We provide a tour of the ecology of emerging digital tools and artifacts that increasingly mediate public engagement with science in the context of environmental decision making. As our examination of emerging technologies in this context illustrates, while not all technical communication is science communication, science communication is increasingly also productively viewed as technical communication.

This webtext juxtaposes six exercises in place-based writing, locative, media, and creative methods during a “BioBlitz” held at a nature reserve. Four frameworks inform the six educational interventions: “creative-critical electorate fieldwork,” Indigenous environmental justice, deep mapping and critical cartography, and analog/digital/post-digital writing. Readers can explore descriptions of all six workshops, authored by the facilitators. Together, the pieces that make up the “North Woods Project” show the array of paths that researchers and practitioners in arts, sciences, and technology can take when united by a single location and a shared theoretical framework.

The webtext presents a study on student attitudes toward public-facing science communication. Drawing upon a set of short 5-7 minute “bite-sized” interviews with 21 students at a STEM-focused institution, the researchers reveal the students’ thoughts about how to determine the accuracy of scientific media, the role it played in their educational journey, and their thoughts about the public’s ability to assess information.

We argue that the commonly used metrics for science communication video engagement, such as the number of views, reveal little about the longer-term impact on viewers. To explore this potential impact, the authors analyzed the comments of a video they created with Kurzgesagt, a professional science communication YouTube channel with 20 million subscribers. The video, “We lied to you…and we’ll do it again,” directly addresses the challenges of simplifying complex content for viewers. Such simplifications will never be able to capture a scientific topic’s nuances, so Kurzgesagt strives for transparency about each video’s limitations, with the goal of inspiring viewers to learn more.

This webtext shares the curriculum for a day camp workshop that invites pre-teen students to learn about and engage with sustainable design practices, and to share their observations and findings through discussions and multimodal webtexts. They also discuss the value of addressing sustainable practices from multiple age perspectives, and based on multiple sites—a pollinator garden, a bike repair shop, a thrift store, and more.

In this collection, we present the perspectives of seven different writing instructors from backgrounds ranging from comparative literature, creative writing, English, history, and writing studies. We all work in the UC Santa Barbara Writing Program, which has multiple upper-division courses and a Professional Writing Minor track in Science Communication. Here we share our different pedagogical reflections, as well as specific assignments, to illustrate a range of interdisciplinary lenses that can be brought to the classroom.

This multimedia project employs and performs the full etymology of articulation—the linguistic, visual, embodied, and mechanical—to describe an advanced undergraduate course in science writing, which focused exclusively on new media storytelling....Each element, produced by a participant in the course, performs the mechanics of new media and can be viewed or heard in any order as they each attempt to stand alone while joining with the others. By design, this webtext can be employed in ways specific to new media science writing specifically or to new media writing more generally.