Academic Rap
We wish to help make academia more accessible through translation from big complex words to normal human speak and/or rap songs.
Team
Julieta C. Arancio, Rachel Uwa
Possible Practical implementation, written by Julieta.
Translating academia into human language
Problem: people from outside academia can’t understand what scientists write
What: We’re intending to hack lay summaries in order to make them even more accessible and easily generated, as we think audiovisual material and social interactions can help spreading knowledge and bridging science and society. Also this platform can provide a way of getting feedback (<3 from public) - altmetrics
Why: Science generates knowledge that can/should be useful for people outside academia. This is more evident in countries where research is publicly funded, like in most Latin America countries. Open Access initiatives help diminishing the gap, but being able to download papers or journals isn’t equal to being able to understand them. The science communication field has developed some advances, e.g. the lay summary being required in some journals. Though recognizing the importance of science communication, many scientists still believe this is too time-consuming, also arguing the lack of communication skills.
Who: input provided by scientists and feedback given by journalists searching for trusted sources, students, advocates
How: scientists upload their pre-prints/papers to the platform, that extracts keywords and calls pictures for that keywords in order to generate a mindmap which can be easily re-arranged by drag&drop. Once this mindmap is finished, writing the lay summary is much more easy -the platform also provides guidelines-. Adding other media is also possible and desirable (voicenotes, videos, tw storylines, etc). The outcome is a lay summary+mindmap+pictures+voicenotes+youtube videos+etc. Scientist also has to provide link to related wikipedia articles. This outcome is realeased under a CC license. Public can interact with the lay summary by liking <3 and social network sharing, this could provide altmetrics.
Integrate with:
- https://openknowledgemaps.org/ this site allows you to access papers searching by topic, the platform could be integrated there as an add-on
- readable.io
- wikipedia: a section “unfake news from latest science research” in related articles
I’m going to continue now with this!