How the Smithsonian Institution Is Crowdsourcing History

by -

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 may sound odd, but plenty of people would rather parse the curly, old-fashioned handwriting of a bugle player in a Civil War military band than stream an old episode of Breaking Bad, as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s online Transcription Center. So far, 5,883 volunteers from around the world have transcribed more than 150,000 pages from over 1,000 projects.

This effort exists because of a simple fact: just digitizing something isn’t the last step in making something useful to scholars or the general population.

“Digitizing materials is really important but that’s not the only step to making them accessible,” says anthropologist Meghan Ferriter, project coordinator of the Transcription Center.

Launched in 2013, the project invites anyone with access to a computer to choose from a buffet of documents supplied by 14 of the Smithsonian’s libraries, archives and museums. Volunteers participate anonymously or create profiles, and each project comes with specific instructions. Participants read scanned pages and type their transcriptions into a field below. Many users work on multiple projects in small chunks, so that any given text is transcribed by a team. Transcriptions are reviewed by fellow volunteers and then signed off on by a Smithsonian staffer before being declared complete.

Research institutes have rushed in recent years to digitize their holdings, but without transcriptions, text-based assets can’t be searched. Turning hardcopies into searchable text opens up a new world of research possibilities and plenty of institutes are getting on board. Curious gourmands can take part in the New York Public Library’s effort to transcribe historic menus. (In 1901, a plate of calf’s liver and bacon in the Union Pacific dining car would set you back 40 cents.) The National Archives is crowdsourcing the transcription of photo captions from the National Forestry Service and works documenting Wounded Knee. You can dig into women’s diaries or the history of the transcontinental railroad via the University of Iowa Libraries or bivalve specimens through the Australia-based Atlas of Living.

Source: How the Smithsonian Institution Is Crowdsourcing History | Atlas Obscura

Editor’s Choice: Community-based Data Validation Practices in Citizen Science

by -

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 quality or not. This is critical information that should be used in the burgeoning development of data collecting apps. –LFF

Abstract:

Technology-supported citizen science has created huge volumes of data with increasing potential to facilitate scientific progress, however, verifying data quality is still a substantial hurdle due to the limitations of existing data quality mechanisms. In this study, we adopted a mixed methods approach to investigate community-based data validation practices and the characteristics of records of wildlife species observations that affected the outcomes of collaborative data quality management in an online community where people record what they see in the nature. The findings describe the processes that both relied upon and added to information provenance through information stewardship behaviors, which led to improved reliability and informativity. The likelihood of community-based validation interactions were predicted by several factors, including the types of organisms observed and whether the data were submitted from a mobile device. We conclude with implications for technology design, citizen science practices, and research.

Photo Credit: Image from article.

Source: Community-based Data Validation Practices in Citizen Science

Opening Access with Citizen Science in a Word

by -

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 violations of copyright laws. (The Sci-Hub server is believed to be in Russia and isn’t shutting down.) As leaders in the open access movement, the actions of Swartz and Elbakyan were about making scientific publications available for free.

Their solution is one approach to the problem of access to science. There is a related access problem that citizen science can help tackle.

Scientists communicate with each other through the peer-reviewed literature. One discovery sparks a new study that leads to another discovery and helps make sense of past discoveries, and so on, as our collective understanding grows. Because the exchange of ideas, insights, methodologies, and discoveries is critical to scientific progress, scientists must not be isolated from one another. Yet, scientists in less affluent parts of the world can feel the most isolated, often from not having enough financial resources to access the scientific literature.

The open access movement challenges the financial structure of the current publishing model in science, but there is more to access than freely getting scientific papers in hand (or on the screen). Access is more than viewing the words. Access also involves turning words into meaningful information. There are several ways that citizen science projects that focus on words contribute to various and sundry ways of opening access to science.

Source: Opening Access with Citizen Science in a Word | CitizenSci

How Citizen Science Changed the Way Fukushima Radiation is Reported

by -

“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 a chance after the disaster for humanity to innovate our thinking about energy, and that doesn’t seem like it’s happened.  But what we can change is the way we measure the environment around us.”

Franken and his founding partners found a way to turn their email chain, spurred by the tsunami, into Safecast; an open-source network that allows everyday people to contribute to radiation-monitoring.

“We literally started the day after the earthquake happened,” revealed Pieter. “A friend of mine, Joi Ito, the director of MIT Media Lab, and I were basically talking about what Geiger counter to get. He was in Boston at the time and I was here in Tokyo, and like the rest of the world, we were worried, but we couldn’t get our hands on anything. There’s something happening here, we thought. Very quickly as the disaster developed, we wondered how to get the information out. People were looking for information, so we saw that there was a need. Our plan became: get information, put it together and deseminate it.”

An e-mail thread between Franken, Ito, and Sean Bonner, (co-founder of CRASH Space, a group that bills itself as Los Angeles’ first hackerspace), evolved into a network of minds, including members of Tokyo Hackerspace, Dan Sythe, who produced high-quality Geiger counters, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s former Chief Technical Officer. On April 15, the group that was to become Safecast sat down together for the first time. Ozzie conceived the plan to strap a Geiger counter to a car and somehow log measurements in motion. This would became the bGeigie, Safecast’s future model of the do-it-yourself Geiger counter kit.

Source: How Citizen Science Changed the Way Fukushima Radiation is Reported

Editor’s Choice: A Life in the Trenches? The Use of Operation War Diary and Crowdsourcing Methods to Provide an Understanding of the British Army’s Day-to-Day Life on the Western Front

by -

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 Western Front war diaries to create data for analysis. This article discusses the methodology used in the project and then analyses (for the duration of the war) data for the six original British Expeditionary Force infantry divisions (1-6) and the first two cavalry divisions (1-2) to arrive in France. It highlights uses of the data on issues such as how much time was spent at the front and/or fighting, which appears to be 47% for infantry battalions, 62% for the artillery and 20% for the cavalry. At 46%, artillery days involving some fighting were more than twice the infantry’s at 20%. The article also highlights further research questions and ways in which fuller datasets could be compiled using crowdsourcing methods.

Photo Credit: Image from article.

Source: A Life in the Trenches? The Use of Operation War Diary and Crowdsourcing Methods to Provide an Understanding of the British Army’s Day-to-Day Life on the Western Front

Editor’s Choice: Scientists Should Talk to the Public, but Also Listen

by -

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 to be praying, but when God talks to us, we’re schizophrenic?”

So I ask: Why is it when scientists talk to the public, they’re said to be communicating, but when the public talks to scientists, they are crazy to think scientists will listen?

Traditional lessons on science communication address only one half of the possible exchange between scientists and the public. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, advises young scientists to develop their writing skills if they want to be effective science communicators. Alan Alda, the actor who also has a passion for explaining science suggests that scientists should practice story-telling and bring in strong feelings and emotions, channeling their inner ordinary person rather than their hyper-rational mindset as a scientist.

Its excellent advice, but what about the crazy half? Scientists should also practice listening to the public. Communication is a two-way street, so why should scientists turn a deaf ear to the people they are communicating with?

Case in point. The Flint Water Study, a citizen science project run by faculty and their students at Virginia Tech. Residents in Flint can follow a simple protocol to collect tap water in their home, ship it to Virginia Tech, and receive results about the water chemistry, including the concentration of lead, if present.

Source: Scientists Should Talk to the Public, but Also Listen – Scientific American Blog Network

Modeling crowdsourcing platforms to enable workforce dimensioning

by -

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 ago. However, in order to build sustainable services on top of this inter-cloud environment, scalability considerations have to be made. While cloud computing systems are already well studied in terms of dimensioning of the hardware resources, there still exists little work on the appropriate scaling of crowdsourcing platforms. This is especially challenging, as the complex interaction between all involved stakeholders, platform providers, workers and employers has to be considered. The contribution of this work is threefold. First, we develop a model for common crowdsourcing platforms and implement the model using a simulative approach, which is validated with a comparison to an analytic M[X]/M/c – ∞ system. In a second step, we evaluate inter-arrival times as well as campaign size distributions based on a dataset of a large commercial crowdsourcing platform to derive realistic model parameters and illustrate the differences to the analytic approximation. Finally, we perform a parameter study using the simulation model to derive guidelines for dimensioning crowdsourcing platforms, while considering relevant parameters for the involved stakeholders, i.e., the delay before work on a task begins and the work load of the workers.

Source: Modeling crowdsourcing platforms to enable workforce dimensioning

Editor’s Choice: Intelligent Sensing for Citizen Science

by -

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 Citizen Science has grown significantly over the last decade. Much of this interest can be traced to the provision of sophisticated platforms that enable seamless collaboration, cooperation and coordination between professional and amateur scientists. In terms of field research, smart-phones have been widely adopted, automating data collection and enriching observations with photographs, sound recordings and GPS coordinates using embedded sensors hosted on the device itself. Interaction with external sensor platforms such as those normally used in the environmental monitoring domain is practically null-existent. Remedying this deficiency would have positive ramifications for both the professional and citizen science communities. To illustrate the relevant issues, this paper considers a common problem, that of data collection in sparse sensor networks, and proposes a practical solution that would enable citizen scientists act as Human Relays thus facilitating the collection of data from such networks. Broader issues necessary for enabling intelligent sensing using common smart-phones and embedded sensing technologies are then discussed.

Photo credit: Ed Bourdon (CC).

Source: Intelligent Sensing for Citizen Science

Guest Editor’s Choice: Making Volunteers Guess

by -

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 online citizen science project that asks volunteers to classify images, you’ve undoubtedly run into this issue. Your gut tells you that you should accommodate your volunteers and allow them to bypass difficult images or to at least allow them to express their uncertainty. But as long as you are showing each image to multiple volunteers, you should resist this urge. Making your volunteers guess – even when they don’t want to – is a good thing: it increases overall project efficiency and provides you with good data. Reassure your volunteers and tell them that when they guess, they are doing a Good Thing for your project.

I wrote the following for our volunteer community shortly after Snapshot Serengeti [link: http://www.snapshotserengeti.org] was launched in 2012.  – Margaret Kosmala

Okay, okay. I hear you. I know it’s really frustrating when you get an image with a partial flank or a far away beast or maybe just an ear tip. I recognize that you can’t tell for sure what that animal is. But part of why people are better at this sort of identification process than computers is that you can figure out partial information; you can narrow down your guess. That partial flank has short brown hair with no stripes or bars. And it’s tall enough that you can rule out all the short critters. Well, now you’ve really narrowed it down quite a lot. Can you be sure it’s a wildebeest and not a buffalo? No. But by taking a good guess, you’ve provided us with real, solid information.

Source: We need an ‘I don’t know’ button!

Choosing and using citizen science guide

by -

Citizen science can be a very useful ‘tool’ for undertaking research and monitoring, while also engaging with many people. Citizen science is very diverse; there are many different ways for volunteers to get involved with real science. This diversity can be overwhelming for someone seeking to organize a citizen science activity and citizen science will not always be the most appropriate or optimal approach for undertaking scienti c research or monitoring.

Here we aim to provide guidance to support people considering using a citizen science approach, especially (but not necessarily restricted to) monitoring biodiversity and
the environment in the UK. It will help you decide whether citizen science is likely to be useful, and it will help you decide which broad approach to citizen science is most suitable for your question or activity.

Source: Choosing and using citizen science guide