Smithsonian staff members recently presented a poster at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, 11-15 February, 2016. The poster, entitled “The Impact of Coordinated Social Media Campaigns on Online Citizen Science Engagement” by Lesley Parilla (Cataloging Coordinator, The Field Book Project) and Meghan Ferriter, Ph.D. (Project Coordinator,…
It’s the end of the day, you’ve worked hard, and now you’re home and it’s time to relax. So you open up your laptop and settle in to transcribe some bee specimen labels. Or the packing list of a space shuttle. Or the field notes of a naturalist tromping through early 19th century Ireland. It…
This is an excellent example of the in-depth studies needed to move the field of citizen science forward. In this paper, it is made clear that the type of device used to record data inputs from citizen science projects has a large impact on whether the data collected by the citizen scientists are of research-grade…
When Aaron Swartz committed suicide in 2013, he was facing up to 35 years in prison and a one-million dollar fine for 13 felony counts related to violating copyright laws. Today the NY Southern District Court ordered the shut down of a website (Sci-Hub) run by Alexandra Elbakyan, a neuroscience graduate student from Kazakhstan, for…
“It appears the world-changing event didn’t change anything, and it’s disappointing,”said Pieter Franken, a researcher at Keio University in Japan (Wide Project), the MIT Media Lab (Civic Media Centre), and co-founder of Safecast, a citizen-science network dedicated to the measurement and distribution of accurate levels of radiation around the world, especially in Fukushima. “There was…
This paper is just one example showcasing the great strides that have been taken in the arena of “Citizen Historians” as more and more archives are opened up for transcription and metadata tagging by volunteers. –LFF Abstract: Operation War Diary, launched in 2014, is a crowdsourcing project in which ‘Citizen Historians’ tag First World War British Army…
The Flint water crisis has caused all sorts of reflections on citizen science practice; this blog, from Scientific American, examines the broad range of science communication that attempts to make dialogue between public and (professional) scientists a two-way street. –Chris Comedian Lily Tomlin once asked, “Why is it when we talk to God we’re said…
Abstract: Crowdsourcing platforms provide an easy and scalable access to human workforce that can, e.g., provide subjective judgements, tagging information, or even generate knowledge. In conjunction with machine clouds offering scalable access to computing resources, these human cloud providers offer numerous possibilities for creating new applications which would not have been possible a few years…
You hear variations of the same concern over and over: “can you please add a way to skip images?” “I wish I had a way to tell you that I’m really unsure on some pictures.” “Some of these are so hard. I’m worried that I’m going to mess up your data!” If you run an…
This article pushes forward a technology that would enable smart phones to be used as “relay” stations for sparse data collection networks. This is a great step for increasing citizen science opportunities centered on data collection. There is also a good general discussion of the use of embedded sensing technologies. — LFF Abstract: Interest in…