Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science
(EMAPS)
Start date: Nov 1, 2011,
End date: Oct 31, 2014
PROJECT
FINISHED
EMAPS (Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science) is a collaborative research project aiming at answering in the most innovative way the topic SiS.2011.3.0.6-1 which calls for an assessment of “the opportunities and risks in the use of the web and the social media as a meaningful information tool and for developing a participatory communication between scientists and the different publics”. Our proposal focuses first on the emerging uses of the web as a tool of collective endeavour and public debate, then on engaging actors involved in two particular technoscientific issues (aging/life expectancy and climate change adaptation) in an ‘open-air’ experiment using online interactive platforms that will be designed and developed within the project.In the domain of science-society interactions, the aim of EMAPS is to get a better understanding of whether the web can provide a meaningful equipment to produce an enhanced interest of a wider public, not as receivers of information about end results of science, but as potential participants in science in the making. Particularly for controversial topics like climate change, the present EU call underlines the potential as well as the risks of the explosion of online communication and the proliferation of producers and consumers of scientific information. To cope with this situation, EMAPS, coordinated by Prof. Bruno Latour at Sciences Po in Paris, proposes an innovative model to trace the heterogeneous networks constituted around science and technology issues. Accordingly, the involvement of different publics will come from equipping scientists, journalists, activists, corporations and citizens with a political atlas mapping their disagreements on science and technology. This is the hypothesis EMAPS would like to assess, drawing on a set of theories and practices to be assembled in the project: digital methods, science and technology studies, communication design and social innovation.
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