Current images of AI – widely used and available in stock libraries – are dominated by tropes such as white humanoid robots, blue backgrounds, glowing brains and science fiction imagery. Research into narratives as forms of sense-making AI …
Category: research communication
Finding your niche in the four styles of research communication
Research communication can often seem like a monolith, if you want to take your research beyond the walls of the university then do x-y-z. As Andy Tattersall describes, there are in fact many hands and styles of work that contribute to effective resear…
Book Review: Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation by Carolyn Pedwell
In Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, Carolyn Pedwell examines how social change can be enacted through everyday habits and routinised practices, arguing that such ‘minor’ gestures may be just as transformative as major events…
Narratives and Evidence – Which stories about COVID-19 did we believe and why?
Rigorous empirical evidence is often presumed to be the most persuasive, notably in fields such as healthcare and medicine, where there are established frameworks for assessing the quality of evidence. In this post, Eivind Engebretsen and Mona Baker ar…
Descriptive statistics are essential to making complex analyses useful.
In response to the ever-growing volume of data, quantitative social research has become increasingly dependent on complex inferential methods. In this post, Kevin R. Murphy argues that whilst these methods can provide insights, they should not detract …
Podcast: Do we need the arts to change the world?
The latest episode episode of the LSE IQ podcast asks: Do we need the arts to change the world? As the UK government looks to recover from the costs of the pandemic its decision to cut funding for creative higher education courses could be seen as a pr…
From science to stanzas – The role of poetry in research communication
Poetry can be perceived as the antithesis of science, indicative of a non-rational mode of thought, and famously banished from Plato’s ideal republic. However, as a form of communication poetry presents a unique way of engaging audiences and empowering…
Are personal academic blogs a thing of the past?
The personal blog was a defining feature of the early internet and there are still a number of high-profile academic blogs studiously maintained by lone scholars. However, for researchers new to academic blogging, is it still worth setting up your own …
Introducing cinematic scientific visualization: A new frontier in science communication
Data and its visualizers have always exploited the latest trends in media and communication in its quest to make seemingly dull numbers engaging, affective and interesting. In this post Kalina Borkiewicz, Eric Jensen, Stuart Levy, Jill .P. Naiman, and …
The devil’s in the framing: language and bias
How we say things can be as important as what we say. In this post, Ella Whiteley explores the “framing effect”, its implications for education and research communication and in particular, its salience to discussions of sex and gender. Picture yourse…