Manuel Schneider

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Schneider

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Manuel

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0000-0002-9645-8723

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Publications 1 - 9 of 9

How Interactive Visualizations Compare to Ethical Frameworks as Stand-Alone Ethics Learning Tools for Health Researchers and Professionals
Sleigh, Joanna; Ormond, Kelly; Schneider, Manuel; et al. (2023)
AJOB Empirical Bioethics
Background Despite the bourgeoning of digital tools for bioethics research, education, and engagement, little research has empirically investigated the impact of interactive visualizations as a way to translate ethical frameworks and guidelines. To date, most frameworks take the format of text-only documents that outline and offer ethical guidance on specific contexts. This study’s goal was to determine whether an interactive-visual format supports frameworks in transferring ethical knowledge by improving learning, deliberation, and user experience. Methods An experimental comparative study was conducted with a pre-, mid-, and post-test design using the online survey platform Qualtrics. Participants were university based early-stage health researchers who were randomly assigned to either the control condition (text-only document) or the experimental condition (interactive-visual). The primary outcome variables were learning, (measured using a questionnaire), deliberation (using cases studies) and user experience (measured using the SED/UD Scale). Analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics and mixed-effects linear regression. Results Of the 80 participants, 44 (55%) used the text-only document and 36 (45%) used the interactive-visual. Results of the knowledge-test scores showed a statistically significant difference between participants’ post-test scores, indicating that the interactive-visual format better supported understanding, acquisition, and application of the framework’s knowledge. Findings from the case studies showed both formats supported ethical deliberation. Results further indicated the interactive-visual provided an overall better episodic and remembered user experience compared with the text-only document. Conclusions Our findings show that ethical frameworks formatted with interactive and visual qualities provide a more pleasing user experience and are effective formats for ethics learning and deliberation. These findings have implications for practitioners developing and deploying ethical frameworks and guidelines (e.g., in educational or employee-onboarding settings), in that the knowledge generated can lead to more effective dissemination practices of normative guidelines and health data ethics concepts.
FLP-Mapping
Nairz, Knud; Zipperlen, Peder; Schneider, Manuel (2007)
Methods in Molecular Biology ~ Comparative Genomics
Digital Bioethics: Contextualizing Digital Technologies and Introducing Digital Methods for Empirical Research
Schneider, Manuel (2021)
Digital technologies introduce both opportunities and novel ethical issues in medical research, healthcare, and biotechnology. Moreover, discussions surrounding bioethical issues increasingly take place online, and the results of ethical deliberation and normative analysis are routinely disseminated through digital communication channels. Although empirical bioethics research has been growing over the last two decades, the field has only started to pay attention to the peculiarities of digital technologies and online spaces as well as the opportunities they offer. To foster inquiries into digital technologies, we need, on the one hand, to understand how bioethics and digital technologies relate to each other and, on the other hand, a methodological toolbox suited for this digital context. To start building such a toolbox, we can resort to other disciplines such as digital anthropology and computational social science to learn from their methodological innovations and adopt their digital methods for bioethical inquiries. In this thesis, I introduce a holistic approach to integrate digital technologies, both as research subjects and as tools, in the field of bioethics. In Chapter 1, I demonstrate the need for such an approach and provide a definition for digital bioethics, which incorporates three areas of bioethical interest: (1) the study of bioethical issues arising from digital technology applications, (2) the use of digital tools to disseminate bioethical content to stakeholders, and (3) the use of digital methods for empirical bioethics research. In Chapters 2, 3 and 4, I present case studies to exemplify what constitutes these three areas. Thereby, the focus lies on the use of digital methods in Chapter 4, which demonstrates the methods’ value for bioethics and illustrates how they integrate with normative considerations. Chapter 5 reports the development of a research platform that addresses challenges related to the digital methods case studies. The platform exhibits one avenue to support bioethics researchers in conducting digital methods research and, through that, to establish digital bioethics within the discipline. This thesis closes by discussing the case studies in the broader disciplinary context of bioethics and outlines a way forward for bioethics to go digital.
Understanding global challenges of rapidly developing technologies: digital methods for empirical bioethics
Schneider, Manuel; Blasimme, Alessandro; Vayena, Effy (2021)
Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai. Bioethica
Since the first successful application of the gene editing method based on the CRISPR/Cas-system, the technology has demonstrated great potential but also sparked a series of ethical concerns. Some of the issues are already known from earlier gene editing debates. However, the possibility of CRISPR to target genes with high accuracy and the easy application that allows a biohacker to experiment with a simple toolkit ordered online have introduced new ethical challenges. Further, thanks to preprint servers such as bioRxiv, biomedical research results are more and more accessible with little delay after an experiment was conducted. This enables researchers all over the world to participate and conduct their own experiments, making it a global endeavour. Not only does this make it difficult to monitor and regulate the technology but also speeds up the technological development significantly.CRISPR is only one of many examples of recent advancements with potentially high consequences for society at large. We think it is therefore paramount to identify new issues, understand their nature and assess their impact in a timely manner. In this paper, we propose the integration of digital methods into the toolbox of modern empirical bioethics and demonstrate their potential with two examples: We used 1) crawling and network analysis for hypothesis building, and 2) sentiment analysis to assess the public's attitudes towards CRISPR on Twitter over a six and a half years period.
Qualitative analysis of visual risk communication on twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic
Sleigh, Joanna; Amann, Julia; Schneider, Manuel; et al. (2021)
BMC Public Health
Background: The Covid-19 pandemic is characterized by uncertainty and constant change, forcing governments and health authorities to ramp up risk communication efforts. Consequently, visuality and social media platforms like Twitter have come to play a vital role in disseminating prevention messages widely. Yet to date, only little is known about what characterizes visual risk communication during the Covid-19 pandemic. To address this gap in the literature, this study’s objective was to determine how visual risk communication was used on Twitter to promote the World Health Organisations (WHO) recommended preventative behaviours and how this communication changed over time. Methods: We sourced Twitter’s 500 most retweeted Covid-19 messages for each month from January–October 2020 using Crowdbreaks. For inclusion, tweets had to have visuals, be in English, come from verified accounts, and contain one of the keywords ‘covid19’, ‘coronavirus’, ‘corona’, or ‘covid’. Following a retrospective approach, we then performed a qualitative content analysis of the 616 tweets meeting inclusion criteria. Results: Our results show communication dynamics changed over the course of the pandemic. At the start, most retweeted preventative messages came from the media and health and government institutions, but overall, personal accounts with many followers (51.3%) predominated, and their tweets had the highest spread (10.0%, i.e., retweet count divided by followers). Messages used mostly photographs and images were found to be rich with information. 78.1% of Tweets contained 1–2 preventative messages, whereby ‘stay home’ and ‘wear a mask’ frequented most. Although more tweets used health loss framing, health gain messages spread more. Conclusion: Our findings can inform the didactics of future crisis communication. The results underscore the value of engaging individuals, particularly influencers, as advocates to spread health risk messages and promote solidarity. Further, our findings on the visual characteristic of the most retweeted tweets highlight factors that health and government organisations should consider when creating visual health messages for Twitter. However, that more tweets used the emotive medium of photographs often combined with health loss framing raises concerns about persuasive tactics. More research is needed to understand the implications of framing and its impact on public perceptions and behaviours.
Visualizing an Ethics Framework: A Method to Create Interactive Knowledge Visualizations From Health Policy Documents
Sleigh, Joanna; Schneider, Manuel; Amann, Julia; et al. (2020)
Journal of Medical Internet Research
Background: Data have become an essential factor in driving health research and are key to the development of personalized and precision medicine. Primary and secondary use of personal data holds significant potential for research; however, it also introduces a new set of challenges around consent processes, privacy, and data sharing. Research institutions have issued ethical guidelines to address challenges and ensure responsible data processing and data sharing. However, ethical guidelines directed at researchers and medical professionals are often complex; require readers who are familiar with specific terminology; and can be hard to understand for people without sufficient background knowledge in legislation, research, and data processing practices. Objective: This study aimed to visually represent an ethics framework to make its content more accessible to its stakeholders. More generally, we wanted to explore the potential of visualizing policy documents to combat and prevent research misconduct by improving the capacity of actors in health research to handle data responsibly. Methods: We used a mixed methods approach based on knowledge visualization with 3 sequential steps: qualitative content analysis (open and axial coding, among others); visualizing the knowledge structure, which resulted from the previous step; and adding interactive functionality to access information using rapid prototyping. Results: Through our iterative methodology, we developed a tool that allows users to explore an ethics framework for data sharing through an interactive visualization. Our results represent an approach that can make policy documents easier to understand and, therefore, more applicable in practice. Conclusions: Meaningful communication and understanding each other remain a challenge in various areas of health care and medicine. We contribute to advancing communication practices through the introduction of knowledge visualization to bioethics to offer a novel way to tackle this relevant issue.
Digital bioethics: introducing new methods for the study of bioethical issues
Schneider, Manuel; Vayena, Effy; Blasimme, Alessandro (2023)
Journal of Medical Ethics
The online space has become a digital public square, where individuals interact and share ideas on the most trivial to the most serious of matters, including discussions of controversial ethical issues in science, technology and medicine. In the last decade, new disciplines like computational social science and social data science have created methods to collect and analyse such data that have considerably expanded the scope of social science research. Empirical bioethics can benefit from the integration of such digital methods to investigate novel digital phenomena and trace how bioethical issues take shape online. Here, using concrete examples, we demonstrate how novel methods based on digital approaches in the social sciences can be used effectively in the domain of bioethics. We show that a digital turn in bioethics research aligns with the established aims of empirical bioethics, integrating with normative analysis and expanding the scope of the discipline, thus offering ways to reinforce the capacity of bioethics to tackle the increasing complexity of present-day ethical issues in science and technology. We propose to call this domain of research in bioethics digital bioethics.
A Platform to Develop and Apply Digital Methods for Empirical Bioethics Research: Mixed Methods Design and Development Study
Schneider, Manuel (2022)
JMIR Formative Research
Background: The rise of digital methods and computational tools has opened up the possibility of collecting and analyzing data from novel sources, such as discussions on social media. At the same time, these methods and tools introduce a dependence on technology, often resulting in a need for technical skills and expertise. Researchers from various disciplines engage in empirical bioethics research, and software development and similar skills are not usually part of their background. Therefore, researchers often depend on technical experts to develop and apply digital methods, which can create a bottleneck and hinder the broad use of digital methods in empirical bioethics research. Objective: This study aimed to develop a research platform that would offer researchers the means to better leverage implemented digital methods, and that would simplify the process of developing new methods. Methods: This study used a mixed methods approach to design and develop a research platform prototype. I combined established methods from user-centered design, rapid prototyping, and agile software development to iteratively develop the platform prototype. In collaboration with two other researchers, I tested and extended the platform prototype in situ by carrying out a study using the prototype. Results: The resulting research platform prototype provides three digital methods, which are composed of functional components. This modular concept allows researchers to use existing methods for their own experiments and combine implemented components into new methods. Conclusions: The platform prototype illustrates the potential of the modular concept and empowers researchers without advanced technical skills to carry out experiments using digital methods and develop new methods. However, more work is needed to bring the prototype to a production-ready state.
Assessing Public Opinion on CRISPR-Cas9: Combining Crowdsourcing and Deep Learning
Müller, Martin; Schneider, Manuel; Salathé, Marcel; et al. (2020)
Journal of Medical Internet Research
Background: The discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9–based gene editing method has opened unprecedented new potential for biological and medical engineering, sparking a growing public debate on both the potential and dangers of CRISPR applications. Given the speed of technology development and the almost instantaneous global spread of news, it is important to follow evolving debates without much delay and in sufficient detail, as certain events may have a major long-term impact on public opinion and later influence policy decisions. Objective: Social media networks such as Twitter have shown to be major drivers of news dissemination and public discourse. They provide a vast amount of semistructured data in almost real-time and give direct access to the content of the conversations. We can now mine and analyze such data quickly because of recent developments in machine learning and natural language processing. Methods: Here, we used Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), an attention-based transformer model, in combination with statistical methods to analyze the entirety of all tweets ever published on CRISPR since the publication of the first gene editing application in 2013. Results: We show that the mean sentiment of tweets was initially very positive, but began to decrease over time, and that this decline was driven by rare peaks of strong negative sentiments. Due to the high temporal resolution of the data, we were able to associate these peaks with specific events and to observe how trending topics changed over time. Conclusions: Overall, this type of analysis can provide valuable and complementary insights into ongoing public debates, extending the traditional empirical bioethics toolset.

Publications 1 - 9 of 9

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