Who's Misunderstanding Whom?

“But although multidisciplinary study of the media is now commonplace, it is striking how little effort has gone into examining the role the media play in the public understanding of science, which is itself, by definition, a multidisciplinary activity, though one very much still dominated by natural scientists themselves. All of this tends to reinforce the perception that, so far as scientists are concerned, the problem about science and the public is largely the latter’s ignorance of the former – what academics call the ‘deficit model’.” —Who’s Misunderstanding Whom? (Economic and Social Research Council (UK))

This is good content, but the website design doesn’t do it justice.

The page has no out-of-context title (it’s posted as “Untitled Document”), it uses frames (which means I can’t actually send you to the page from which I got the above quote — if I did, you’d be on an orphaned page and you’d have to hack the URL to navigate), and each chunk of text is a long string of paragraphs set in tiny, tiny type — no bold keywords or bulleted lists. There’s even a button that is labeled “click here”, that takes you to a page that lets you click again to download a PDF document.

Looks like the job of putting this text online was given to a talented brochure designer. While I applaud the publisher’s decision to make the full text of the PDF document available in HTML, the design of the website could use some improvement.