How Ducks Research

Tristan Phillips & Claire Putnam Public Speaking Literacy as a Counterstory     
When asked about what skills are most important for communication, often reading and writing come to mind. It’s not often in our education that we find public speaking to be a skill that is emphasized as important. As a result, people don’t often put time and energy into becoming better public speakers and are afraid of it when they are required to give presentations. In this study, we examine how students feel about public speaking. How do students who have received practice or training feel compared to those who don’t have that training?  The purpose of this study is to see how we can best tailor our public speaking workshops to the students. We want to get an idea of the perception people have of public speaking. More importantly, what qualities do people see as “good public speaking skills” and what does this tell us about public speaking literacy? We hope this data can be used by the university to allocate more resources toward public speaking education. 

Wesley Johnson Literacy Counterstory. It dictates the disparity in accessibility of literature.

Dylan Lew, Olivia Ward, Josh Weinrobe, Evan Wong Usage of Taboo Words in Online Settings of Varying Anonymity
This is an observational study to see how the use of taboo language on social media platforms changes depending on the anonymity of its users. To accomplish this, we examined the contents of comments on posts from three different social media platforms: Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. Each of these varies slightly in how much emphasis is put upon the user’s image, with Instagram emphasizing personal content production (selfies, snapshots, etc.) while Twitter and Reddit content being more impersonal (e.g. discussions, news, etc.). We hypothesized that users on platforms that promote personal content less would correlate with less frequent usage of taboo words, as usage of these words could be considered harmful to a user’s image. For several days, we collected 100 comments total across several posts and tallied the number of total swears present across all comments. We also categorized each swear into either definite swears, and non-definite swears whose taboo nature is debated in order to measure the intensity of swearing. Our preliminary results conform to our initial hypothesis, with Instagram comments having much lower amounts of swearing present than on Reddit or Twitter. This may indicate that anonymity plays a significant role in user behavior online regarding swearing, with more anonymity corresponding with more intense and/or frequent swearing.

Anna Mattson The Importance of Journalism in Communicating Climate Change
Journalism is critical in communicating the climate crisis.
For this project, I traveled to Cordova, a small fishing town in Southeastern Alaska, for two weeks to talk with locals about how glacial melt is affecting their lifestyles and how they are adapting to environmental changes happening in Alaska.
I discovered that while millions of salmon still come up the Copper River annually, rising temperatures have led to increased glacial melt, and fish counts are declining. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, in 2021, wild sockeye salmon numbers fell 37.4% below the recorded 10-year average.
The decline of salmon throughout Alaska concerns local communities, like the Native Village of Eyak, whose connection to the area grows out of generations of relationships with salmon.
Salmon are critical to Native Village of Eyak culture and subsistence practices. The Eyak are “dependent on the returning wild salmon to this day.”
Journalism acts as a conduit between scientists, climate events and people — it allows anyone to have a voice and holds institutions and lawmakers accountable.
As more extreme climate events occur, communicating these crises has never been so important, especially as it relates to elevating marginalized communities.
My piece, titled A State of Unease, will be published in Science Insider this summer.