Abstract: The first Ocean Sampling Day (OSD) took place on June 21, 2014. In a coordinated effort, an internationally distributed group of scientists collected samples from marine surface waters in order to study microbial diversity on a single day with global granularity. Concurrently, citizen scientists enriched the OSD initiative through the MyOSD project, providing additional…
Abstract: Crowdsourcing can efficiently complete tasks that are difficult to automate, but the quality of crowdsourced data is tricky to evaluate. Algorithms to grade volunteer work often assume that all tasks are similarly difficult, an assumption that is frequently false. We use a cropland identification game with over 2,600 participants and 165,000 unique tasks to…
Who doesn’t like a discussion of what exactly citizen science is? This paper is a timely reminder of the wide diversity of ways in which people participate in science, and the need to support all sorts of projects instead of merely repeating ourselves again and again. Abstract: In recent years, citizen science has gained popularity…
Abstract: The scientific value of citizen-science programs is limited when the data gathered are inconsistent, erroneous, or otherwise unusable. Long-term monitoring studies, such as Our Project In Hawai’i’s Intertidal (OPIHI), have clear and consistent procedures and are thus a good model for evaluating the quality of participant data. The purpose of this study was to…
Abstract: Kinsey Reporter is a global mobile app to share, explore, and visualize anonymous data about sex. Reports are submitted via smartphone, then visualized on a website or downloaded for offline analysis. In this paper we present the major features of the Kinsey Reporter citizen science platform designed to preserve the anonymity of its contributors,…
Abstract: Our natural environment is complex and sensitive, and is home to a number of species on the verge of extinction. Surveying is one approach to their preservation, and can be supported by technology. This paper presents the deployment of a smartphone-based citizen science biodiversity application. Our findings from interviews with members of the biodiversity…
One of the reasons we were excited to start Citizen Science Today was the chance to highlight commentary and results from a wide range of sources, but I didn’t expect us to be featuring a post from a mailing list. Nonetheless, Ben Brumfield’s careful response to the question ‘where are the failures?’ on a transcription…
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,…
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…