The grant provides support for an initiative by the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University, partnering with MIT Press, MIT Media Lab, and Plympton Literary Studio, to create an open-access digital edition of Mary Shelley’s landmark novel Frankenstein. The digital “Living Frankenstein” edition—titled Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds—will present an innovative reading experience and compelling new digital content to the 21st century reader, including a podcast series, videos, and graphical interactives. It is also constructed on the software platform PubPub, developed by MIT to facilitate large-scale collaborative authorship and peer review, which will allow readers to explore multiple layers of content while annotating, commenting, and curating material that they can share with a wide community. The project tackles the novel’s age-old themes of creation and responsibility—and its contemporary relevance to artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and more—to foster an engaged community of readers and a new interactive reading experience timed to the novel’s 200th anniversary in 2018. The digital edition will offer a unique encounter between a great literary text and contemporary issues of science and technology refracted through an interactive digital medium that seeks to transform the reading experience and advance public understanding and community engagement with science and technology.

This grant funds a two-year study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) to help improve our understanding of public attitudes to science—especially how people encounter science in everyday life—and to suggest ways to improve outreach, particularly to underserved communities. This effort is part of a three-year Academy initiative, The Public Face of Science, to address various elements of the relationship between scientists and the public. The AAAS team will first compile data on public engagement with science, broadly defined to include watching film, theater, and other storytelling media with science and technology themes, as well as attendance at zoos, aquaria, and science museums, and use of the internet and social media to access scientific content. After conducting and publishing the baseline study, the AAAS will commission six papers from leading researchers to identify gaps in the existing data and ways to address them, with an emphasis on reaching underserved communities. These six papers will be presented and discussed at an Academy workshop in 2017, which will then generate a final report with recommendations for addressing gaps.