Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science (EMAPS)

The Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science project (EMAPS) was a three year EU funded research project under the work programme topic 'Science-Society interaction in the digital technologies era'. The project brought together data scientists, designers, social scientists, programmers and coders from across Europe to explore how pioneering visualization and mapping techniques can provide new insights into public debates. EMAPS focused on understanding the debate around adaptation to climate change, and delivered mapping of the debates through a series of sprints or hackathons.

In the domain of science-society interactions, the aim of EMAPS was to get a better understanding of whether the web can provide a meaningful equipment to produce an enhanced interest of a wider public. Not as receivers of information about end results of science, but as potential participants in science in the making. Particularly for controversial topics like climate change, the EU call underlined the potential as well as the risks of the explosion of online communication and the proliferation of producers and consumers of scientific information. To cope with this situation, EMAPS, coordinated by Prof. Bruno Latour at Sciences Po in Paris, proposed an innovative model to trace the heterogeneous networks constituted around science and technology issues. Accordingly, the involvement of different publics came from equipping scientists, journalists, activists, corporations and citizens with a political atlas mapping their disagreements on science and technology. This was the hypothesis EMAPS would like to assess, drawing on a set of theories and practices to be assembled in the project: digital methods, science and technology studies, communication design and social innovation.'