Storytelling for narrative approaches in citizen science: towards a generalized model

Abstract

Storytelling essentials are stories that direct attention, trigger emotions, and prompt understanding. Citizen science has recently promoted the narrative approach of storytelling as a means of engagement of people of all ages and backgrounds in scientific research processes. We seek understanding about the typology of storytelling in citizen science projects and explore to what extent the tool of storytelling can be conceptualized in the approach of citizen science. In a first step, we investigated the use and integration of storytelling in citizen science projects in the three European German-speaking countries. We conducted a low threshold content analysis of 209 projects listed on the German-speaking online platforms for citizen science projects “Bürger schaffen Wissen”, “Österreich forscht”, and “Schweiz forscht”. Two expert workshops with citizen science practitioners were held to validate and discuss the identified role of stories in the practice of citizen science. Our analysis revealed three major categories mirroring how stories are being integrated and applied in citizen science. The first category refers to projects, in which stories are the core research objective. The second category is characterized by the application of stories in different phases of the research project. The third category encompasses stories as agents being part of the communication and organization of the project. We illustrate the practical application of these categories by three representative case studies. By combining the functionality of the categories and abstracting the linkages between storytelling and citizen science, we derived a generalized model accounting for those linkages. In conclusion, we suggest that storytelling should be a prerequisite to enhance the competencies of the actors involved and to exchange knowledge at the interfaces of science and policy as well as science and society.

Communication and Dissemination in Citizen Science

“…Stories can be personal, historical, or educational (Veeckman et al 2019), and a narrative is created when they are linked together, which can provide people with a connection point for their own experiences. Stories can depict the immediate context, providing meaning to participants and reflecting their experiences, thereby providing a means to generate, analyse, and pass on actions, experiences, and biographical knowledge for citizen science projects in creative ways (Hecker et al 2018;Richter et al 2019). Good stories are memorable, often feature a 'hero' and describe a conflict, have a specific aim, and awaken emotions in your audience (Hecker et al 2017).…”

«Diamo l’assalto al cielo!» («Let’s assault the sky»): science communication between scientists and citizens and Lombardo Radice’s television in Italy in the years of the protests

“…By using sources from that time such as magazines, newspapers, TV programmes and state or personal archives -as well as taking into account the primary and secondary bibliography -we will make an attempt to reconstruct the salient features. This entails telling a story to describe a model [Richter et al, 2019]. To provide some context, we will briefly describe the experiences in the medical and psychiatric field and the related level of media attention.…”

Participation and Co-creation in Citizen Science

“…When integrating the collaboration of researchers from other disciplines, especially nonacademic participants and communities of interest, it is important to start with facilitation strategies that integrate simple and affordable ways to communicate concepts which are often complex or specific to the scientific world (Richter et al 2019). A progressive approach and familiarisation between participants based on a shared language, rather than conceptual theories or sophisticated academic discourses, can help to discuss the problems, methods, and solutions to be addressed from a citizen perspective (Mattor et al 2014).…”