Universität Dortmund
Fakultät Raumplanung
Institut für Raumplanung
IRPUD Banner Grafik
IRPUD Banner Foto

Spatial Risk Management and Climate Impact Research

EMAPS - Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science (2011- 2014)

EMAPS logo

EMAPS (Electronic Maps to Assist Public Science) is a collaborative research project aiming at answering in the most innovative way the topic within the “Science in Society” call SiS.2011.3.0.6-1 which calls for an assessment of “the opportunities and risks in the use of the web and the social media as a meaningful information tool and for developing a participatory communication between scientists and the different publics”. To do that, the EMAPS project focuses first on the emerging uses of the web as a tool of collective endeavor and public debate, then on engaging actors involved in two particular technoscientific issues (aging/life expectancy and climate change adaptation) in an “open-air” experiment using online interactive platforms that will be designed and developed within the project.

Project objectives:

  • Assessing the risks and opportunities of online technoscientific debate
  • Investigating scientific and media debates around two case studies (aging and life expectancy and the adaptation to climate change)
  • Developing an integrated platform for debate mapping
  • Disseminating the platform and the lessons learnt from it

In the domain of science-society interactions, the aim of EMAPS is to get a better understanding of whether the web can provide a meaningful equipment to produce an enhanced interest of a wider public in science and technology issues, not as receivers of information about end results of science, but as potential participants in science in the making. Particularly for controversial topics like life expectancy or climate change, the present EU call underlines the potential as well as the risks of the explosion of online communication and the proliferation of producers and consumers of scientific information, whether institutions, researchers, journalists or bloggers. To cope with this situation, EMAPS proposes an innovative model to trace the heterogeneous networks constituted by science and technology issues – the continuous entanglement between the media process of producing opinions and the scientific process of producing facts.

The Institute of Spatial Planning (IRPUD) is mainly involved in WP3 “Collection and analysis of scientific and media discourses (case study “climate change adaptation”). WP3 as a twofold aim. First, it aims at collecting a large share of the discourses that animate the debate in the scientific community and in traditional and social media. Second, it aims at submitting these discourses to a mathematical and sociological analysis to reveal the dynamics of the debate.

The EMAPS project is a Collaborative Project funded within the 7th Framework programme Work programme topic “SiS.2011.3.0.6-1 Science-Society interaction in the digital technologies era” and runs from 11/2011 to 10/2014.

Project partners:

  • Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, France (co-ordinator)
  • University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Institute of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund University, Germany
  • Barcelona Media, Spain
  • Politecnico di Milano, DensityDesign, Italy
  • The Young Foundation, United Kingdom

Contact: Dr. rer. pol. Mark Fleischhauer, Prof. Dr. Stefan Greiving

Further information: http://www.emapsproject.com/blog/

Other projects in this research area: