2015 09-30 Research Seminar

Sharing initial concerns about arts, humanities and social sciences citizen science research projects

Dra. Núria Ferran-Ferrer

Research SeminarTallin UniversitySeptember 2015

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UOC My knacksack

1. Citizen science’s concept

2. Wondering

3. Methodology

4. Main results

5. Conclusions

6. Further research

Summary

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Sharing initial concerns...

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UOC Open University of Catalonia

UOC was created in 1995 by the Catalan Goverment (at the moment Region of Spain)

It offers people lifelong learning using ICT (elearning)

We carry out research on the knowledge society and elearning

52.523 students / 58.094 alumni

Our student:Adult25-35 years old (57%)Married with children (55%)With full time job (93%)Previous university degree (60%)Update knowledge personal/prof reasons

www.uoc.edu

ADMIN. STAFF

477RESEARCH

STAFF

71TEACHING

COLLABORATORS

3,022FACULTY

253

http://www.uoc.edu/

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Departments, schools, research centres & chairs

Schools

• Business School• School of Languages• School for Cooperation• Doctoral School

Chairs

• UNESCO Chair - Education & Technology for Social Change

• UNESCO Chair - Food, Culture & Development• Miró Chair

Departments

• Arts & Humanities• Health Sciences• Info. & Communication Sciences• Law & Political Science• Economics & Business Studies• IT, Multimedia & Telecoms• Psychology & Ed. Sciences

Research centres

• Internet Interdisciplinary Institute• eLearn Center

The UOC’s course offering is organized into:

w.uoc.edu/schools

http://w.uoc.edu/escoles

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A flexible offer adapted to students’ needs

Knowledge areas• Arts and Humanities

• Health Sciences

• Information and Communication Sciences

• Law and Political Science

• Economics and Business Studies

• IT, Multimedia and Telecommunications

• Psychology and Education Sciences

• City Management and Urban Planning

• Tourism

• Information Society

• Food Systems, Culture and Society

Course offering• Degrees (17)

• Master’s degrees (37 & 35)

• Postgraduate courses (42)

• Doctoral programmes (3)

• Open short courses

• In-company training

studies.uoc.edu

http://estudios.uoc.edu/

Sharing first concerns...

• Learning support in:o Information and Communication Studies

Qualitative Research Methodologies Information Architecture

o Computer, Mutimedia and Telecom Studies User Research and UCD

• Research in:• Open Access to Science (currently under

Spanish government funding).• COST Action submitted to EU this July

about citizen science

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My Knacksack

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Decalogue of BCNLab Citizen Science Office

Scientific research carried out, partially or completely, by non-professional scientists

o Creation of new knowledgeo Active participation in at least one stage.

o 4 levels of participation: o Crowdsourcingo Distributed intelligence o Participatory science o Collaborative science

o Projects must obey a policy of open data and open code and must follow CC licences (when possible).

http://issuu.com/bcnlabcienciaciudadana/docs/llibret_icub__v.eng_/5

1. Citizen science’s concept





• Trends: Google searches 2007-15

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=citizen%20science

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1. Citizen science: concept

• More projects• More topics and types of projects• International success: Science and

Nature• Merging with other movements:

Commons• Open source• Open content

• Gamification• Maker spaces• Participatory movement and activism


• People we serve through design over the last 20 years: Customer / User / Co-creator

Sanders, E. (2006) Scaffolds for building everyday creativity, Design for Effective Communications: Creating Contexts for Clarity and Meaning. Jorge Frascara (Ed.) Allworth Press, New York, New York, 2006.

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• First citizen/amateur Scientifics

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Lecture delivered by Michael Faraday in the mid-19th century


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From scientific amateurs 19th century to the possibilities of CROWDSOURCING and ICT


Meanings of Citizen science:

Cornell Ornithology Lab. Precursor of CS practices(Lewenstein, 2004)

1. Participation of nonscientist in the collection and analysis stages 2. Engagement of nonscientist in true decision-making3. Engament of research scientists in the democratic and policy process.

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2. Wondering


Are volunteers in all CS

projects treated like s

ensors?

Are citizens only gather

ing and processing data?

Can’t they be involved i

n other research stages?

2239564

897083

70% Sciences and Engineering30% Social Sciences and Humanities13

.

The Decalogue presents 20 projects in BCN on Citizen ScienceBut non of them on AHSS. Where are the AHSS citizen science research projects?

2. Wondering

I+R internal investment in Higher Education Spanish Institutions (in thousands of €)Source: INE, 2013


• Research questionso Are there AHSS CS research projects?o Citizens only collect and process data? Are always passive in research projects?

• Content Analisys:o 4 platforms of citizen science (Wikipedia, SciStarter, CitSci and Precipita)

More than 800 projects 4 studied variables:

• Disciplines (sciencies/social sciences, art and humanities)• Task and phase on the research process• Design (bottom-up/top-down)• Aim (big data/not)

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3. Methodology


• Interviews:• Participants:

• 5 innitiatives: national library, national film library, public libraries network, cartographic institue, Tapias Foundation (contemporary art musem).

• Barcelona Lab’s citizen Science Office• Interviews about:

• Promoters: was it on porpose that the project was based on CS? Why (low cost, participation, etc.?)

• Volunteers: calls, rewards, needed competencies, personal data, etc.• Researchers: avaluation of outputs, perceptions on quality of data, etc.• Process of participation: infrastructure, trainning, verification processess, etc.

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3. Methodology (and II)


Wikipedia: List of Citizen Science Projects(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_citizen_science_projects)• list of projects of citizen participation in science that are active and a list of closed projects• “ordinary people can contribute significantly to scientific research”.

Discipline: the majority of the projects are of a natural and physical sciences type (81 projects). The most predominant themes are: biology (11 projects), ornithology (12) and astronomy (5). Only one of the 81 projects is from social sciences and it is on linguistics.

Task: The principal activity of the volunteers is focused on the phase of data collection. The principal activities are related to the collection of data through transcriptions and observations.

Volume of data: the projects attach importance to the quality of data collected. A project goes from active to closed in the platform when its objectives of data collection are reached. Design of research projects: the projects are clearly top-down. The researchers or their entities propose and make known the calls for participation.

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4. Main results (I)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_citizen_science_projects

SciStarter(http://scistarter.com/)• A North American platform that indexes and enables the signing up of more than 600

scientific projects of citizen participation. • It is accompanied by a very popular blog which annually highlights the ten best citizen

science projects from the metrics of your browser “Project Finder”.

Discipline: the majority of the projects are from natural and physical sciences. Only the categories “archaeology” and “education”, of a total of 23 categories, could be considered to be from the field of arts and humanities.

Task: the projects that the platform gathers focus on tasks relating to the collection of data.

Volume of data: much importance is attached to quantity. The slogan of the platform is “to liaise millions of scientific citizens with millions of projects”.

Design of the research project: which is clearly a top-down approach. The platform possesses a specific part to register projects and carry the label “For Scientist”, a fact which allows us to know that only researchers can propose projects.17

4. Main results (II)


http://scistarter.com/

CitSci (http://citsci.org) • The platform was initially created with money from the National Science Foundation (NSF) • Platform which empowers citizens in their scientific interests. Offers support, tools and

resources to scientific processes that is intended to be done with citizen participation from 2006.

Discipline: the majority of projects are of a natural and physical sciences type.

Task: volunteers participate in the collection of data. Emphasis is placed on the fact that their tasks should respond to motivations for learning and fun.

Volume of data: importance to quantity. Just to give an example; the platform emphasises that it has managed to date (November 2014) more than 100 projects and have contributed to almost 30,000 observations of species.

Design of the research project: projects are top-down, despite the fact that the vocation of the platform is bottom-up since the objective sought is to give support to research processes.

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4. Main results (III)


http://citsci.org/

http://www.nsf.gov/

Precipita(http://www.precipita.es/descubre.html)• Desember 2014, and was created and promoted by the Spanish Foundation for Science

and Technology (FECYT). They called themselves platform for collective science

Discipline: it only focuses on natural and physical sciences projects; no human or social science project is included. Task: the volunteers contribute through economic donations. Crowdfunding

Volume of data: No importance. There are currently more projects geared to the dissemination of science in society.

Design of research projects: To contribute to a project, it is necessary to register and two requirements must be fulfilled: belong to a public research centre and have contributed to scientific publications or dissemination in the last two years.

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4. Main results (and IV)


http://www.precipita.es/descubre.html

GENERAL

• Most participants collect and process data• Need for deepen engament: from collaborative stage to crowdsouring research stage

• Need for volunteer leaders• Bottom-up design but need for sustainability

• Unbalanced proportion of Science and AHSC projects:• Wikipedia: 81 projects. Only 1 in AHSC (Linguistics)• SciStarter:23 categories. Only 2 on AHSC (Archeology and Education)

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5. Conclusions (I)


CS projects in AHSC

• The label CS is still not used :• Unknow and unclear• More used: participatory projects, collaboratory projects, crowdsoursing... Not science• AHSC projects do not use the CS platforms. But social web

• CS is not the aim :• Heritage, link admin-citizens, low-cost entry data, etc.

• No worries in validate data:• Absence of prank data

• Need for keeping personal data of participants:• Citizens are willing to participate in scientific adventures!

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5. Conclusions (and II)


• Increasing variety of topics and types of projects

• Barely scratch the surface with current mobile technology on Internet of Things

• Just experience with early stages of citizen participation. Need for more collaborative projects

• Convergence with other movements:• Open source / open data / open content...• Civic participation / Activism...• Do it yourself movement

• Links with education and training

• Becoming mainstream: easier to pubish in indexed journals22

6. Appealing for further research


Thanks for your attention! Waiting for your comments

Ferran-Ferrer, N. (2015) “Volunteer participation in social sciences, arts and humanities citizen science projects”, El Profesional de la Informacion, v.25, n.6 [in press]

Dra. Núria Ferran-Ferrer@[email protected]

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