Science c. Story In an unfortunate title. It reinforces the idea false that “science” means “real” and “history” means “makeup”. But the title of the last chapter, “Science And History ”(Accent on the original) describes better what Emma Bloomfield has in mind: improving communication on science using narration.
The invention that Bloomfield hopes to improve narration is the “narrative web”. Imagine a circle sliced in six pieces. Each piece represents a part of a story: character, action, sequence, scope, storyteller and content.
Imagine now that the outer circle has two smaller circles nested inside, like a floor.
Each part obtains a point on one of these three circles. If part of the story is concrete and specific, a point is closest to the center. But if this part is abstract and general, the point is close to the ring closest to the edge. If it is between the two – you guessed it – a ring. These six points form a “constellation” that characterizes a story. (See fig. 1, below.)
It is a complicated way to show “low, medium, high” for six aspects of a story. In addition, Bloomfield often calls the levels of the “micro-year”, the “meso-ring” and the “macro-year”; Academic Greek does not facilitate the constellations of its descriptions.
The narrative web is also a little non -intuitive to use. At the beginning, Bloomfield says that the three levels represent the “specific” “abstract” beach for all parts of history, but not all of them work in this way. For example, the “storyteller” part is not evaluated by specificity, but by the confidence of the public in the storyteller.
The subtitle, “narrative strategies for scientific communicators”, suggests that this book “How” is for scientific communicators, but the narrative web tool and the writing style do not seem well adapted to journalists, museum staff or public information agents artizing stories on science. It seems better suited to academics analyzing stories about science.
The use of narrative canvases in the analysis is obvious, but it is not so clear how to use them to create effective stories. What constellation does a convincing story create on the narrative web? One might think that a good storyteller would bring together the points in the middle, like a sniper. The saying says: “The death of one is a tragedy” (specific inner ring, strong history); “The death of many is a statistic” (Summary, Outdoor Ring, simple fact). But Bloomfield says that the interior rings are not always better. She encourages the experimentation of larger and more abstract concepts, pushing points closer to the edge of the web.
Bloomfield uses his narrative web to analyze stories of climate change, evolution, vaccines and COVVI-19. Its coverage of them is deepened, although biased in the United States. But his focus on these controversies undermines the objective of the book.