Storytelling essentials are stories that direct attention, trigger emotions, and prompt understanding. Citizen science has recently promoted the narrative approach of storytelling as a means of engagement of people of all ages and backgrounds in scientific research processes. We seek understanding about the typology of storytelling in citizen science projects and explore to what extent the tool of storytelling can be conceptualized in the approach of citizen science. In a first step, we investigated the use and integration of storytelling in citizen science projects in the three European
Who speaks for “citizen science” on Twitter? Which territory of citizen science have they made visible so far? This paper offers the first description of the community of users who dedicate their online social media identity to citizen science. It shows that Twitter users who identify with the term “citizen science” are mostly U.S. science professionals in environmental sciences, and rarely projects' participants. In contrast to the original concept of “citizen science”, defined as a direct relationship between scientists and lay participants, this paper makes visible a third category of
Identifying private gardens in the U.K. as key sites of environmental engagement, we look at how a longer-term online citizen science programme facilitated the development of new and personal attachments of nature. These were visible through new or renewed interest in wildlife-friendly gardening practices and attitudinal shifts in a large proportion of its participants. Qualitative and quantitative data, collected via interviews, focus groups, surveys and logging of user behaviours, revealed that cultivating a fascination with species identification was key to both ‘helping nature’ and wider
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Nirwan SharmaSam GreavesAdvaith SiddharthanHelen AndersonAnnie RobinsonLaura Colucci-GrayAgung Toto WibowoHelen BostockAndrew SalisburyStuart RobertsDavid SlawsonRené van der Wal
Online citizen science platforms increasingly provide types of infrastructural support previously only available to organisationally-based professional scientists. Other practices, such as creative arts, also exploit the freedom and accessibility afforded by the World Wide Web to shift the professional-amateur relationship. This paper compares communities from these two areas to show that disparate practices can learn from each other to better understand their users and their technology needs. Three major areas are discussed: mutual acknowledgement, infrastructural support, and platform
We developed a multi-touch interface for the citizen science video game Foldit, in which players manipulate 3D protein structures, and compared multi-touch and mouse interfaces in a 41-subject user study. We found that participants performed similarly in both interfaces and did not have an overall preference for either interface. However, results indicate that for tasks involving guided movement to dock protein parts, subjects using the multi-touch interface completed tasks more accurately with fewer moves, and reported higher attention and spatial presence. For tasks involving direct
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Thomas MuenderSadaab Ali GulaniLauren WestendorfClarissa VerishRainer MalakaOrit ShaerSeth Cooper
Effective classification of large datasets is a ubiquitous challenge across multiple knowledge domains. One solution gaining in popularity is to perform distributed data analysis via online citizen science platforms, such as the Zooniverse. The resulting growth in project numbers is increasing the need to improve understanding of the volunteer experience; as the sustainability of citizen science is dependent on our ability to design for engagement and usability. Here, we examine volunteer interaction with 63 projects, representing the most comprehensive collection of online citizen science
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Helen SpiersAlexandra SwansonLucy FortsonBrooke SimmonsLaura TrouilleSamantha BlickhanChris Lintott
In citizen science, user-centred development is often emphasised for its potential to involve participants in the development of technology. We describe the development process of the mobile app “Naturblick” as an example of a user-centred design in citizen science and discuss digital user feedback with regard to the users' involvement. We have identified three types of digital user feedback using qualitative content analysis: general user feedback, contributory user feedback and co-creational user feedback. The results indicate that digital user feedback can link UCD techniques with more
Although hundreds of citizen science applications exist, there is lack of detailed analysis of volunteers' needs and requirements, common usability mistakes and the kinds of user experiences that citizen science applications generate. Due to the limited number of studies that reflect on these issues, it is not always possible to develop interactions that are beneficial and enjoyable. In this paper we perform a systematic literature review to identify relevant articles which discuss user issues in environmental digital citizen science and we develop a set of design guidelines, which we evaluate
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Artemis SkarlatidouAlexandra HamiltonMichalis VitosMuki Haklay
We discuss the potential application to virtual citizen science of a recent standard (BS ISO 27500:2016 “The human-centred organisation”) which encourages the adoption of a sociotechnical systems perspective across a wide range of businesses, organizations and ventures. Key tenets of the standard concern taking a total systems approach, capitalizing on individual differences as a strength, making usability and accessibility strategic objectives, valuing personnel and paying attention to ethical and values-led elements of the project in terms of being open and trustworthy, social responsibility
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robert HoughtonJames SprinksJessica WardlawSteven BamfordStuart Marsh
The growing interest in citizen science has resulted in a new range of digital tools that facilitate the interaction and communications between citizens and scientists. Considering the ever increasing number of applications that currently exist, it is surprising how little we know about how volunteers interact with these technologies, what they expect from them, and why these technologies succeed or fail. Aiming to address this gap, JCOM organized this special issue on the role of User Experience (UX) of digital technologies in citizen science which is the first to focus on the qualities and
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Artemis SkarlatidouMarisa PontiJames SprinksChristian NoldMuki HaklayEiman Kanjo
This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Cyber-Human Systems Program in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems in the Directorate for Computer Science and Engineering, the Gravitational Physics Program in the Division of Physics in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and the Office of Integrative Activities.
This innovative project will develop a citizen science system to support the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (aLIGO), the most complicated experiment ever undertaken in gravitational physics. Before the end of this decade it will open up the window of gravitational wave observations on the Universe. However, the high detector sensitivity needed for astrophysical discoveries makes aLIGO very susceptible to noncosmic artifacts and noise that must be identified and separated from cosmic signals. Teaching computers to identify and morphologically classify these artifacts in detector data is exceedingly difficult. Human eyesight is a proven tool for classification, but the aLIGO data streams from approximately 30,000 sensors and monitors easily overwhelm a single human. This research will address these problems by coupling human classification with a machine learning model that learns from the citizen scientists and also guides how information is provided to participants. A novel feature of this system will be its reliance on volunteers to discover new glitch classes, not just use existing ones. The project includes research on the human-centered computing aspects of this sociocomputational system, and thus can inspire future citizen science projects that do not merely exploit the labor of volunteers but engage them as partners in scientific discovery. Therefore, the project will have substantial educational benefits for the volunteers, who will gain a good understanding on how science works, and will be a part of the excitement of opening up a new window on the universe.
This is an innovative, interdisciplinary collaboration between the existing LIGO, at the time it is being technically enhanced, and Zooniverse, which has fielded a workable crowdsourcing model, currently involving over a million people on 30 projects. The work will help aLIGO to quickly identify noise and artifacts in the science data stream, separating out legitimate astrophysical events, and allowing those events to be distributed to other observatories for more detailed source identification and study. This project will also build and evaluate an interface between machine learning and human learning that will itself be an advance on current methods. It can be depicted as a loop: (1) By sifting through enormous amounts of aLIGO data, the citizen scientists will produce a robust "gold standard" glitch dataset that can be used to seed and train machine learning algorithms that will aid in the identification task. (2) The machine learning protocols that select and classify glitch events will be developed to maximize the potential of the citizen scientists by organizing and passing the data to them in more effective ways. The project will experiment with the task design and workflow organization (leveraging previous Zooniverse experience) to build a system that takes advantage of the distinctive strengths of the machines (ability to process large amounts of data systematically) and the humans (ability to identify patterns and spot discrepancies), and then using the model to enable high quality aLIGO detector characterization and gravitational wave searches
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Vassiliki KalogeraAggelos KatsaggelosKevin CrowstonLaura TrouilleJoshua SmithShane LarsonLaura Whyte