Citizen Science in the (Digital) Arts and Humanities

This module will look at the variety of practices within ‘citizen science’, how you as a humanist might get started working with them, what issues you might be wary of along the way and how Research Infrastructures can potentially help you.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this module, learners should be able to:

• Recognise and define common approaches to incorporating citizen science into research projects in the arts and humanities
• Be aware of strategies and tools for managing citizen input to research
• Recognise some of the possible challenges in such projects and be equipped to manage them
• Identify and plan for potential ethical challenges that may arise during the course of a citizen science project

Full Module Credits

This PARTHENOS Training modules was authored by Professor Jennifer Edmond (Trinity College Dublin), Eliza Papaki (Trinity College Dublin) and Dr. Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (DARIAH-EU).  It was edited by Vicky Garnett (Trinity College Dublin).

Please note: Authors are listed in alphabetical order, and listing does not reflect level of contribution

---

What is Citizen Science?

The advent of digital technologies opened up radically new potentials in innovation and dissemination in all scientific areas. Such new innovations, new connections between people and resources, and changes in practice have fundamentally altered how researchers collaborate, how knowledge is shared, and how science is organised.

In parallel to these technological changes, social shifts have also been altering how we conceive of research.  People (not just professional researchers) have become more accustomed to taking advantage of access to information, including scientific results.  For many, the opportunity to apply expert knowledge or take part in the expansion of research is a source of pleasure and empowerment.

In addition, and indeed in response to this, the management of research is also reaching to incorporate citizens into science.  For one thing, research that is publicly funded should be available as a public good. Furthermore, however, enabling non-professional researchers to improve their awareness of research and expand their critical facilities is also of general benefit to society and its members.  For these reasons, promoting and encouraging citizen science is a growing feature in national and European policy.

The vision of Citizen Science is an inspiring one.  Science becomes more available than ever to the broader society and this pertains not only to access to knowledge but also to access to knowledge creation. Citizens are no longer merely passive consumers, subjects or recipients of scientific endeavours but can also actively shape scientific matters or even bring new research questions and projects to the table.

Ted talk video: ‘Citizen Science – Everybody counts’ by Caren Cooper

The opportunities to participate in citizen science are boundless. There is a wide variety of projects currently out there that people choose to participate as a hobby, out of interest, or curiosity. Participating in all these kind of projects is easy. Often, volunteers only need to have a mobile phone or access to the internet to collect and submit observations and to see results. These emergent, accessible platforms make it possible to help the USGS measure and record earthquake tremors; join NASA’s effort in counting passing meteors, and even help monitor noise and light pollution in our communities. Platforms like Project NOAH, SciSpy and iNaturalist provide free mobile apps for participants to share photos and observations of wildlife and nature in their backyards, cities, and towns. The idea behind these projects is that anyone, anywhere can participate in meaningful scientific research. From counting stars in galaxies, monitoring city traffic, recognizing and tagging buildings in old photos, deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, building knowledge bases on Wikipedia or playing games to unfold protein structures, non-academic contributions to the advancement of science can take a huge variety of forms.

Definitions of Citizen Science

“Citizen Science is the inclusion of members of the public in some aspect of scientific research. “

(Eitzel, M. et al. 2017)

“As technology makes us more connected, we can only hope that science will become more accessible to more curious ppl and not just thought of an endeavour that only experts can understand or appreciate. The community of scientists can grow in all kinds fields and grow larger and wider reaching than ever.”

(Hank Green, videoblogger of the SciShow Youtube channel)

“Citizen Science refers to the general public engagement in scientific research activities when citizens actively contribute to science either with their intellectual effort or surrounding knowledge or with their tools and resources.”

(Sanz et al. 2014: 8)

“Citizen science bridges gaps by harnessing the power of people who are motivated by curiosity, a desire to advance research, or a concern about environmental conditions in their communities, then connecting them to projects that benefit from their energy and dedication.”

(SciStarter)

---

Connecting non-experts who are curious about the world with research projects is an extremely powerful instrument through which to find solutions for the societal problems of our age faster and investigate them on a much larger scale than it could be done in laboratories or research groups alone. For instance, researchers of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington had been investigating effective solutions to fold structures of certain proteins for a long time when they decided to release the problem to the public. In collaboration with the University of Washington Center for Game Science, in 2011 they launched the game Foldit, an online puzzle video game about protein folding. In just ten days, some 236.000 citizen scientists helped, as players of the game,  decipher the crystal structure of the M-PMV retroviral protease, a monkey virus which causes human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), a scientific problem that had been unsolved for 15 years.

Who is a Citizen Scientist?

In short, everyone is a Citizen Scientist who is working outside of the academia but is willing to voluntarily contribute to the advancement of science with their curiosity, time, effort, knowledge or even computing power (Yadav et al. 2017). Online gamers with or without programming skills, students and their parents seeking to gain hands-on experience outside of the classroom, retirees aiming to spend their leisure time in useful ways, policy-makers looking to help making informed decisions, or even prisoners can push new frontiers in our understanding of our world.

The availability and use of devices like smartphones with GPS, camera and microphone broaden participation in citizen science in ways previously not possible, as they allow different communities to collect data in an accurate, standardised and easily captured and contextualised manner, using such device-based capabilities as noise level or location and time stamps. Also, mobile apps and social media enable real-time dialogue between scientists and citizens (Newman et al. 2012).

Participants can be involved in Citizen Science project on many different levels. They can contribute to data collection or annotation but can also be engaged in some or all other steps the research process from the design of research questions through the analysis and interpretation of the gathered sources, even to the publication of research results either in peer-reviewed scientific topical journals or in publication fora dedicated to Citizen Science such as the Open Access peer-reviewed journal of the Citizen Science Association, the Citizen Science: Theory and Practice.  In many cases, they can use these scientific insights to influence policy decisions. To align research agendas and objectives with real community priorities, citizens can also decide about the questions and topics to investigate either in collaboration with professional scientists or alone. In fact, the most effective Citizen Science programs are built on this alignment and allow the different communities to investigate issues they are really passionate about (see e.g. literary wikis collectively developed by fans of particular authors or works) or directly impact their everyday lives (see e.g. investigations in local history (see the case study below) or urban ecology projects (e.g. Project Pigeonwatch, Celebrate Urban Birds, Project BudBurst

Contrary to what the term ‘science’ might suggest for native English speakers, Citizen Science projects do not pertain only to STEM disciplines, however. The study of human cultures and societies – subject areas of Cultural Heritage and Humanities – also attract many participants to engage via oral history, transcription of manuscripts, tagging old texts, photos, or works of art, building dictionaries collectively, recognizing archaeological sites, uncovering shocking episodes of local history or crowdsourcing digital collections of letters. You can learn more about such projects below.  That said, much of the guidance material available either focusses on hard science applications and/or gives mostly generic guidance. In this module, we will draw out lessons for the researcher looking to develop a citizen science project specifically in the arts and humanities, as well as indicating what supports might be available for such endeavours through research infrastructures such as CLARIN, DARIAH, and E-RIHS.

Benefits of Citizen Science

Building societies where practices of knowledge creation are not locked away from the public, and therefore Citizen Science can flourish is a good investment, a true case of win-win. Beyond the obvious advantage of creating new knowledge that works both for science and the society, it benefits societies, research, and the participants themselves in numerous ways:

Benefits for Participants

• Access to scientific research has never been more important to provide the basis for debates on critical issues such as climate change, global health, or the crisis of democratic values. A deeper and broader understanding of how science operates is a powerful asset against fake news.
• Citizen Science is a form of simultaneous learning and knowledge making. It enables people to enhance their scientific literacy in fields that are truly relevant to them.
• By participating in Citizen Science projects, citizens can gain a greater say in and commitment to scientific and research matters.
• It empowers communities to make a difference in their immediate environment. and thus raise their social well-being.
• Citizen science bridges gaps by harnessing the power of people who are motivated by curiosity or have a desire to advance research, then connecting them to projects that benefit from their energy and dedication.

Benefits for Researchers

• Opening up your research processes to the public can lead to a discovery that you or your research group could never achieve alone. In the past, collecting large samples of data for research was the most challenging task of any initiative. However, with today’s interconnected world, thousands of people from around the globe can remotely contribute to a study and provide, analyse, or report data that researchers can use. Public participation enables investigations that would not otherwise be possible.
• It allows you to investigate your research questions more deeply, on a much larger scale. Engaging interested citizens in the collection and analysis of your data you can create large data sets and complete labour-intensive tasks much faster and more efficiently.
• Input from non-experts can provide you with unexpected insights that can take you to new research questions. develop new research questions.
• Including Citizen Science aspects into your project makes a clear statement that you care about the societal impact of your research and how it works for the public.
• Citizen Science is a great way to make your research more accessible to a wider audience and increase its reach.
• It build pathways by which the utility and impact of Humanities research can be recognised.

Benefits for Society

• Citizen Science helps to make sure that scientific agendas are well aligned with grand societal challenges and thus it enhances societal trust in science and helps funding bodies to make a better investment into research development and open innovation.
• It is a powerful tool to make the interface between academia and the public more permeable and transparent.
• The democratisation of access to knowledge and knowledge production positively impacts social mobility.
• Citizen science encourages people to take a stake in the world around them. As a result, the hope is that this informed public will play a valuable role in influencing larger decisions about science policy.

Case Study: Uncovering Historical Stories fro Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, Galway

Click to expand (PLEASE NOTE: Contains upsetting details)

The power of Citizen Science in uncovering historical facts and to heal wounds from the past: The case of Catherine Corless and the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Galway.

One of Ireland’s recent historical discoveries with the greatest social and political impact was achieved by a local citizen historian, Catherine Corless. She had long heard the stories about deaths of children at a former home for unmarried mothers run by the Bon Secours Sisters in Tuam, County Galway from 1925-1961. To raise local awareness of the tragedy and uncover the truth about the children raised by the nuns, she decided to properly investigate the deaths that occurred at the mother and baby home. In her spare time, she visited libraries, churches and council offices and dug deep into their archives and records. After several unsuccessful attempts, she managed to gain information from the registry office in Galway about the death certificates for children in the home. As a next step, she uncovered the fact that none of the children from this list of 796 names were buried in local cemeteries. Comparing old maps of the site, she managed to identify a former septic tank and bring the unmarked mass grave to light, leading to the discovery of the remains of hundreds of children, aged from new-borns to nine years old.

After receiving strong media coverage, the shocking discovery came to both national and global attention and it provoked a significant reaction within Irish society, causing serious questions to be raised about the role of both the Catholic Church and the state in the tragedy.

The rigorous and successful work done by Corless clearly points on the potential power of Citizen Science in uncovering historical facts and local traumas buried in the collective unknown and entering them into the national historical record. Bringing to light questions of deep relevance to the whole society, her research enabled local and broader communities to heal wounds from the past.

At the same time, Corless’s quest to uncover the truth about the Tuam mother and baby home also points out some of the serious difficulties non-professional researchers working outside of the academia must face during their endeavours. In an interview she gave to the Irish newspaper The Journal, she reported on many unsuccessful attempts to obtain information both from the church and the city councils. In one case, giving access to the records was explicitly denied because she didn’t have a university degree. In addition, Corless had to pay €4 for each of the 796 death certificate copies issued by the city council on her own.  Greater recognition for citizen science from professional researchers can help individuals such as Catherine Corless to pursue their questions and share their results more efficiently and effectively.

Challenges of Conducting a Citizen Science project

Citizen Science has enormous potential to change knowledge production for the better. To realise these promises (or maybe more importantly, to stay realistic regarding its potentials), it is also important to recognise and be aware of its limitations and challenges.

1. Support Structures around Citizen Science are not yet Fully Established

A significant part of these strategic challenges follows from the fact that Citizen Science is still a relatively young, evolving discipline and community of practice (for a historical overview, see Science Europe’s Briefing paper on Citizen Science).

Consequently, there is a need to establish and strengthen its support instruments, for instance,

• to develop innovative financing models that guarantee sustainable support for Citizen Science projects and meet the needs of a range of different stakeholders – for example, although citizen science is included in European research funding projects as an eligible method to fund, many national funders do not have schemes that can accommodate it.
• to strengthen training around Citizen Science both inside and outside of academia; or
• to strengthen synergies between Citizen Science and science communication (source: the Green Paper Citizen Science Strategy 2020 for Germany )

2. Mixed Attitudes Towards the Value of Citizen Science both among Researchers and the Participants

Some members of the scientific community remain sceptical about the idea that the public can make useful contributions to science (for a detailed discussion, see e.g. Golumbic et al. 2017).  Such concerns are partially explained by one of the main methodological challenges of Citizen Science projects, namely, the reliability of and trust towards citizen-generated data. On the other side of the trust gap, the absence of alignment between community priorities and research agendas can easily keep communities away from Citizen Science projects when they find little resonance between the scholarly investments into Citizen Science and their own community priorities. This is especially true for minorities or groups that have been historically underrepresented in science (see Pandya 2012), the lack of whom can, in turn, seriously undermine the diversity potential of expert/non-expert collaborations and can amplify existing biases in science.  The tweets below critically reflect on such potential biases in a machine-learning context.

Carefully designed projects and the increasing number of Citizen Science success stories and working practices, as well as the development of support structure around it, have the potential to enhance mutual trust towards Citizen Science, however.

Challenges in Managing the Ethics of Citizen Science

Managing a project that involves non-professional researchers can lead to the rise a number of ethically challenging issues. Done badly, citizen science can lead to unintentional exploitation of volunteer labour, misuse of public data and the public itself, a lack of proper credit being given and, in the end , it could unintentionally strengthen the lay–expert barriers that Citizen Science  is being promoted to overcome. Meeting these challenges will be discussed in more detail in the ‘Giving credit’ subsection

• Methodological Pitfalls and Unexpected Challenges when Conducting a Citizen Science Project

Opening up the research process for large-scale external collaboration with those who are not familiar with the field-specific framework adds extra dimensions and complexities to the project design. Consequently, academic-led Citizen Science projects are much less flexible for incremental changes and improvisations in design and implementation. In contrast to traditional research projects, as a leader of a Citizen Science project, you may not be able to fully control all aspects of its operation such as the realisation of volunteer contributions (NB: as we saw above, this can also be seen as an advantage of Citizen Science endeavours). Thinking and planning ahead however can significantly reduce the chances of ending up with the unexpected difficulties or accidental bias that poses a risk to meeting your research objectives.

The two most frequently reported sets of methodological issues to resolve in the Citizen Science discourse, regardless of disciplines or project types, are a. Diversifying and optimising participation and b. Ensuring data quality.  

• Diversifying and optimising participation

Finding a good balance between diversifying participation and ensuring that applications are suited to the project is not always easy. As Wiggine et al. (2012:301) remarks, “Despite their broader reach, new technologies may inadvertently create barriers that widen the ‘digital divide’ between those adopting/having the technology and those avoiding/lacking it (Ess and Sudweeks 2001). [..] As citizen-science programs adopt new technologies, sensitivity to social, cultural, economic, and political factors will be critical to the success of projects that cross boundaries and involve local/traditional ecological knowledge (Ballard et al. 2008).”

How and where to engage people to your project, how to train them adequately for their task, how to make the tools they need accessible and easy to use, which kind of support they might need during their contributions, how to keep them motivated and how to reward them for their work (e.g. via web-based acknowledgement by posting names or login names online) are fundamental aspects of Citizen Science project design.

• Ensuring data quality

Ensuring that the methods used and quality of data produced are robust enough to make participants’ contributions valid for research is a universally recognised challenge in Citizen Science projects. In most cases, the “success” or “failure” of a citizen science project will be determined by the degree to which data collected by participants matches with researchers’ standards and expectations (for an extended discussion, see e.g. Gollan 2013).  For instance, building bridges between the expert vocabularies used to describe materials in formal institutional settings and community descriptions is a crucial component is in the design of Citizen Science projects in the Cultural Heritage domain. Starting with small-scale pilot projects, the outcome of which can help fine-tuning the study design, establishing well-explained and concise data protocols (e.g. clear guidelines on the orthography of place names in tagging tasks, transcription protocols such as consistent transcription guidelines for abbreviations), providing training and close supervision for the contributors are all assets to (co)produce more reliable and satisfactory crowdsourced data. Still, as Riesch and Potter (2013) reminds us, the simplest guarantee for quality data collection can be ensured at a much earlier step of the research workflow, namely by asking appropriate research questions. By specifically addressing questions that can be answered through relatively simple and accessible surveys regardless of age and ability, that there is little that can go wrong.

Watch!  Challenges and Unexpected Outcomes of the Transcribe Bentham Project

Prof. Melissa Terras (Transcribe Bentham project) discusses the challenges and unexpected outcomes that have arisen during the Transcribe Bentham project.

To find out more about the Transcribe Bentham project, click here: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/

Case Study: ExploreAT! Strategies to enhance data quality and reduce uncertainties in the Citizen-driven Archive Topotek

The aim of the exploreAT! project is to explore, preserve and archive a corpus of Bavarian dialect samples (DBÖ) collected between 1911 and 1998 in the region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and open it up for analysis and insight in different contexts such as cultural studies or collaborative multilingual explorations via Linked Open Data technology.

One of the community groups connected to the exploreAt! project is the citizen-driven archive Topothek, a network of Wikipedia-like local history collections collecting digitised images/photos, audio, video material and texts about the history of the particular place and its locals. The collections are made searchable and interconnectable with other databases via community tagging. These tags are instrumental as they form a tissue and enable interlinking real-world objects contained in the Topothek collections with the language data and thus enrich the corpus to obtain a more inclusive view on the rural world as portrayed in the data.

A recently published article offers interesting insights into the challenges in using community tags as connection points between the Topothek and other sources such as the DBÖ language data and also introduced the use of new technologies such as computer vision to overcome some of these identified problems. A major factor that affected the tagging quality was a general one, namely, the varying quality and precision of the tags. The different degrees of specificity in community tags however also uncovered another challenge having to do with the difference in what is interesting and relevant for the citizens curating the Topothek database and what is relevant for researchers and archivists. For instance, tagging simple objects shown on the pictures (e.g. animal, fruit etc.) is crucial for finding things within the archive. By contrast, community-generated tags tended to contain much more precise information on places, roles of persons or individual names but these, lacking further information or context, were not always easy to meaningfully integrate into the sake of analysis or keep them to the interest of the broader community.

As a partial solution to these problems, the project designers introduced a range of easy-to-use, commercial computer vision tools that could be harnessed both by citizen scientists and archivists or researchers to align different levels of specificity, to overcome uncertainties in the data generated by tagging and also to better align the needs of different stakeholder groups. You can read more about the project and success rate of using computer vision tools here.

Further Learning for this section

Click to expand

• A roadmap for broadening e-Infrastructure deployment to support the participation of citizens in Humanities and Heritage Science projects: CIVIC EPISTEMOLOGIES – Development of a Roadmap for Citizen Researchers in the Age of Digital Culture https://www.civic-epistemologies.eu/
• Alexander Noack et al.: Transcriba – A Citizen Science Project Supporting the Transcription of Manuscripts through Gamification, 2018 In: Proceedings of the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2017 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322721621_Storytelling_in_Citizen_Science_-_Potential_for_Science_Communication_and_Practical_Guideline
• Anne Bowser and Lea Shanley, New Visions in Citizen**Science, 2013, chapter Citizen Archivists. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/new-visions-citizen-scienc
• Betsy Rymes, and Andrea L. Leone: Citizen Sociolinguistics: A New Media Methodology for Understanding Language and Social Life, 2014 https://goo.gl/QHX4xC
• Eitzel, M.V., et al. : Citizen Science Terminology Matters: Exploring Key Terms. 2017 https://theoryandpractice.citizenscienceassociation.org/article/10.5334/cstp.96/. DOI:  DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.96
• Günter Mühlberger et al. Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) of Historical Documents as a Shared Task for Archivists, Computer Scientists and Humanities Scholars. The Model of a Transcription & Recognition Platform (TRP) (preprint), https://www.academia.edu/8601748/Preprint_Handwritten_Text_Recognition_HTR_of_Historical_Documents_as_a_Shared_Task_for_Archivists_Computer_Scientists_and_Humanities_Scholars.The_Model_of_a_Transcription_and_Recognition_Platform_TRP
• Interview with Catherine Corless – https://www.thejournal.ie/catherine-corless-tuam-mother-and-baby-home-3268501-Mar2017/
• Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World – A vision for Europe, European Commission Directorate-General for Research & Innovation, 2016 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/open-innovation-open-science-open-world-vision-europe
• Riesch and Potter 2013: Citizen science as seen by scientists: Methodological, epistemological and ethical dimensions https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963662513497324?casa_token=Ide0u0GFUJwAAAAA%3AOkcaZAtLxWEPVEX4m9see0K72uLlq0KmySEpGXxdzBJW6zaPlWjbwblqcH9FtHuYpWAIR_6aY0-r
• Scassa and Chung, 2015: Best practices for managing intellectual property rights in citizen science: A guide for researchers and citizen scientists https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/research_brief_guide_for_researchers.pdf
• Serrano, Fermín & Sanz, Francisco & Schaefer, Teresa & Silva, Cândida & Kieslinger, Barbara. (2014). White Paper on Citizen Science. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271130935_White_Paper_on_Citizen_Science
• Susan Schreibman: From Archives to Activism: Why Public Engagement is Essential for the Future of the Humanities, 2017. Podcast) https://rs.cms.hu-berlin.de/rv-dh2017/pages/view.php?ref=37&k=0e3762dc43 Slides: http://www.ifdhberlin.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Schreibman_DH-Ringvorlesung-WS-17-18_Archives-to-Activism_2018-02-13.pdf
• Susanne Hecker et al.: Urban Archaeology (Stadtarchäologie Wien), Science and Volunteers – A Challenge, 2018 In: Proceedings of the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2017 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322721621_Storytelling_in_Citizen_Science_-_Potential_for_Science_Communication_and_Practical_Guideline
• Ten Principles of Citizen Science from the European Citizen Science Association, 2015 https://ecsa.citizen-science.net/engage-us/10-principles-citizen-science
• “Trust yourself!” How the Citizen Science movement proposes to rethink of the relationship between citizens and the public (LSE Impact blog)  http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/03/13/trust-yourself-how-the-citizen-science-movement-proposes-a-radical-rethink-of-the-relationship-between-scientists-and-the-public/

Citizen Science in different national contexts:

• Austria: Open Innovation Strategy for Austria, BMWFW, Vienna, 2016 http://openinnovation.gv.at/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/OI_Barrierefrei_Englisch.pdf
• Germany: Hecker, Susanne & Bonn, Aletta & Richter, Anett & Vohland, Katrin & Pettibone, Lisa & Brandt, & Feldmann, Reinart & Göbel, Claudia & Grefe, & Hecker, & Hennen, Leonhard & Hofer, Heribert & Kiefer, & Klotz, Stefan & Kluttig, & Krause, & Küsel, Kirsten & Liedtke, Christa & Mahla, Anika & walther, doreen. (2016). Green Paper Citizen Science Strategy 2020 for Germany. Berlin, 2016. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303458477_Green_Paper_Citizen_Science_Strategy_2020_for_Germany
• Ireland: “‘Engaged Research’ – a Joined-up Approach to Tackling the Big Issues.” Irish Research Council, 2017 http://research.ie/2017/01/12/engaged-research-a-joined-up-approach-to-tackling-the-big-issues/.
• Pettibone and Vohland, Citizen Science for all: A Guide for Citizen Science Practitioners, 2016

Citizen Science and Research Infrastructures

Creating a well-functioning ecosystem that allows new forms of co-creation between professional researchers and citizen scientists is an essential success criterion for Citizen Science. Opening up research processes to actors outside academia requires the empowering of citizens with access not only to research outputs but also to the key sources of scholarly knowledge creation: research data and research tools like virtual research environments.

Research Infrastructures in these research fields, like DARIAH for digitally enabled Arts and Humanities, CLARIN for language and text-based studies, E-RIHS for heritage science, CESSDA for Social Sciences, and OPERAS for scholarly communication, have proven potential to connect expert specialists and resources with the public. These organizations play a vital role in opening up resources (databases, corpora, software, research tools and services to annotate, analyse, connect, store, and share data but also repositories and training materials) that are usually only available for established scientists with institutional e-mail accounts and affiliations for broader collaborations. Open data management and storage services provided by research infrastructures like EUDAT’s B2Drop repository can be essential services for hosting and connecting data produced by independent researchers and citizen scientists who do not have access to institutional services.

CLARIN

From a Citizen Science point of view, the Endangered Language Archive (ELAR), a founding member of the CLARIN-UK consortium, is an especially valuable resource as it allows citizens to connect with their own fragile heritage through a digital repository specialising in preserving and publishing endangered language documentation materials from around the world.

Case Study: How the CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory Enables Citizens to Collect, Analyse and Store Language Data

A significant advantage of the CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory over the institutionally hosted resources is that it is openly available for independent or non-specialist researchers around the globe. They can find all types of resources they need to conduct research on language resources – data sets, corpora, web services for processing, analysing and visualising data, storing capacities – on the same federated and easy-to search platform. All the necessary know-how is included in the tools which help decide which tools best suited for research. The video below illustrates a fictional use case and shows how researchers (experts and non-experts alike) can find answers to the question of how the use of nouns by females differ from male members of the parliament.

From language data to insight: the CLARIN use case:

Despite all that these services and tools research infrastructures can offer to non-academic researchers interested in the Social Sciences and Humanities, it seems that the uptake and use of such services is not yet a common practice. A possible reason for that is despite the open availability of webinars and other training materials, the navigation in such complex environments still requires a great deal of expert epistemic knowledge and the general awareness of their availability is also limited.

Europeana

In a Cultural Heritage context, Europeana has a long tradition of collaboration with the broader public. Operating as  ‘the digital door to European cultural heritage’, the platform collects and provides access to digitised material of more than 30 million items. This rich source of is open to use and reuse in a great variety of educational and research contexts, and has also harnessed citizen knowledge to grow the range of perspectives it can represent.

Case Study: Europeana 1914-1918

One of Europeana’s most far-reaching Citizen Science programmes has been the 1914-18 collection day, which invited citizens Europe-wide to present family artefacts, such as photos, diaries medals, recordings or postcards from the period of 1914-1918 and their associated stories. To develop a deeper understanding of this important period of European history and show a plurality of narratives about the Great War, the conflict and all perspectives, from the front line as well as the homefront, a substantial digital collection of material was gathered from the national library collections of ten libraries and other partners in eight countries that found themselves on different sides of the historic conflict. Contributions from the public were collected, digitised and curated by experts from the affiliate network of archives who then made the digital objects openly available on the Europeana 1914-1918 website. The project’s results were published in 2014, at the centenary of outbreak of WW1, but it is still open to for the public for contribution. Its success clearly shows the potential of Europeana as an aggregator infrastructure in Citizen Science. On the one hand, to reach diverse communities in different European countries, having a rich network of partner institutions was an essential success criterium. On the other hand, Europeana’s interoperability framework enabled the bringing together diverse sources from a variety of institutions to a central platform.

To make public involvement into collection enrichment broader and easier, Europeana is now developing a crowdsourcing platform that will enable citizens to transcribe and enrich cultural heritage material from Europeana Collections and national aggregator portals.

Further information: https://pro.europeana.eu/project/enrich-europeana

Wikidata: An Increasingly Strong Infrastructural Link Between Citizen Scientists and Cultural Heritage Institutions

Europeana also plays a role in exploring the potentials of Wikidata as a platform for galleries, libraries, museums and archives to enrich, connect and openly share their cultural heritage collections.

Wikidata is a multilingual free knowledge base, a main pool for sharing scholarly and technical information that can be read edited both by humans and machines. The ambition of the endeavour is not less than reflecting “the sum of all human knowledge” in a structured and interconnected network of knowledge graphs that can be displayed in any language. The interoperability framework underlying these knowledge graphs is flexible enough to accommodate information from all areas of knowledge (including all domains of scholarly and scientific knowledge or even indigenous knowledge) and allows for the Wikidata user communities to iteratively and dynamically shape it via their inputs. These properties enable Wikidata to go beyond its role as a support data base for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the other wikis of the Wikimedia movement, and acquire the status of a major open data platform for massive online collaboration that is open to anyone in the world with an internet connection to learn, to share their own knowledge, to link further resources to the knowledge graphs or to build services, tools or cool applications on the top if it.

The participation of a global and multilingual communities of volunteer data creators and curators on Wikidata can be easily interpreted as an en masse instantiation of Citizen Science. Building on Wikidata allows individual projects to overcome many methodological challenges and struggles they might face by using a smaller, isolated virtual environment as it increase the capabilities of both professional and citizen scientists to collaborate with each other in mutually beneficial ways (for further details, see Mietchen et al. 2015). First, project designers do not have to struggle to find sufficiently large and diverse communities of contributors. Second, an ecosystem of infrastructure, technologies and tools already established and made available by Wikidata. Third, the use of Wikidata standards, vocabularies and know-hows as shared common grounds for data creation and curation reduce the risks of insufficient data production and ensures data quality.

The values in connecting collections with Wikidata and opening up their descriptions for community curation are increasingly recognized and explored by the cultural heritage sector worldwide. They are able to benefit from the Wikimedia and Wikidata community efforts in several ways.

• Integrating their collection descriptions with Wikidata enables them to share and amplify knowledge collected in their institutions outside of the walls of their institution and embed this knowledge in a larger context of related knowledge systems.
• It enables GLAM collections around the world to be mapped with each other and establish connections and links between them that would remain hidden otherwise. Uncovering synergies between different institutions holdings and curation practices help them to reduce duplicate work.
• Community curation of descriptions help institutions to structure and enrich the metadata of cultural heritage objects from a different source. As a result, their holdings become better searchable and discoverable. Extra contextual information gained this way can help even the curators to discover new correlations and connections in their material.
• Opening up collection descriptions for community enrichment also involves opening them up for different perspectives with different knowledge representation systems. For instance, as Alex Stinson remarks in her blog post Wikidata in Collections: Building a Universal Language for Connecting GLAM Catalogs, fitting instances of indigenous knowledge into library catalogues or authority vocabularies is an uneasy task that can easily result in inappropriate and insufficient description of cultural content. By contrast, Wikidata, as she puts it, “creates opportunities for community participation and allows for a greater diversity in the way people can be represented in data, giving people the power to shape knowledge about their own communities.”

Over the past years, a growing community has formed on Wikidata around the cultural heritage domain. You can learn more about and join them here:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Cultural_heritage

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Wikidata.GLAM/

Further Learning for this Section

Click to expand

• How to donate data to Wikidata? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZVrhkoj6BM
• What Dutch GLAMS want from Wikidata: https://pro.europeana.eu/post/what-dutch-glams-want-from-wikidata
• Wikidata in Collections: Building a Universal Language for Connecting GLAM Catalogs: https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/wikidata-in-collections-building-a-universal-language-for-connecting-glam-catalogs-59b14aa3214c
• Enabling Open Science: Wikidata for Research (Wiki4R): https://riojournal.com/articles.php?journal_name=rio&id=7573

Creating a Citizen Science Project

Creating projects to achieve social and scientific objectives requires deliberate design that is attentive to diverse interests, including why and how members of the public would even want to be involved.

According to the Citizen Science toolkit, the practical steps in creating a Citizen Science project are:

• Scope your problem
• Design a project
• Build a community
• Manage your data
• Sustain and improve

The sections that follow will expand upon each of these stages in the context of an arts and humanities-focussed citizen science project.

What Kind of Project?

There is a wide variety of existing Citizen Science projects that you could join, as well as various platforms that can support and host your project development. From SciStarter to Zooniverse, over a thousand Citizen Science projects have been developed and documented worldwide on all kinds of topics. Browsing these platforms can help or inspire you on new topics and research questions that have not been addressed yet. All this activity can also act as source of knowledge, of guidelines and best practices on how new projects can be best designed to be successful.

According to the literature, the different types of Citizen Science projects are mainly defined by the degree of public participation. This analysis leads to five project models:

• Contractual projects, where communities ask professional researchers to conduct a specific scientific investigation and report on the results;
• Contributory projects, which are generally designed by scientists and for which members of the public primarily contribute data;
• Collaborative projects, which are generally designed by scientists and for which members of the public contribute data but also help to refine project design, analyse data, and/or disseminate findings;
• Co-Created projects, which are designed by scientists and members of the public working together and for which at least some of the public participants are actively involved in most or all aspects of the research process; and
• Collegial contributions, where non-credentialed individuals conduct research independently with varying degrees of expected recognition by institutionalised science and/or professionals.

To clarify the different role of public participation in these project types, you can refer to this table (adapted from from Shirk et al.)  matching specific tasks with project types where X = public included in task and (X) = public sometimes involved in the task.

Aspects of scientific research/monitoring process:	Contractual Projects	Contributory Projects:	Collaborative Projects:	Co-Created Projects:	Collegial Projects
Choose or define question(s) for study	X			X	X
Gather information and resources	(X)			X	X
Develop explanations (hypotheses)				X	X
Design data collection methodologies			(X)	X	X
Collect samples and/or record data		X	X	X	X
Analyse samples			X	X	X
Analyse data		(X)	X	X	X
Interpret data and draw conclusions	(X)		(X)	X	X
Disseminate conclusions/translate results into action	(X)	(X)	(X)	X	X
Discuss results and ask new questions	X			X	X

However, above and beyond this participation-orientated typology for defining Citizen Science project types, newer research has attempted to define types of Citizen Science projects by combining both primary goal orientation and degree of virtuality.  As the field progresses and further develops, research to analyse and document this field will continue to expand into investigating new approaches.  Our still emerging understanding need not keep you from engaging in citizen science, however, though being aware of new directions for research and infrastructure development to support public engagement in scientific research will help you to take early advantage of relevant new tools and insights.

Realising Co-Creation Methods

The idea of citizen science has changed over time, and encompasses a lot of different modes of engagement.  Allowing your personal computer’s slack cycle time to be used to run protein folding made people feel they were being useful to science, but not necessarily engaged.  Becoming a research subject, or contributing to crowdsourcing might make them feel a part of research, but not necessarily as a subject, more as an object, a subordinate, albeit an essential subordinate, in the delivery of material to investigate someone else’s research questions, build someone else’s knowledge.

In response to this gap, a new paradigm is emerging: co-creation.  Co-creation implies that not just the generation of research data, but of research questions, and research design, can be carried out in a collaborative manner between interested non-professional researchers and their professional counterparts. As such, this is one of the most challenging – and potentially rewarding – of Shirk’s five project models to deliver on.

As defined by the Accomplissh Project (Accomplissh stands for: “ACcelerate CO-creation by setting up a Multi-actor PLatform for Impact from Social Sciences and Humanities”), co-creation is based on the following: Often, traditional valorization approaches focus on linear processes: knowledge transfer from academia to society. Co-creation transcends such linear boundaries as it focuses on collaboration and co-production of knowledge and solutions across partners from the so-called Quadruple Helix network (industry, governments and societal partners).

Co-creation often occurs most readily in situations where groups of citizens, communities or civil society groups come forward with a question and recruit professional researchers to work with them and guide them.  As such, the field of public history or public humanities is a rich one for co-created citizen science in the arts and humanities to emerge.

Case Study: Storytelling

Storytelling is a powerful tool in the arsenal of arts and humanities researchers.   In the Accomplissh project, the participating team from the University of Ghent spoke of the potential power of this approach in co-created research:

“Storytelling is a technique for enhancing communication skills for collaborative research forms and is delivered via workshops to researchers at the University of Ghent. The training in ‘storytelling’ enables researchers to be able to connect with people in a natural way and can be a tool by which communication can become more human and thoughtful.

The workshop facilitator explained:

“I call it meaningful encounters – you need to be authentic, but open minded and open to possibilities and opportunities in a respectful way. Not just I want something from you, but what can we do together? This is part and parcel of impact”

A powerful example of this in practice can be found in the methods of the project Theatre of Witness.  The underlying method developed by Artistic Director Teya Sepinuck has been applied in a number of national and cultural contexts, but always with the goal of enabling marginal or fragile populations to develop a sense of empowerment with regards to their own personal histories through the development of storytelling techniques. http://www.theaterofwitness.org/about/

That said, co-creation in the arts and humanities has its challenges.  In particular where personal identities and histories may be under, and where outcomes may not be easily evaluated in terms of a product or service, it is important to be clear about expectations from the outset, to negotiate shared meaning for key terms, to respect the tenets of shared authority

Where to Start? Your Problem, Project and People

Scoping the problem is the first step in developing a Citizen Science project. This step sets the foundations of all future planning and entails:

• Developing a research case to be explored by the project
• Defining why it is important and what are the project’s priorities
• Starting to identify the key stakeholders and participants that you would like to engage with
• Placing the project in the larger picture of citizen science and crowdsourcing projects, learning basic terminology used and exploring frameworks of existing projects
• Planning the project in terms of tasks, workflows and resources

Considering all these different elements well ahead of your project planning will ensure that by the time of the launch, the project will have clear scope, target community, tasks and workflows, contributing to its success. Focusing more on the last element of project planning, it is advisable at this stage of planning to start considering issues such as:

→ ways to validate the information collected by project participants, to ensure data quality

→ your resources, in terms of funding, staffing, equipment, needs and scope, so that you are also aware of your limitations

→ the form of sharing you will use for your project’s results and outcomes

→ ways to surround your project with a motivated and engaged community

It may sound premature to start building a community of volunteers at this stage but it seems that this element is key to project’s success. According to the findings of a 2015 workshop, organised by Zooniverse, the best practices for engagement are: building your project to be appealing and volunteer-friendly / launching your project and recruiting volunteers / managing your project from post-launch to completion.

Watch! Selecting Resources for a Crowdsourcing Project

Prof. Melissa Terras discusses the process of selecting resources for large-scale crowdsourcing projects, such as the Transcribe Bentham project.

To find out more about the Transcribe Bentham project, click here: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/

Five Strategies to Find your Volunteers or Get Them Engaged

Depending on the aim, scope and scale of Citizen Science projects, there are different strategies you can use to gather your team of non-expert contributors.

1. Libraries, and other Cultural Heritage Institutions

   Projects with a regional studies focus, for instance local history explorations, contribution to regional bibliographies, georeferencing of regional maps etc., are often advertised in, hosted and coordinated by libraries. The professional staff of librarians and curators locate are instrumental in the identifying participants, supporting them with guidance and equipping them with the required resources.

   Example: Citizen Science in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden https://www.slub-dresden.de/open-science/citizen-science/

   Such calls for contribution to regional heritage projects can be amplified by local newspapers or news portals.

   Example:  Europeana 1914-1918 collections https://www.sonline.hu/kultura/hazai-kultura/elso-vilaghaborus-csaladi-emlekeket-var-a-magyar-nemzeti-leveltar-1197082/

2. Communities of Practice

   It is also possible to start out from already established communities around a specific tools for community content curation. For instance, different stakeholders and contributors to annotation and transcription projects can find each other on the Transkribus tool’s platform:https://transkribus.eu/Transkribus/

3. Social media

   Social media is probably the most flexible tool for finding volunteers to Citizen Science projects and maintaining a real-time dialogue with them. An advantage of platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit is that reach to a critical mass who are using these platform for their daily networking and content discovery is almost guaranteed.  If your own networks are not broad, you can ask cultural heritage or research institutions to help you broadcast your call for participation, or reserve a small budget to do targetted advertising.

   Example:  Wikidata + GLAM open facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Wikidata.GLAM/about/

4. The Citizen Science community

   To get the greatest visibility and discoverability for your project and receive professional support in project organisation, advocacy, or even funding, you can register it on one of the global platforms dedicated to the growing popularity of Citizen Science, where people can discover, take part in, and fund research projects. These platforms support both community-led and scholar-led projects.

   Examples:

• www.scistarter.com,
• www.zoonierge.org,
• www.citsci.org,
• www.citizensciencegames.com,
• www.citizenscienceassociation.org

5. Wikidata

   Wikidata is an increasingly important pool of resources for Citizen Science.  Operating on the basis of open community curation along global standards, it ensures good data quality and  increases the capabilities of both professional and citizen scientists and the capacities of their organisations to find and collaborate with each other in mutually beneficial ways.

   Example: Cultural Heritage Wikidata Project  https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Cultural_heritage

Watch! Recruitment and Outreach in the Transcribe Bentham project

Prof. Melissa Terras and Dr. Justin Tonra discuss the recruitment and outreach activities as part of the Transcribe Bentham project.

To find out more about the Transcribe Bentham project, click here: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/

Software for Citizen Science Projects

The tools you use to collect and manage your data will vary according to the size and complexity of what you collect, as well as where you collect it from and how you engage your citizen co-researchers.  In some cases, standard tools, such as an Access database or indeed an Excel spreadsheet may be enough to keep your data safe. If you are collecting more complex oral reports, you may use a generic qualitative analysis software tools such as MaxQDA, Atlas.ti or NVivo, or you may choose to prepare them as TEI files.

There are some software choices that are more common or specially optimised for citizen science, however.  As has been mentioned above, for some projects and approaches, hosting a common platform, such as Zooniverse, may be a very good choice.  Although the functionality of their workflows may be limited in some ways, having a platform that requires no technical expertise to use will be of great benefit to some projects.

Where there are specific requirements in the project and technical expertise available, it may be useful to look for other projects that have met similar challenges, as their code may be available for reuse.  For example, the Transcribe Bentham project’s “Transcription Desk’ (itself based on the MediaWiki platform) is openly available for reuse and adaptation on GitHub.

Somewhere between these two poles, you may find that what you really want is an easy-to-use solution for presentation of objects and information from your project.  Omeka, for example, is a popular choice for creating virtual exhibitions.  Based on the WordPress platform, it treads the line between ease of set-up and flexibility to provide a popular solution for crowdsourced projects.

What’s In It For The Citizen Scientists?

You’ve designed your project approach. You’ve recruited your citizen scientists, but how do you now ensure that they feel fully invested in the project and its outcomes? Appropriately rewarding and acknowledging fellow citizens for their participation is a cornerstone in designing Citizen Science projects. Recognising diverse forms of expertise in and contributions to knowledge production is among the core values of the inclusive open research culture Citizen Science is embedded into. And of course, from a more pragmatic perspective, carefully selected reward mechanisms are also instrumental in keeping participants motivated throughout their period of contribution.

Issues Around Authorship

Listing citizen contributors as co-authors of any resulting paper is probably the strongest form of acknowledgement that can also work as a reward. Although currently this is not the most common practice to give visibility to non-expert contributions, examples are easy to find e.g. among outputs from Zooniverse or SciStarter. In a blog post published in 2017 on the Galaxy Zoo blog (find the link below in the Further learning section) ,you can read a short interview with two citizen scientist authors who share their experiences about their motivations, authorship and future ambitions.

The Stardust@home SciStarter project takes authorship-as recognition and rewards even further. The project summary states that:

“In recognition of the critical importance of the Stardust@home volunteers, the discoverer of an interstellar dust particle appears as a coauthor on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home team announcing the discovery of the particle. The discoverer also has the privilege of naming the particle!”

Still, non-expert contributors’ participation in the ‘publication game’ is not free from complexities as it entails a range of ethical, epistemological and practical considerations.

First, a truly democratic approach to knowledge production that is advertised and propagated in Citizen Science agendas would suggest that publishing opportunities and taking authorship over scholarly works should be accessible for non-expert contributors too. On the other hand,  scholarly publishing is deeply embedded into a complex set of institutionalised excellence criteria, established expert practices and broader power dynamics of scientific knowledge production that imply a range of written and unwritten rules not easy to comply with for an outsider. For instance, there have been instances of project outputs receiving criticism for a writing style that was “not scientific enough”and sent back for significant re-writes. This may soon change, however, with the increase in dedicated journals edited by academics for a lay-audience.  This also points at the long and bumpy road from the paper submission to publication of the final peer-reviewed version that non-expert authors are not necessarily aware of when giving permission to be listed as co-authors.

Contributions and Authorship

Raising awareness towards all aspects of scholarly production that an author should be accountable and responsible for takes us to a second consideration, that is, what kind of contribution deserves authorship. The authorship recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), also applied by the Citizen Science Association’s official publication forum, the Citizen Science Theory and Practice journal is a commonly accepted set of recommendations which helps the disambiguating whether contributions of citizen scientists should be listed as authors or rather should be only mentioned in the acknowledgement section. This latter solution is most convenient and accepted by journals being a more flexible way to gain recognition to all types of contributions regardless on the level of involvement of participants, the types of their contributions or their attitudes towards authorship or preference for other forms of reward.

Other Reward Mechanisms

Being listed as an author of the research article certainly serves as the highest value currency within academia but might easily lose its attractiveness outside of this context, especially if contributors do not want to expose themselves to all the obligations and additional work mentioned above that is coming with scientific authorship. When it comes to (public) acknowledgement, non-expert contributors might prefer to be mentioned on more public platforms that are closer to the reach of general public such as project websites, blogs, popular scientific journals or in local events.

Academics and citizen scientists alike may take different perspectives on what makes their collaboration successful and rewarding. One of such major difference is that while in the traditional scientific context the products and outputs of the project tend to be of primary interest (e.g. the significance of results in the light of the hypothesis, data quality, the prestige of publication etc.), these become less important for citizen scientists whose focus primarily lies in the process of knowledge creation. For them, the quality of interactions between both fellow citizens and their expert supervisors, their involvement and user experience as contributors, the extent to which their involvement satisfied their curiosity, the strength of the community-building process over the course of the project or the difference the project outcome can make in their immediate environment are much more relevant indicators. Keeping these different perspectives in mind might help to avoid unwanted gifts, and find reward mechanisms – in addition to acknowledgement – that are truly meaningful and contextually appropriate, such as collectible online badges, scoring systems, or hosting local events to present the project outcomes to the volunteers and acknowledge their efforts in their own environment.

Listen! Dr Amy Clotworthy Discusses Citizen Science at the Danish National Archive

Dr. Amy Clotworthy discusses her investigations into the experiences of the volunteers in a Digitisation citizen science project at the Danish National Archive

You can also download an edited transcript of this interview here: Amy Clotworthy Interview on the Citizen Scientist experience – April 2019 PDF

Best Practices for Giving Credit and Acknowledgement

When designing a Citizen Science project, the importance of planning ahead cannot be emphasised enough – this general remark is also true for making decisions about the most appropriate rewarding and acknowledging strategies. Will the scale and scope of the project allow for listing each contributor individual in the acknowledgement? What will be the main platform and expected intensity of interactions with citizen scientists? Are there possibilities for different levels of involvement? What are the possible factors that help them feel more comfortable and fulfilled during their period of contribution? What other types of currencies exist that make sense outside of academia? – questions like this help in better understanding the motivations of participants and offer rewards that are truly meaningful to them.

To gain insight about the different perspectives of success criteria and motivations, opening a dialogue with the participants about rewards and acknowledgements in an earliest possible phase of the collaboration is favourable. In the case of planned co-authorship with non-expert contributors, being explicit about what exactly authorship entails in terms of responsibilities before, during and after the publication process and obtaining an informed and written consent from the future co-authors can eliminate a range of complexities.

Further Learning for ‘Creating a Citizen Science Project’

Click to expand

• Amy Freitag and Max J. Pfeffer: Process, Not Product: Investigating Recommendations for Improving Citizen Science “Success”, 2013. PLoS One, Vol. 8(5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0064079  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0064079
• Citizen Science in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden https://www.slub-dresden.de/open-science/citizen-science/
• The Citizen Science Toolkit (UK) –  https://www.citizenscience.gov/toolkit/howto/#
• Cultural Heritage Wikidata Project:  https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Cultural_heritage
• Francesco Cappa, Jeffrey Laut, Maurizio Porfiri,, Luca Giustiniano: Bring them abroad: Rewarding participation in technology-mediated citizen science projects, 2018. Computers in Human Behavior Vol.  89 (12),  246-257.  DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2018.08.017 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563218303923
• Gabriele Gadermaier, Daniel Dörler, Florian Heigl, Stefan Mayr, Johannes Rüdisser, Robert Brodschneider and Christine Marizzi: Peer-reviewed publishing of results from Citizen Science projects, 2018. Journal of Science Communication, Vol. 17 (3) DOI: 10.22323/2.17030101 https://jcom.sissa.it/archive/17/03/JCOM_1703_2018_L01
• Lewandowski, E., Caldwell, W., Elmquist, D. and Oberhauser, K., 2017. Public Perceptions of Citizen Science. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, 2(1), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.77
• Link to the Accomplissh project website: http://accomplissh.eu/, and specifically to their guide to co-creation: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/35d470_3136df3c786149e2ab78027fb0cc33f1.pdf
• Nature article on the importance of co-creation in research: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06855-7
• Rick Bonney, Jennifer L. Shirk, Tina B. Phillips, Andrea Wiggins, Heidi L. Ballard, Abraham J. Miller-Rushing and Julia K. Parish, Next Steps for Citizen Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1251554 Science 343 (6178), 1436-1437.
• SciStarter website on Citizen Science – https://scistarter.com/citizenscience.html
• Shirk, J. L., H. L. Ballard, C. C. Wilderman, T. Phillips, A. Wiggins, R. Jordan, E. McCallie, M. Minarchek, B. V. Lewenstein, M. E. Krasny, and R. Bonney. 2012. Public participation in scientific research: a framework for deliberate design. Ecology and Society 17(2): 29. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-04705-170229
• Shun-Ling Chen: Authorship, Ownership and Credibility in Citizen Science Projects, 2015 http://www.pnclink.org/pnc2015/english/PNC_2015_Abs&PPT/September 27/Proprietary Data and Open Data in the Shadow of Copyright/PPT/Authorship, Ownership and Credibility in Citizen Science Projects.pdf
• Wiggins, A., Crowston, K., “From Conservation to Crowdsourcing: A Typology of Citizen Science”, 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2011.207 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5718708
• Wikidata + GLAM open facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Wikidata.GLAM/about/

How to Manage Data and Metadata in Citizen Science

Most scientific data management techniques apply equally to Citizen Science projects. But there are slightly more challenges to face here, merely due to the public participation in the whole process of collecting and managing data in these projects. Depending on the scope and audience of each project, methodologies may vary. Here we will guide you through the main process and aspects you should have in mind when planning the data life cycle of your project and the different data management techniques.

The process of managing data when it comes to Citizen Science projects can be summarised in the following data life cycle model.

These steps do not always follow a linear sequence but can occur or repeat at different stages, depending on the project’s needs.

Plan – Understand your project’s data needs

Start planning your data life cycle early ahead in your project. You will need to answer questions related to documentation, storage, quality assurance and ownership for each stage of the data lifecycle. At each stage, it is advisable that you consider cross-cutting elements, such as description (including metadata and documentation), quality management, backup and security. Making such decisions requires understanding of the project’s purpose and being familiar with the scope of data that should be collected to best serve the project’s goals.

Collect

This step deals with determining the best way to go about acquiring and organising the data that will be collected by the public, resulting into a data model which will clearly describe what the data is, their formats and how they will be organised and processed. You can acquire new data by collecting them, by adapting old data, by sharing or exchanging data and by purchasing data. In citizen science and crowdsourcing projects that involve data collection, volunteers typically record their empirical observations or use equipment such as cameras to create data.

Assure

In order for a project to be considered successful, it must ensure data quality, usefulness and preservation. This step is for ensuring quality control of the data by suggesting quality assurance procedures that should be employed in order to minimise errors and identify and treat erroneous data.

Describe

This step focuses on enriching your collected data with information about data (metadata) so as to help other users to discover, acquire, interpret and effectively use data. Metadata fields can vary but should in general answer the following questions: Why were the data collected? Who collected the data? What does the data include? When were the data collected? Where were the data collected? How were the data collected and how was data quality ensured?

Preserve

This is an important, ongoing data management task for all projects and tackles the issue of long term preservation and sustainability of the collected data. This includes submitting data to an appropriate long term archive, such as a data centre or repository.

Discover

You should make sure that your data is discoverable by other users in a medium that people can understand and easily use. To achieve this, you should figure out who will need your data or want to see them, whether it’s researchers, journalists, policymakers or a particular community and then decide on the most efficient ways of giving users the data access they need. Start by providing easy-to-use search and discovery tools.

Integrate

This step has to do with enriching your collected data with other resources so that you create a data set more valuable for analysis.

Analysis

As in any scientific undertaking, analysis helps you document and describe facts, detect patterns, develop explanations, test hypotheses and illustrate findings. Analysis of citizen science or crowdsourcing data isn’t necessarily different from analysis of data collected by other methods, and can vary widely depending on the nature of the study and type of data. Knowing how you’ll analyse data before you create your final collection plan will help create a better data collection model.

Tips for Managing Data

Even when working in citizen science, proper management of data, with a view to making it open and reusable where possible, should be incorporated into a project.  In fact, the risks inherent in the decisions you make about data may be even higher in such a project, as you may be less able to change course quickly and easily within such a context if you find an earlier decision has limited your options at a later stage, or introduced an unexpected risk..

For that reason, we recommend you be particularly sensitive to the following in your planning stages:

1. Know what you data will be, and how you will use it, to ensure you are compliant with GDPR and ethical standards
2. Use appropriate standards to model your data
3. Use a data management plan to help structure your thinking

In particular, depending on the form of citizen science you are following, you may need to pay particular attention to quality control of the data you receive.  Forums that allow for open commenting, for example, may be open to abusive or mischievous posting, which could skew the nature and quality of your data if unmanaged and undetected.  On the other hand, standard academic measures of rigour or provenance may not be equally applicable if you want to leave space for meaningful input by non-professional researchers. A good introduction to how to think about data quality in a citizen science project is listed in the ‘further resources’ section below.

Watch! Setting Tasks and Meeting Technical Requirements in the Transcribe Bentham project

Prof. Melissa Terras and Dr. Justin Tonra talk about the practicalities of building a platform for crowdsourcing, and setting realistic tasks for volunteers on the Transcribe Bentham project.

To find out more about the Transcribe Bentham project, click here: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/

Creating Citizen Science Data Through Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the process of leveraging public participation in or contributions to projects and activities and a common part of many citizen science projects.  It is the practice of engaging a ‘crowd’ or group for a common goal. As an evolving and quite recent phenomenon, crowdsourcing has not yet reached the point of having an exhaustive definition. A recent study (Estelles-Arolas & Gonzalez-Ladron-de-Guevara in 2012) documenting forty original definitions found in thirty-two articles published between 2006 and 2012 results in the following: “Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in which an individual, an institution, a non-profit organization, or company proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity, and number, via a flexible open call, the voluntary undertaking of a task.”

This term has been quite popular and increasingly familiar over the last decade as it is enforced in many different areas. Government, industry, research and commercial enterprises have been developing crowdsourcing as a means to engage their audiences, enrich their collections, build new resources, and solve time-consuming problems. Technology and the growing connectivity through social media platforms have enabled crowdsourcing on larger scales and in various different contexts. Not surprisingly, according to the context, the practice of crowdsourcing can have diverse enforcements and purpose as a crowd initiative. Especially in the humanities, the focus on crowdsourcing has been on the improvement and transformation of content from one type to another, the description of objects and the synthesis of information from different resources. In this disciplinary context, the purpose of crowdsourcing initiatives can be summarised as:

• Exploring new forms of public engagement (e.g. Tag! You’re it!; Expose: My Favourite Landscape)
• Enriching institutional resources through the contribution of the crowd (e.g. Transcribe Bentham; Old Weather)
• Building novel resources (e.g. archive) through the contribution of the crowd (e.g. Letters 1916-1923; Europeana 1914-1918; 9/11 Memorial Museum)

Who is Behind This “Crowd”?

Crowdsourcing as a social engagement practice suggests the existence of a community of volunteers surrounding a project, adopting different roles and tasks. Analysing this “crowd” in the literature led to defining it as “a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity, and number” who voluntarily undertake a task. This group, varying from amateurs to students, scientists or professionals, takes on tasks according to its personal motivations, for professional development, knowledge enhancing, personal interest to a topic etc.

“Social engagement is about giving the public the ability to communicate with us and each other; to add value to existing library data by tagging, commenting, rating, reviewing, text correcting; and to create and upload content to add to our collections. This type of engagement is usually undertaken by individuals for themselves and their own purposes … Crowdsourcing uses social engagement techniques to help a group of people achieve a shared, usually significant, and large goal by working collaboratively together as a group.”

Where does Crowdsourcing Take Place?

Despite the fact that crowdsourcing has been mostly described as “a type of participative online activity”, interactions do not occur exclusively online. While the majority of such projects do happen online, often there is a blended approach, in humanities projects in particular, combining both live and “face-to-face” events with more standard computer-mediated actions. Especially in initiatives aiming to document historical events (e.g. Europeana 1914-1918), by organising crowdsourcing events to collect memorabilia provided by the public, physical and online interactions are inevitably intertwined.

What do Volunteers Do?

Crowdsourcing encompasses many practices. According to the purpose of the initiative or project, the tasks that participants are asked to perform vary. In general, as suggested before, we could say that the main trends in terms of projects are:

1. Crowdsourcing projects that require the “crowd” to integrate/enrich/reconfigure existing institutional resources
2. Crowdsourcing projects that ask the “crowd” to create/contribute novel resources

These types of projects suggest the following tasks:

1. When interacting with an existing collection, the public is mostly asked to intervene in terms of curation (e.g., social tagging, image selection, exhibition curation, classification); revision (e.g., transcription, correction); and location (e.g., artworks mapping, map matching, location storytelling).
2. When developing a new resource, the public is mostly invited to share physical or digital objects, document private life (e.g., audio/video of intimate conversations); document historical events (e.g., family memorabilia); and enrich known locations (e.g., location-related storytelling.

From transcribing handwritten text into digital form, tagging photographs to facilitate discovery and preservation, entering structured or semi-structured data, commenting on content or participating in discussions, or recording one’s own experiences and memories in the form of oral history, public involvement can be traced in many forms. In the table below you can find examples of applications of crowdsourcing in research according to type of activity and type of data, which can inspire you to think about the many ways you might include non-professional researchers in your projects.

Applications of Crowdsourcing in Research

Application	Description
Data processing
Classification	This is a common application of citizen science in crowdsourcing. Gathering descriptive metadata related to an object in a collection. Social tagging is a well-known example. It is particularly useful for example for images that humans can interpret better than computers can, such as images of landscapes containing wildlife.
Correction and Transcription processes	Inviting users to correct and/or transcribe outputs of digitisation
Contextualisation	Adding contextual knowledge to objects, e.g. by telling stories or writing articles/wiki pages with contextual data
Co-curation	Using inspiration/expertise of non-professional curators to create (Web)exhibits
Data collection
Data gathering	Data gathering is a common application of crowdsourcing in citizen science. Crowds can collect large volumes of data covering many geographical locations or moments in time.
Complementing Collection	Active pursuit of additional objects to be included in a (Web)exhibit or collection
Problem solving
Contests and prizes	Participants, who are often not traditional experts in the subject area, compete to solve problems or develop novel ideas. This approach enables benefits by drawing on diverse perspectives.
Puzzle games	‘Games with a purpose’ may encourage participation because they are fun and do not require knowledge of the underlying research questions.
Shaping research priorities
Agenda setting by citizens	Different communities of stakeholders may identify areas of importance that they feel should be addressed in research.
Idea generation
Collaborative community	Idea generation and management platforms are a type of crowdsourcing platform that offer a digital, social space to generate, discuss, refine and evaluate ideas. Organisations or individuals can use them to create online spaces where communities of stakeholders can gather to share and rate ideas in real time. Ideas can be collaborated on, voted on, and researched by participants. Top-ranked ideas can then be adopted by organisations, or taken forward in other ways. (e.g. Wikipedia)
Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding	Collective cooperation of people who pool their money and other resources together to support efforts initiated by others.

Perhaps one of the most interesting challenges arising from crowdsourcing practices, in particular in the context of cultural institutions (archives, galleries, museums), is the space between official and unofficial knowledge and the need to accommodate, blend and present both in their collections.

Gamification as a Different Mode for Engagement

‘Gamification’ is a perhaps self explanatory term that generally refers to how repetitive tasks can be made more engaging by supplementing them with markers of achievement or wrapping them in a game-like frame.  This is a way of addressing the need to continue to motivate contributors to maintain their interest in and contribution to the project.

As can probably be guessed, the term can cover a very wide range of different practices.  That said, gamification as it is used in cultural heritage projects can generally be broken down into a few models.

Incentives and Recognition

Participants in projects will often be involved in performing repetitive tasks, most commonly transcription or verification of transcribed text.  By giving participants a sense of their own progress or achievements, projects can incentivise their contributors to continue. Badges or status levels (often somewhat tongue-in-cheek ones), progress bars, rankings or levels all give a contributor a sense of achieving something with their participation.  The ‘Transcribe Bentham’ project used this approach by incorporating a ‘Benthmometer’ and a user leaderboard into their site.

Rewards and Challenges

In other models, virtual currency or goods can be assigned, or particular challenges can be built in at certain times to make repetitive tasks more engaging overall.  This model is similar to one described above, but changes over time, and may be useful in extended projects, where occasional changes may make the experience more fresh for the users.

Game-like Interaction.  

A much more intensive model of gamification makes interaction with the material not just feel like it has results like a game, but look and feel like a game.  This is a less common model, as it is more resource intensive to design and build, but the ultimate result can be very fresh and motivating. For example, the Finnish National Library developed a game called ‘DigitalKoot’ to encourage people to verify transcriptions of historic typefaces by clicking in blocks to build bridges for a mole to cross rivers.

Creating Citizen Science Data Through Public Collection

As introduced before, another major example of how involvement in citizen science can be structured is by calling the public to provide artefacts and historical memorabilia to create or enhance collections and archives. In this module, we approach public collections as archives, art and cultural collections that are:

• Open and accessible by the public
• Contributed by the public
• Co-created by the public (co-curated)

There are a number of discussions and tensions on what constitutes a private or public collection, especially in art. Here, however, we will focus on giving you a glimpse of the various public collections with mainly cultural content and introduce you to initiatives and citizen science projects that developed and curated such collections.

An initiative worth mentioning that encompasses two of the criteria of a public collection as listed above is The Public Collection. This initiative is a public art and literacy project developed to improve literacy, foster a deeper appreciation of the arts (and artists), and promote social and educational justice in the community of Indianapolis, USA. Its mission was to increase the access to books through the use of functional pieces of art in familiar settings. Through a curated process, Indiana-based artists were commissioned to design unique book share stations or lending libraries that were installed in public spaces around the state. Each book share station holds a varied selection of books for diverse audiences and age groups. The Public Collection stations are free and available to everyone. Passersby can borrow and return books at their leisure while books are supplied and stocked by the Indianapolis Public Library.

To list two examples of cultural heritage public collections, we could mention Artstor and Europeana. Artstor’s ever-growing public collections offer approximately 1 million freely accessible images, videos, documents, and audio files from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials, as well as hundreds of thousands of open access images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This material is open, free and accessible to anyone through the website. These public collections are cataloged, managed, and shared by institutions such as Cornell University, Colby College, RISD, and MIT. They are also discoverable alongside the core collections of more than 2.5 million images from leading museums, photo archives, scholars, and artists available to subscribers to the Artstor Digital Library.

Europeana, having as its motto “transforming the world with culture”, is one of the most significant initiatives at a European level of collecting, sustaining and promoting Europe’s rich cultural heritage. By collecting a variety of content, such as music, books, films, art or social history manuscripts, from institutions all over Europe, it aims to make this valuable content more accessible and more beneficial to more and more people. Apart from collecting and openly sharing cultural heritage resources to the public, Europeana has been really active in crowdsourcing techniques for enriching resources or co-creating online collections. Europeana Migration Cultural Heritage was such an initiative, calling the public to contribute content that had to do with the topic of historical migration to and from Europe and/or to host a collection day to collect stories and material relating to migration and family history.

It is interesting to also note here cases of public co-curation of collections. The Brooklyn Museum (U.S.) and Kröller-Müller Museum (Netherlands) have organised such public curated exhibitions. Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition (Brooklyn Museum) first collected works of photography through an open call and then asked the audience to evaluate the works. Following that, the works were exhibited depending on their relative ranking in the public evaluation. Another example comes from the Kröller-Müller Museum which in 2010 organised two public-curated exhibitions based on a selection of artworks of its own collection: Expose: My Favourite Landscape was entirely curated by children who, through a website, chose their favourite landscapes among a set of fifty proposed by the Museum and gave their reasons why the works had to be included in the exhibition. Twenty artworks were then exhibited.

Case Study: “Perceptual Dialectology of Irish Accents” project” What is Perceptual Dialectology?

Perceptual Dialectology (PD) is a branch of sociolinguistics that looks at how people living within a geographical region perceive the accents of other geographical regions, or their own region, and therefore relies very heavily on the participation of large numbers of members of the public to get the widest view.

How was data gathered in the Irish Accents project?

The Irish Accents project started out as an outreach exercise at the Dublin Language Garden in 2015, and was run by Vicky Garnett and Stephen Lucek at Trinity College Dublin.  Over the course of one evening, members of the public who had come to the Dublin Language Garden event were asked to draw where they thought different boundaries lie between different dialects in Ireland on a blank map.  The map was deliberately left without any borders drawn on it so as not to influence the lines the participants drew.

In addition to drawing lines, they were also asked to write what they thought the features of the dialects they had identified were, and what the characteristics of the people who spoke the dialect were.  This gave both geographical information, and qualitative information.

The drawn maps were collected (from the 24 adults who had participated), the boundaries were ‘traced’ and entered into a GIS, and the qualitative data was entered into a spreadsheet and then annotation software for analysis.  The results were presented at a linguistics conference in 2016, and submitted for publication in a forthcoming book.

How Perceptual Dialectology makes further use of citizen science techniques

Other PD projects make further use of citizen science techniques by taking the maps that were gathered in a public collection exercise, and re-presenting them to other members of the public to see if they might agree with the way boundaries have been drawn, or the features assigned to them.  This then makes perceptual dialectology a more iterative process to gain a closer idea of how attitudes between groups of people in a geographical space can be formed, create a sense of identity, or even reveal how certain types of discrimination (either conscious or unconscious) are formed.

Further Learning for this Section

Click to Expand

• Carletti, Laura et al., “Digital humanities and crowdsourcing: An exploration.” Museums and the Web, 2013.
• Citizen Science Cost Action, “On the importance of data standards in Citizen Science”, 2018 https://www.cs-eu.net/blog/importance-data-standards-citizen-science
• Citizen Science.gov, How-to Toolkit https://www.citizenscience.gov/toolkit/#
• COST Action CA 15212 “Citizen Science to promote creativity, scientific literacy, and innovation throughout Europe” Minutes of WG5 workshop in Geneva: “On the citizen-science ontology, standards & data”, 2018 https://www.cs-eu.net/sites/default/files/media/2018/06/COST-WG5-GenevaDeclaration-Report-2018.pdf
• Crowdsourcing week website: https://crowdsourcingweek.com/what-is-crowdsourcing/
• Enrique Estellés-Arolas, Fernando González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, “Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition”, Journal of Information Science, vo.38, issue 2, pp.189-200, 2012 https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551512437638
• Holley, Rose. “Crowdsourcing: how and why should libraries do it?.” D-Lib magazine 16.3/4 Ma (2010).
• Madelaine d’Angelo, “Public vs, Private, Who Wins?”, Huffington post, 2017 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/madelaine-dangelo/public-vs-private-who-win_b_8248518.html
• Mark Hedges, Stuart Dunn, Academic Crowdsourcing in the Humanities, Chandos Publishing, 2018.
• Oomen, Johan, and Lora Aroyo. “Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities and challenges.” Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies. ACM, 2011.
• Po Ve Sham – Muki Haklay’s personal blog, “Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing – week 5 – Data quality”, 2018 https://povesham.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/citizen-science-scientific-crowdsourcing-week-5-data-quality/
• Ridge, Ms Mia, ed. Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2014.
• Schade, Sven, and Chrysi Tsinaraki. “Survey report: data management in Citizen Science projects.” Publication Office of the European Union: Luxembourg (2016). https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/survey-report-data-management-citizen-science-projects
• Strang, Lucy, and Rebecca K. Simmons. “Citizen science: Crowdsourcing for systematic reviews.” (2018).
• The Public Collection https://www.thepubliccollection.org/about/
• Wiggins, Andrea, et al. “Data management guide for public participation in scientific research.” DataOne Working Group(2013): 1-41. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit/toolkit/steps/accept/DataONE-PPSR-DataManagementGuide.pdf

Additional

• Although the original DigitalKoot site is no longer accessible, you can still see samples of how it worked here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-W9cf9u9Qw&feature=youtu.be
• This article includes screen shots of some of the incentives used by the Transcribe Bentham  project: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/2/000125/000125.html

Ethics and Releases

Why Ethics?

Put simply, the need for ethics is to ensure protection of the researcher, the subjects of study, and the institution within which the research is being carried out.

Ensuring ethical practices in research applies as much to the Humanities and Social Sciences as it does to STEM subjects, even if it looks slightly different.  In all subjects, protection of the researcher is just as important as protection of the individuals under study. The person or persons conducting the research still need to make sure that they are not risking their own wellbeing in order to carry out their research.  In the case of those working in a scientific lab, this can be something like disclosing personal circumstances that might mean they are at greater potential risk (pregnancy, on a new type of medication, etc), or simply making sure that correct protocols are followed such as wearing certain types of clothing, or following steps through in a particular order.  Within the Social Sciences and Humanities, this might include risk assessment when conducting one-on-one interviews.

Personal protection accounted for, the researcher then needs to protect the individuals under study.  Within the Social Sciences and Humanities, these individuals could be the person or people that are taking part, it could refer to an entire community of people, or it could mean inanimate objects.  For example, some historic artefacts can carry with them some spiritual connotations that are sacred to a specific community. Respect of those beliefs and therefore respect for the item is paramount.

Ethics in Citizen Science

The need for protection of the researcher, the subject and the institution is still the primary consideration when dealing with ethical requirements in a citizen science project.  However, as the number of ‘researchers’ can be far larger, and some of them may have no background in research practices, the need for clear guidelines and practices becomes more pressing.

Knowledge is Power

As a lead researcher opening up research to a citizen science approach, you need to make sure that anyone who is participating in the research knows what is expected of them from an ethical viewpoint.  They will also need to know their rights, and the responsibilities they take on by taking part in the project. This can sound far more onerous than it need be. We are all very used to signing up to terms and conditions online, and many of us are guilty of skipping to the end just to tick the box.  A brief set of ‘community guidelines’ that outline these rights and responsibilities in as simple a way as possible can help to get the point across and make sure that your participants read them and understand them.

Sharing Authority

When a single researcher works with a body of sources, in general s/he maintains authority over how those sources are used and curated. This is a powerful position, in that it makes him or her the ultimate arbiter of what is or is not allowed to come forward and be a part of the argument or presentation of an event, perspective, person or other artefact of human culture.  This model does not necessarily extend comfortably into citizen science projects, where other perspectives and other voices, very differently informed from those of the professional historian, need to be effectively incorporated and affirmed.  This is a great challenge in citizen science projects, in particular those based upon co-creation, a challenge which is often discussed under the rubric of “shared authority.”

WATCH! Sharing Authority, Ciaran O’Neill and Geogina Laraghy

In this video, Public History experts CIaran O’Neill and Georgina Laraghy speak about the challenges of sharing and shared authority in public history projects.

Risk Avoidance

None of your citizen scientists should be taking part in anything that potentially puts them at risk.  If there is a low level risk they should at the very least be informed of what that might be. For example, if a project is calling on public collection, providing letters or personal items to a project could result in a) the item being damaged or lost; or b) their identity, or the identity of someone close to them being revealed in some way, even if names are redacted from the data.

Ownership of Their Work

Giving your citizen scientist some means of maintaining ‘ownership’ of their work (in the metaphorical sense!) will make them more likely to comply with the proper procedures.

Watch! Citizen Science and Ethics in the Transcribing Bentham Project

Further Learning for this Section

Click to expand

• Khatib, F.; Dimaio, F.; Cooper, S.; Kazmierczyk, M.; Gilski, M.; Krzywda, S.; Zabranska, H.; Pichova, I.; Thompson, J. (2011). “Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players”. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. 18 (10): 1175. doi:10.1038/nsmb.2119.

• Praetorius, Dean (2011-09-19). “Gamers Decode AIDS Protein That Stumped Researchers For 15 Years In Just 3 Weeks”. The Huffington Post*. Retrieved 17 November 2016*.

• Foldit – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit