Five months with no updates: That is quite a stretch, even for me. Different personal troubles have kept me busy so that I did not feel like spending more time in front of my PC screen. Yet, now that autumn has arrived and the weather has turned quite nasty in my city, I have less distractions. Thus, here we go:
Without further ado, I announce the publication of a text that harks back to a project which ended in 2022. Three years ago, I had the pleasure to lead an investigation into the “dynamics of multidirectional science communication in times of Corona”. My colleagues and I published quite extensively during this project which was funded for only 18 months. In total, the project’s website lists four articles, one 80 page-report, one interview and various academic talks as output. Not bad, I’d say.
Still, the HoF institute’s director judged that this was somehow insufficient: Every project should end with a (printed) monograph. After several rounds of discussions (which took into consideration that all involved personnel at the time were already busy in new reseach projects), the director sat down and compiled said monograph from the different contributions we had already published elsewhere. Flourished with an introduction and a new discussion section penned by the institute’s director, this material has now been (re-)born as an open access monograph which is available for download here.
I’ve got mixed feelings about the result: On one hand, the monograph mostly consists of empirical results we gathered roughly four years ago, rearranged and compiled in such a way that they are more strictly integrated under one topic (one colleague worked on his second book while being active at the original research project and thus took care to distinguish his publications from others). The book thus offers very little in the sense of new results. On the other hand, because of its tighter integration, the reworked conclusions as well as the new introduction and discussion section offer broader strands of debate about science communication during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond than the different articles could — and as the report did as it was published at the project’s half-time. Yet, because our results are still inconclusive, the director’s application of rather broad strokes to paint an overall picture sometimes seems like a wide stretch for some of our empirical results. But I guess that’s why that section is called “discussion”.
In the end, this is a publication I originally did not see coming and then saw germinating a good long time. Speaking in terms akin to the music industry, this is not a new album, but an original remix. Maybe with this in mind it is worth the read.
