You have a fascinating dataset, and you want to create an eye-catching, easily understandable visualization—how do you choose a color palette? In addition to using a colorblindness simulator to ensure accessibility, you can use best practices revealed by research in cognition and psychology. You’ve likely seen countless visualizations that represent continuous data using a rainbow colormap, with colors spanning […]
Connecting Research and Practice: Where to Find Scicomm Research
The social science of science communication is a vast field of research, with new papers constantly being published on topics such as science misinformation, people’s perceptions of risk, climate change communication, and more. How can you keep up to date with it all? Many of the strategies you might use to keep up with physical […]
Connecting Research and Practice: How to Handle Misinformation
The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it an explosion of new misinformation, leaving many science communicators wondering why people believe false information and how to counter its spread. Even before COVID, social scientists were finding answers to these very questions. A 2019 PNAS piece by Dietram Scheufele and Nicole Krause provides a good overview, starting with the blurry line between […]
Connecting Research and Practice: Strategic Science Communication
You’ve got a great idea for a new scicomm project—but before you dive in, you should ask yourself a set of strategic planning questions. What are the long-term goals of your project, in terms of changes to your audience’s attitudes and behaviors? What are the short-term objectives of each individual piece of communication? And what are the tactics that you can […]
Connecting Research and Practice: Framing Climate Change as a Health Issue
When talking about climate change, you might emphasize the economic benefits of climate action, our moral responsibility to future generations, the importance of regulations, the importance of individual actions…the list goes on. A wise choice of emphasis frame can resonate with people’s values and foster support for pro-climate policies. One promising but underused option is a public […]
Speaker Spotlight: Dr. Rayvon Fouché
ScienceTalk 2024 is just around the corner! We had the honor of chatting with one of our keynote speakers, Dr. Rayvon Fouché, about his career in science communication and what he’s looking forward to at this year’s conference. Q: What is your background in science communication? A: I get very excited about science, and I […]
Visualizing A Sustainable Energy Future
We are in the early stages of a seismic energy transition. Such transitions coincide with major shifts in human well-being and the health of the Earth’s natural systems. The main storyline of improvements in the overall human condition since about 1800 has two concurrent threads. The first is the massive increase in the extraction and […]