Collaborative Research: HCC: Small: Science communication in the ecosystem of digital media platforms

这项研究将调查关于科学进步如何在数字媒体平台生态系统中传播的开放性问题。在过去的几十年里，科学传播经历了巨大的变化。大多数学者和公众现在使用社交媒体网站、电子新闻媒体、博客和维基百科等在线平台来分享科学发现。更好地了解科学进步的网上传播是必要的，因为这些与公众联系的新渠道在处理不受控制的信息扭曲方面带来了新的挑战。此外，由于科学结果哗众取宠的报道越来越多，确定可靠的知识仍然很困难。这项工作将融合信息科学、传播和新闻的思想、方法和技术，以解决具有重大社会和经济影响的许多问题：(1)有助于改善公共服务科学新闻；(2)根据社交媒体上的集体线索，为科学传播提供切实可行的早期预测；(3)通过更好地理解和跟踪真实世界的信息扭曲活动，丰富全球人们的在线体验；(4)告知当前与错误信息相关的关键危机；(5)利用数字媒体平台生态系统中科学传播的新知识指导科学政策。虽然大多数关于信息传播的研究都集中在单个平台上，但本项目将为科学传播开发一个关键的多平台分析框架。主要目标是发现关于以下方面的基本知识：(1)科学文章跨平台传播的典型轨迹；(2)这些轨迹如何与作品的影响、新颖性以及学者和公众的反应联系起来；(3)早期覆盖模式对最终反应的预测；(4)标题党和信息扭曲对传播的影响。该项目将阐明科学发现是如何在网上被分享、讨论和扭曲的，并提供经验证据，说明如何利用从社交媒体线索推断出的早期信号来计算预测科学文章的覆盖范围。交互式工具的设计将展示如何在真实的报道场景中向科学记者展示集体反应的痕迹，这是令人信服和有用的。这项工作将由现有的关于在科学传播中使用新媒体的理论和实证研究推动并进一步发展，评估在线有意和无意的信息扭曲，利用基于网络平台的集体线索进行早期预测，并为记者设计信息界面。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This research will investigate open questions about how scientific advances spread in the ecosystem of digital media platforms. Science communication has undergone dramatic changes over the past decades. Online platforms such as social media sites, electronic news outlets, blogs, and wikis are now used by most scholars and the public for sharing scientific findings. A better understanding of the online circulation of scientific advances is imperative because these new channels of connecting with the public have brought novel challenges in dealing with the uncontrolled distortion of information. Additionally, it remains difficult to identify reliable knowledge, given the increase of sensationalist presentations of scientific results. This work will merge ideas, approaches, and technologies from information science, communication, and journalism to address numerous issues of significant social and economic impact: (1) contributing to the improvement of public serving science journalism; (2) providing practical and actionable early predictions of science dissemination from collective cues on social media; (3) enriching the online experience of people around the globe with a better understanding and tracking of real-world message distortion campaigns; (4) informing key current crises related to misinformation; and, (5) guiding science policy with novel knowledge about science communication in the ecosystem of digital media platforms.While most research on information diffusion has focused on individual platforms, this project will develop a critical multi-platform analysis framework for science communication. A primary goal is to discover fundamental knowledge about: (1) typical trajectories in the cross-platform dissemination of scientific articles; (2) how these trajectories connect to the impact of the work, its novelty, as well as the reactions from scholars and the public; (3) predictions of eventual reactions from early coverage patterns; and, (4) effects of clickbait and information distortion on dissemination. This project will illuminate how scientific findings are shared, discussed, and distorted online and provide empirical evidence of how early signals deduced from social media cues can be harnessed computationally to predict the coverage of scientific articles. The design of an interactive tool will demonstrate how traces of collective reactions can be compellingly and usefully presented to science journalists in real reporting scenarios. The work will be fueled by and will further existing theoretical and empirical research on the use of new media in science dissemination, assess intentional and unintentional information distortion online, harness collective cues from Web-based platforms for early prediction, and design information interfaces for journalists.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.