Compressing,Expanding,and Attending to Scientific Meaning: Writing the Semiotic Hybrid of Science for Professional and Citizen Scientists

Meaning Compression

For the Heartbeats Project team, multimodal meaning compression was the most canonical and routinized way for them to construct and communicate scientific meaning. Their work in fact centered on updating a graph from Levine’s 1997 article, which will serve as the representative “moment” for examining their use of meaning compression as a strategy. Levine’s graph plotted the heart rates for 15 species plus “man [sic]” against their life expectancy (see Figure 2), condensing information from multiple sources (doubtless gathered into a spreadsheet) by integrating text, numbers, shape, size, and spatial arrangement to economically make the case that (a) these two variables are related and that (b) “man” is an outlier to a trend.

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Figure 2.

Figure from Herbert Levine’s (1997) “Rest Heart Rate and Life Expectancy.”

As part of their work on the Heartbeats Project, Clay and Jada similarly gathered data on resting heartrate and longevity into spreadsheets, but with far greater specificity and a larger number of data points than displayed in Levine’s graph, necessitating the use of multiple spreadsheets (e.g., for mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles/amphibians). Their mammals datasheet from 2016 (Figure 3), for example, tracks not only common species names, but also scientific names (e.g., coyote and Canis latrans), as well as order, family, genus, and class. In addition, the spreadsheet tracks references for both longevity data (mostly from the AnAge Database) and heartrate data, as well as the status of the team’s data vetting. The datasheet itself condenses information on 160 species from nearly that many scientific research articles and the AnAge Database of Animal Ageing and Longevity into a single table.

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Figure 3.

Mammals data sheet from 2016.

Over the course of the study, the team used their mammals datasheet to conduct a number of analyses, including analyses that examined how the trend held for various orders of mammals (e.g., carnivores, marsupials). The first draft of their manuscript included several tables, as well as a provisional figure that was not intended for the final draft of the manuscript, but that helped the coauthors communicate about their findings and make compositional decisions about their draft (see Figure 4). This figure compressed the 160 data points from their spreadsheet to a single figure that used the same semiotic resources Levine’s figure employed, but added color to help the team think and communicate about an additional dimension they were considering: phylogenies, or the evolutionary history of genetically related groups of organisms.

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Figure 4.

Figure used for internal communication among coauthors in the mammals manuscript’s first draft.

Around the same time the team developed their first draft of the manuscript—an incomplete draft that focused primarily on their results, methods, and introduction—they completed another analysis and created another figure, but this time intended for public audiences (see Figure 5). Initially, the team explored the possibility of developing an interactive figure, but for a variety of reasons opted for a static figure highlighting four species that stood out in some way: humans, gray whales, common mole-rats, and Etruscan shrews. This figure also used color, but simplified the idea it communicated by using gray points for all mammal species except the four highlighted species, which received red points instead. The figure thus communicated the relationship between heartbeats and lifespan and the notion that human beings are outliers, corroborating Levine’s findings, but did not yet attempt to make an explicit phylogenetic argument.

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Figure 5.

Mammals figure developed for public audiences on the project’s citizen science webpage.

As snapshots from the Heartbeats Project team’s work on this figure demonstrate, condensing and collapsing biological processes, scientific activities, individual features, and periods of time were necessary for them to ask, answer, and communicate their science, and employing a combination of modes allowed them to do this economically while simultaneously factoring in many dimensions and variables. Notably, the team’s recontextualization of their work for a public audience of citizen scientists (Figure 5) maintained most of the abstraction of their internal and scientist-oriented figures, but used the example, which draws attention to the individual and particular, as a rhetorical strategy for telling a more evocative scientific story. Even while highlighting individual species, however, their publicly oriented figure compressed meaning about individuals of that species into the more abstract species category. For this team at least, constructing generalizable meaning about the world seemed to require condensing the fine-grained and particular into categories and groupings, while using multimodal strategies to multiply the number of categories possible to consider and communicate about at a time. This, in fact, is in keeping with Lemke’s (1998) observation in his analysis of visual and verbal semiotics in scientific texts that combining distinct semiotic channels multiplies the number of meanings possible.

Meaning Expansion

Scholars have theorized meaning compression as a multimodal strategy in the sciences (Baldry & Thibault, 2010), and it was thus perhaps not surprising to see it employed within the Heartbeats Project team’s composing processes. As the Heartbeats Project team’s work on the central figure for their manuscript described in the previous section illustrates, their inquiry and writing abstracted and compressed the distinctiveness of individual animals in part by placing animals in the larger categories of their species (it is no longer “Spot,” but rather Canis lupus familiaris). The momentary rhythm and pace of particular beating hearts were similarly compressed to individual numbers inscribed in a spreadsheet, with the gray complexity of each moment shed through its numerical representation. Clay had pointed out to me, for example, how complex “resting” heartrate could be to define since “sleep is not even well defined for a lot of organisms.” Those numbers, together, were analyzed using a variety of modes and were represented as abstract, visual patterns of heartbeats and lifespans for large groups of animals—species, orders, classes. All the while, the meaning made about individual animals in individual moments receded, compressed by the layers of abstraction afforded by scientific practices around categories, numbers, language, and visuals. The statement that humans and primates as a group are outliers among mammals’ heartrate-lifespan relationships could not be made without compressing scientific meaning through many layers and steps, using a variety of modes.

Meaning expansion, on the other hand, with its logic of elaborating details about the individual and particular, was rarely present in the team’s composing, with a few moments standing out as revelatory. One of these came during a discourse-based interview (Odell, Goswami, & Herrington, 1983) with Clay during which I inquired about whether sound could be used productively as part of the team’s digital manuscript. This question briefly stumped Clay, before he recalled an NPR Radio Lab episode that used the sound of footsteps to share a study’s findings that “the walking pace of people in cities . . . correlates with how big the city is and how many people live in the city.” He felt “the heart rate thing would be [similarly] interesting,” but that it would be more suitable to radio for public audiences than to scientific communication (i.e., the digital version of their manuscript). In his view, the scientific meaning from the study was predicated on aggregating and compressing meaning, with nothing gained scientifically by disaggregating data through the inclusion of sound files of each individual species’ heartrate. This would amount to using multimodality in service of meaning expansion, expanding on details about individuals related to other aspects of heartbeats than their rates in a manner that could be counterproductive for communicating the specific claim the manuscript was constructing to scientific audiences. Expanding on variables beyond those relevant to the team’s inquiry would amount to noise that got in the way of effective communication. For public audiences, however, Clay felt this could be effective as a means to engage them and make the science less intimidating, since it would include a familiar sound (the human heartbeat) and give members of the public an entry point for identifying with other species through comparison of human heartbeats with other heartbeats. This was in harmony with the lab’s goals for citizen science and outreach, which included “getting people outside” and showing people “how little of the world we actually know,” including the world in their own homes, backyards, and bodies. The lab’s citizen science work in many ways appealed to and built on biophilia, seeking to evoke wonder about the natural world and science in a way reminiscent of the “appeal to wonder” Jeanne Fahnestock (1986) found among journalists’ popularizations of science. For Clay, expanding the scientific meanings represented through other modes by adding indexical sound was more fitting to a broad appeal to the wonder of their object of study rather than to the precise scientific argument he and his coauthors were making in their manuscript.

Clay’s science café talk in 2015 (see Figure 1) serves as another useful moment for analyzing the team’s deployment of meaning expansion as a strategy. Science cafés are events that give members of the general public an opportunity to hear a scientist talk about their work and then interact with them in a casual setting, such as in a bar or restaurant. In December of that year, Clay had been invited to speak at a café sponsored by a nearby university on a topic of his choice. Clay chose the Heartbeats Project as both a project that would be accessible and engaging to a broad audience, and as an active citizen science project that would give members of the audience an opportunity to engage beyond the science café by later contributing data as citizen scientists. The talk was also an opportunity to engage with citizen scientists who had already contributed, since they might be drawn to the talk as a way to learn about the provisional results the team had drawn from the data they had contributed. Clay explained that one of the rhetorical challenges of this type of event was that the audience consisted of both members of the public—in his experience, often a dedicated “cohort of retirees”—and scientists. As a rhetorical situation, the science café included laypeople, as well as scientific specialists from both his discipline and other scientific disciplines.

Clay’s writing for this mixed audience was explicitly narrative, telling the human story of the original research the Heartbeats Project was updating before telling the provisional phylogenetic story of their findings to date. While Clay used the word “story” to talk about his scientific manuscript and shared that he thought of research articles this way, in his science café talk, he was freer to expand on that story and tell it the way he liked without factoring in the preferences of editors or reviewers. One of the ways he did this was to recontextualize several versions of the figure the team had created for the project’s website (Figure 5), highlighting trend lines for different orders of species on each version in a sequence of slides (see Figure 6). This allowed Clay to tell the evolutionary story the team saw emerging from the data, while maintaining the logic of meaning compression—the graphs were economical and remained at a high level of abstraction by integrating a combination of semiotic modes (e.g., text, numbers, shape, size, spatial arrangement, and color). In Clay’s estimation, while still deploying the economy of a scientific figure, this sequencing would be questioned by editors of a journal article as creating redundancy (through duplication) and therefore violating the scientific value of economy.

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Figure 6.

Figure from Clay’s science café talk.

Clay deviated more explicitly from this value and from meaning compression, however, during several moments in his talk when he drew attention to individuals within species and studies through his choice of visuals. While setting up the exigence for the Heartbeats Project, for example, Clay drew attention to the data point for elephant in Levine’s original figure (Figure 2), which he orally questioned as imprecise—was this a Lexodonta Africana or an Elephas maximus? An African elephant or an Asian elephant? He then projected a black-and-white photograph of a circus elephant exiting a train, sharing that Levine’s elephant data point turned out to be the resting heartrate of a circus elephant with no documentation of its species. Similarly, Clay questioned the two whale data points on Levine’s graph, which also omitted their species. Projecting a grainy black-and-white photograph of a beached whale with a man—presumably a whaler—standing on top of it (Figure 7), Clay shared that one of those two data points turned out to be the resting heartrate of a beached whale, which seemed to better fit the definition of an animal in distress than at rest. These vivid examples helped Clay set up a gap for the Heartbeats Project and create anticipation in his audience about their updated results. In contrast, the treatment of Levine’s study in the team’s first draft of their scientific manuscript, while also creating a gap, was succinct:

The most comprehensive study of the relationship between heart rate and longevity of which we are aware considered just 16 species (Levine 1997).

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Figure 7.

Beached whale example from Clay’s science cafe talk.

This brevity was in direct contrast with Clay’s elaboration on several of these 16 species through his combination of talk, text, and photographs. Rather than using a combination of modes to create abstract, aggregated meaning that omitted dimensions of their original material context deemed irrelevant to the phenomenon under study, here Clay used a combination of modes to evoke the multidimensionality of that material context, making it salient to his audience. Dimensions of context that might be deemed “noise” in scientific communication, such as the social contexts of the circus and of whaling, were made relevant during Clay’s presentation. Expanding his meaning making to include the materiality of individual animals in specific contexts allowed him, in this context, to make the science and scientific objects of study (animals) relatable to his public audience. Some of these examples, particularly those connected with the Heartbeats Project’s findings rather than Levine’s, seemed designed to evoke wonder in the natural world, but others, like the beached whale, were more likely to evoke wonder at the process of doing science, as well as to inject a little macabre humor at a clearly human (and therefore fallible) endeavor.

Meaning Attention

While Clay’s use of meaning expansion made salient the multidimensionality and material contexts of their objects and methods of study for his public audience, the attention he drew to the process of constructing scientific knowledge reflects the strategy of meaning attention. Meaning attention refers, here, to the combined use of multiple modes to draw attention to meaning making itself. This strategy is highly reflexive in that it is used to draw attention to the composer’s and/or the audience’s meaning making in order to heighten audience members’ consciousness of how their routine meaning making is colored by convention, habit, or ideology. This strategy is also seemingly at odds with the conventions of contemporary scientific writing, which over its history has tilted toward emphasizing scientific objects of study or theories while “the scientists have vanished to the footnotes” (Bazerman, 1984, p. 178). Over time, the “objects and processes of the natural world, the methods and materials of the laboratory, and abstract nouns have increasingly occupied the subject position” (Gross et al., 2002, p. 166), reflecting and supporting scientific social values such as falsifiability and cooperation (Ding, 2002). In general, a focus on the scientist is seen to be at odds with an enterprise that should be “independent of any particular individuals” and within which results “may simply be observed, and every qualified working scientist may obtain the same result by following the described procedure” (Ding, 2002, p. 149). How to avoid attention to scientists and their language, however, is an open, evolving question, with the Heartbeats team choosing to employ active voice and first person in the linguistic portions of their methods section, most likely in service of linguistic economy (e.g., “we test the relationships between heart rate and longevity” and “we fit linear models of maximum life span . . .”). The plural first person “we” also emphasized the collaborative nature of their work.

One particular compositional moment stands out as illustrative of the team’s orientation toward meaning attention in their writing for scientific audiences. Because the coauthors were writing a digital scientific article, the question of possible digital “enrichments” regularly came up during our interactions, such as those developed as part of Elsevier’s Article of the Future project (Elsevier, 2011; Pérez-Llantada, 2013). During a discourse-based interview, Clay and I discussed one of these possible enrichments for their manuscript: author videos. Clay admitted to some discomfort with author videos, which were videos attached to some digital scientific articles that featured authors “explain[ing] their research in their own words” (Elsevier, 2018). For Clay, the mismatch in quality between scientists’ research articles and their author videos was problematic. He explained how in his field “people design theirs mostly like a PowerPoint presentation—there’s a couple slides, there’s a disembodied voice speaking.” A recurring theme in interviews with Clay and the rest of the team was the intense labor involved in developing scientific expertise and how this was in conflict with the labor investment needed to also develop expertise in skills like video production or graphic design. On the subject of author videos, Clay explained how “people with no video skills make them” because those people have invested their time in becoming expert scientific communicators: “They’re already published . . . and they’re doing real research, and they don’t have time to do a video without those resources being given to them.” For Clay, this particular enrichment did not contribute to the scientific work accomplished by scientific research articles and potentially conflicted with the scientific ethos necessary to work effectively as a scientist.

Soren, however, articulated a larger conflict created by author videos: the attention drawn to the scientist. In his words, an author video often “becomes about the scientist and the work” and is “not giving you that many” scientific benefits. Even though, in Soren’s words, “approaches to science are now pretty relativistic,” the logic governing scientific communication is not, maintaining a commitment to objectivity that emphasizes the phenomenon under study and deemphasizes the people studying it. According to this logic, the people discovering scientific phenomena should be irrelevant to the scientific accounts of those discoveries. Considering author videos, Soren felt that these often broke with that logic:

What the video does is, the human part comes in. And the journals, for the most part have not responded to that. Which is interesting, because historically they did it a little bit more. . . . You know, when relativism hit anthropology, there were all those journals that had this great part at the end where you had the story of the person and why that bears on what has been discovered? . . . It should be here too. But we won’t do that. Maybe ecology will do it, but you won’t get any further in.

Soren here refers to anthropology journal articles’ ethnographic positionality statements, reflexive statements meant to acknowledge and analyze the ethnographer’s role in the research. In context of the natural and physical sciences, however, Soren’s view was that this sort of attention to the researcher deviated too far from the conventions of their research genres. For the team’s mammals manuscript, creating an author video was not a compositional option they were considering.

The lab’s communication with citizen scientists, however, adds further complexity to this picture, demonstrating the wide range of rhetorical strategies its members employed. The lab’s website, for example, featured a blog series of interviews with lab scientists about their lives before becoming scientists. These interviews included a combination of text and images (e.g., photographs of the scientists as children) that humanized scientists, fostering identification with them and, by extension, rendering their scientific inquiry relatable and accessible. Soren’s popular science writing was also highly biographical and narrative, with the similar effect of bringing scientists into focus as interesting, inspiring, but also fallible human beings. These stories humanized scientists and the process of doing science, conveying their excitement and wonder—the “delight” Richard Harris (2017) has recently argued is so critical to good science. By drawing attention to the human being doing the science, however, they also drew attention to scientific inquiry itself, framing it as a human enterprise driven by curiosity, passion, and sometimes luck.

The lab’s citizen science operated in a similar way, creating the effect of drawing attention to scientific meaning making and rendering it accessible and human. Much like the Heartbeats Project, the text at the center of each of these projects was a set of online scientific instructions, sometimes in the form of a lesson plan and sometimes (like with Heartbeats) a simple project webpage (see Figure 8). These allowed citizen scientists to harmonize their scientific activity with the scientists and with each other in order to produce reliable data (Galloway, Tudor, & Vander Haegen, 2006; Ratnieks et al., 2016).

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Figure 8.

Screenshot from the online instructions for the Heartbeats Project (red text denotes hyperlinks).

In addition, however, these instructions drew attention to scientific inquiry over scientific results and made the implicit argument that scientific meaning making was accessible to all. Clay expressed that this was part of their goal in engaging the public to participate in science:

This is, kind of, a different way to get people involved and maybe break the cycle of, “Oh, here’s a cool discovery,” and people see it, and then kind of move on. Versus, like, “Here’s an interesting idea,” which is really what scientists are interested in. It’s more the idea phase than the, sort of, finished product.

Clay preferred that members of the public engage with the ideas and process of “doing science,” which he saw as a deeper sort of engagement, than with the results of science, which he saw as a fleeting and superficial engagement—results were, after all, small, provisional contributions to what he saw as an incremental, cumulative enterprise. The public, in his estimation, too often missed the provisionality of scientific meaning making, overlooking the fact that results might be falsified or refined by other scientists down the road. Citizen scientists’ own engagement in projects like the Heartbeats Project, which might entail returning to the project periodically either to submit more data or to learn about ongoing (provisional) analyses of project data, made powerful arguments about the provisionality, recursiveness, and accessibility of scientific inquiry. In addition, Clay hoped participants would come away realizing, about data on species heartrates, that,

Oh, god, it’s harder to find! This is hard to find. This is surprising. We don’t know things like that. And I think that has a positive spin, because it’s like, things you think are really basic, aren’t known. And if you do get into science, even some of the biggest questions have barely been investigated.

In some ways, then, the citizen science dimension of the project, with its dynamic, interactive assemblage of texts and numbers, worked within the logic of meaning attention, prompting critical reflection on their assumptions and schemas about what it means to “do science,” including who can participate in doing science. If the team were successful, citizen scientists would come away seeing scientific inquiry as more challenging, exciting, accessible, even wondrous than they might have beforehand. They might also better understand the provisional, collaborative, and cumulative aspects of scientific meaning making, perhaps interpreting popularized scientific findings they were likely to encounter with a more critical eye. This implicit argument operates squarely within the “inside-out” media environment Brian Trench (2008) has identified, rendering “some of the back-stage preparation” of science “visible to the prospective spectators of the front-stage performance” (p. 187), a state of affairs that can present challenges to members of the public who must be “capable and willing to handle such uncertainty” thereby made visible (p. 196). Regardless of the potential consequences, however, the team’s writing for citizen scientists demonstrates their versatility as writers and the wide range of multimodal strategies they found productive to deploy as part of their work.