Learning to Swim with Salmon: Pilot Evaluation of Journalism as a Method to Create Information for Public Engagement
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Democratic public engagement is an endeavor that must cope with information. In their recent typology of 102 engagement mechanisms, Rowe and Frewer highlight this importance and state: According to such an information flow perspective, an exercise's effectiveness may be ascertained by the efficiency with which full, relevant information is elicited from all appropriate sources, transferred to (and processed by) all appropriate recipients, and combined (when required) to give an aggregate/consensual response. (1) Hence, in part, it is information that must flow and be taken up for democratic public engagement to achieve its goals. (2) However, how best to create this 'engaging information' is a challenging problem. For instance, in the case of democratic engagement over the governance of genomics--the study of 'genes and their functions'--much of the information required for democratic public engagement is scientific and hence conceptually complex, as well as riddled with technical jargon and the vested interests of experts in developing their own field. This information is therefore not easily presented to citizens with often limited technical expertise. Consequently, efforts to engage citizens about genomics need to answer i) what information someone would need to effectively participate in democratic deliberation on a given topic, and ii) how to obtain, assess, and present this information in a manner that encourages public engagement with the information and each other? This paper presents a brief summary of early experimentation with the use of journalism as a technique to cope with the above difficulties and produce information useful for democratic engagement on the topic of salmon genomics. Journalism is a widely variant profession, but for the purposes of this paper is defined as storytelling, in a truth-seeking tradition, that aims to serve citizens without a legal foundation. (3) As a research technique, journalism has similarities to qualitative methods (4) in requiring (i) restraint, (ii) direct observation, and (iii) continual examination of a topic in light of new observations to a previously established news standard. (5) With this in mind, journalism was used as a research method in an initial pilot study that aimed to create print media stories with an increased potential to engage citizens over salmon genomics. Two test stories were developed within a hypothetical situation where a local news media outlet decides to write a 650 word story on a science project involving salmon genomics that may help in developing disease resistant fish. These stories were created by drawing on interviews, theories of science communication, and scientific expertise through collaboration with salmon researchers from the consortium for Genomics Research on All Salmonids Project [cGRASP]. (6) Briefly, the two test stories differed in their philosophical stance on the role of science journalism in a democracy, the first being a traditional objective and information-based story (transmission model), and the second being a non-traditional subjective and educational-based story (engagement model). (7) These philosophical stances were then operationalized into 13 guiding principles for story creation. For instance, the transmission model set out to: (i) portray science as fixed and certain, (ii) focus a story on events/publications/media relations, (iii) legitimatize itself in the science itself, and (iv) take its purpose as the transmission of information. While, the engagement model set out to: (i) portray science as uncertain/embedded in society, (ii) focus a story on the consequences of choices, (iii) legitimatize itself in personal knowledge, and (iv) take its purpose as active engagement and education in support of democracy. While a detailed analysis of the two stories created is outside the scope of this paper, the introduction to the articles is telling of their differences. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it