC over the form science broadcasts should take. Trenaman’s results were announced just as scientist-advisors were on the defensive, having had their claim that science broadcasts concentrated unduly on ‘social issues’ disproved by evidence from BBC managers. Trenaman’s findings were used by scientists to support their argument that science broadcasts should be managed by an outside scientist, who would ensure that they were comprehensible and scientifically coherent. The outcome was the experimental appointment of a coordinator for scientific broadcasts.

The episode is placed in the context of long-running contention by scientists that the BBC had a duty to privilege science in BBC output ‘in the national interest’, and the BBC’s equally long running resistance to such external scientific pressure.

The next SIRG seminar will take place on Wednesday 30 November at 2 pm. Details follow.

SIRG Seminar

Wednesday 30 November 2011 @ 2 pm
David Gorham Library, Open University (first floor Venables, N1015)

Internet and democracy: the impact of public understanding of science on online citizen engagement

 
Danilo Rothberg
 

New information and communication technologies have made an impact on democracy and citizenship, often raising the availability of information on policies and creating mechanisms for participation in policy making in digital public consultations promoted by governments with increasing frequency and scope. But the formal educational systems, scientific diffusion in non-formal environments and initiatives to promote public understanding of science and technology have not fully assimilated this impact, which poses new requirements for citizenship formation, especially in relation to the skills needed for collective participation in the formulation of public policies. This presentation will discuss the implications of findings from public understanding of science surveys carried out by institutions in Europe, US and Brazil which bring evidence to support the idea that citizens want to participate in decisions on science and technology.

Danilo Rothberg holds a PhD in Sociology from Unesp –Sao Paulo State University (Brazil). He is currently a Lecturer in Science Education at the Unesp and a Visiting Lecturer at the Open University, and was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Open University in 2006-2007.

I’m pleased to announce that full proceedings of The Difference that Makes a Difference 2011, the workshop on the nature of information organised by David Chapman and Magnus Ramage with help from many other members of SIRG, are now available. They can be found on the workshop website. The workshop was held on the 7th-9th September 2011, at The Open University in Milton Keynes.

The proceedings include an abstract, presentation slides and audio recordings (podcasts) for keynote and other speakers in each of four main sessions, on the themes of “What is information?”, “Understanding with information”, “Engaging with information” and “The impact of information”, plus podcasts of rapporteur summaries and panel discussions for the four main sessions, and the closing plenary discussion. In total there were 25 speakers at the event, from disciplines including philosophy, systems theory, ICT, ecology, physics, linguistics, computing, public policy, semiotics and sociology.

Seminar, Wednesday 19th October, 2pm.  Library Seminar rooms 1 &  2.

Amanda Spink
Professor of Information Science, Loughborough University

Abstract: This talk will provide an overview of the field of information science and discuss trends in the field moving forward. The presentation includes a discussion of the major research areas, schools, journals and conferences associated with information science. Currently, the major issue for the field is the growing nexus between computer science and psychology. As information science is a field concerned with the human use of information, it both draws upon and is influenced by fields associated with computer science and technology, as well as psychology and the social sciences. However, being a small field with limited scholarly impact, the long term future for information science is probably limited as “information” is becoming increasingly the purview of many fields related to technology and psychology. For example, there is a shift under way in cognitive and computer science to conduct research into the human aspects of Web and information retrieval, which has been a key area of information science.

Professor Spink is an international leader in information science research with 340+ publications and 6 books. Her research focuses on developing theories and models of information behaviour and she has over 20 years experience in information science in the United States, Australia and the UK. http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/people/ASpink.html

The next SIRG seminar will take place on Wednesday 28 September at 1.00 pm. Details follow.

SIRG Seminar, Open University
Wednesday 28 September 2011 @ 1.00 pm 
David Gorham Library (first floor Venables, N1015)

Philip Brey
Allan Jones

Abstract
Philip Brey is a philosopher of technology based at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He is a prolific author of journal articles and book chapters on topics as diverse as distance education, nanotechnology, and the social construction of technology.

In this short presentation I will offer some comments on his work based, necessarily, on a selective reading of his large output. I will argue that his main strengths are clarity of expression, wide range of interests, and a sympathetic attitude to social studies of science and technology. In so far social scientists and philosophers tend to be suspicious of each other, Brey’s acceptance of social-scientific approaches to science and technology is somewhat unusual. Furthermore, as an outsider, his critical assessment of the various strands of social studies of technology offers several illuminating insights, as I hope to illustrate.

Chris Bissell and I (Allan Jones) have had a paper accepted for a forthcoming issue of Research in Learning Technology. The paper is ‘The social construction of educational technology through the use of authentic software tools’ and uses ideas from the social study of technology to look at educational technology.

I attended the BSHS Annual Conference 2011 at the University of Exeter from 13th to 17th July. The prevalent focus of the sessions I attended seemed to be on science in the 18th to early 20th century science. There seemed to be less emphasis on the technological aspects which was somewhat redeemed by one of the last sessions at the conference. This last session on 17th July about telegraphy had some interesting insights about the working of telegraph companies in 19th & 20th century. Particularly fascinating was the look at Eastern Telegraph Company and its approach to research & development.

The conference as a whole covered a range of subjects. These included theoretical ideas ranging from Narrativism, Presentism and Rankeanism to Robert Boyle’s seminal principles and the conception of masks in Newton’s articulation of planetary orbits. Different takes on the history of science included history of naval architecture, the role of controversy in popularising science in 19th century, 19th century science in the press (including the Punch magazine) and the public history of science being documented at the Science Museum. There was also a very absorbing session on oral history which looked at the history of TB patients at Craig-y-nos castle in Wales during 1940s, oral history of British science and agricultural history in Zambia.

The plenary sessions started off with Martin Rudwick (University of Cambridge) speaking about the great Devonian controversy. An interesting aspect of this presentation was the use of diagrams to depict history while at the same time retaining the different viewpoints of the narrative. Mark Jackson (University of Exeter) took the audience into the twilight zone of the history of science & medicine. This session presented a detailed look at the disciplinary status of medical history & methodological challenges in the history of science and medicine. Advocating the need for a more convergent & interdisciplinary approach, Mark Jackson presented a field theory of medical history in conclusion.

The highlight of the conference was the presidential address (or the presidential dress as she put it) by Sally Horrocks (University of Leicester), the current BSHS president. She presented an engaging look at the presentation of science & technology in “cine magazines” and television in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In a narrative filled with film clips and images from Pathé Colour Pictorials and Associated TV, she traversed the often jaunty, positivistic outlook on science and the “heroic” pursuit of the backroom boffins to solve the problems as shown in the news reels during this period.

With a combination of post-grad students and experienced researchers attending & presenting, the conference had an excellent mix of enthusiasm and academic wisdom (including looking at one’s feet for an entire minute at the start of a presentation). On the whole, the conference was a great learning experience offering exposure to a variety of topics in the field of science & technology studies.

At last, the book I’ve been editing with Chris Dillon, “Ways of thinking, Ways of Seeing” is winging its way to Springer on a memory stick.  Some familiar authors, some not so familiar. Watch this space. A lot more work than I’d been expecting, but eased by a sterling contribution from my co-editor (retired) who said to me last Friday “it’s just like being still at work”.

Contents

1  Creating reality, John Monk

2  Dimensional analysis and dimensional reasoning, John Bissell [son, if you didn't know]

3  Models: what do engineers see in them?, Chris Dillon

4  Metatools for information engineering design, Chris Bissell

5  Early computational modelling: physical models, electrical analogies and analogue computers, Charles Care

6  Expanding the concept of ‘model’: the transfer from technological to human domains within systems, Magnus Ramage and Karen Shipp

7  Visualisations for understanding complex economic systems, Marcel Boumans

8  The inner world of models and its epistemic diversity: infectious disease and climate modelling, Gabriele Gramelsberger and Erika Mansnerus

9  Modelling with experience: construal and construction for software, Meurig Beynon

I (= Allan) have finally had an official acceptance for a paper I began a year ago! It’s ‘Mary Adams and the producer’s role in early BBC science broadcasts’ and will appear – who knows when? – in Public Understanding of Science.

Allan and I attended the Digital Humanities conference http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/digital-humanities/events.shtml today. We both gave talks and, I think, acquitted ourselves well (well, Allan did). There may be a journal article to come out of the event.