Crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, citizen science – recent updates

A small* collection of links from the past little while.

Projects

• A new Zooniverse project, Decoding the Civil War, launched in June: 'Witness the United States Civil War by transcribing and deciphering messages and codes from the United States Military Telegraph'.
• Another Zooniverse project, Camera CATalogue: 'Analyze Wildlife Photos to Help Panthera Protect Big Cats'.

Articles

• Palmer, Stuart, and Deb Verhoeven, ‘Crowdfunding Academic Researchers–the Importance of Academic Social Media Profiles’, in ECSM 2016: Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Social Media (Academic Conferences and Publishing International, 2016), pp. 291–299
• Preece, Jennifer, ‘Citizen Science: New Research Challenges for Human–Computer Interaction’, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 32 (2016), 585–612 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2016.1194153>
• Dillon, Justin, Robert B. Stevenson, and Arjen E. J. Wals, ‘Introduction: Special Section: Moving from Citizen to Civic Science to Address Wicked Conservation Problems’, Conservation Biology, 30 (2016), 450–55 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12689> – has an interesting new model, putting citizen sciences 'on a continuum from highly instrumental forms driven by experts or science to more emancipatory forms driven by public concern. The variations explain why citizens participate in CS and why scientists participate too. To advance the conversation, we distinguish between three strands or prototypes: science-driven CS, policy-driven CS, and transition-driven civic science.'
  …

  'We combined Jickling and Wals’ (2008) heuristic for understanding environmental and sustainability education (Jickling & Wals 2008) and M. Fox and R. Gibson's problem typology (Fig. 1) to provide an overview of the different possible configurations of citizen science (Fig. 2). The heuristic has 2 axes. We call the horizontal axis the participation axis, along which extend the possibilities (increasing from left to right) for stakeholders, including the public, to participate in setting the agenda; determining the questions to be addressed; deciding the mechanisms and tools to be used; choosing how to monitor, evaluate, and interpret data; and choosing the course of action to take. The vertical (goal) axis shows the possibilities for autonomy and self-determination in setting goals and objectives. The resulting quadrants correspond to a particular strand of citizen science. All three occupied quadrants are important and legitimate.'

  

  * It's a short list this month as I've been busy and things seem quieter over the northern hemisphere summer.