Calling All Citizen Scientists! 11/21/17

Calling All Citizen Scientists!
By Jacob Chan




Image: File:Science-symbol-2.svg, Wikimedia Commons
Over the last couple of weeks in ESOC 211, we have explored what it means to be a contributor to large online platforms such as Wikipedia. This week’s activity included introducing our class to the possibility of being “citizen scientists”. Citizen Scientists refers to the user of the website being granted the ability to contribute their own time and effort towards a collective research goal.

Through platforms such as Zooniverse, anyone can be a researcher. That’s right. There is no background or any specialty necessary to participate in Zooniverse. This is a unique aspect as users can contribute their own research from the comfort of their own home on their own time. This main body of researchers is comprised of many men and a surprising amount of women contributors.

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 24, 2017 at 7:03 PM

    While exploring the Zooniverse citizen science page, I found the projects to have be a really interesting take on crowdsourcing. I like that you brought up the fact that you do not necessarily need to know any information on the topics being researched before participating. I personally found that many of these citizen science based projects on Zooniverse helped guide you to correctly answer or solve what was being used of you. I was a little intimidated by the complexity of some projects at first, but quickly found that I enjoyed learning more while volunteering my time to help with these projects.

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  2. UnknownNovember 24, 2017 at 9:36 PM

    The concept of citizen science was interesting to me to collaborate on a subject that many of the collaborators were unfamiliar on to reach a common goal. When I participated on my research assignment, it made more sense to me after going through the tutorial on how to participate in the study and what I needed to do in order to make the study successful. Overall, I was uncertain of how successful citizen science really was until I participated in a study and was able to learn more about it, making me aware of the positive effects that this research has on a study.

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