Abstract
Citizen science is a contemporary reinvention of some research practices of the past when ‘unprofessional’ researchers contributed to scientific projects led by academics; a worth-noting peak of research undertaken in this paradigm had been observed in the 19th century. In the 21st century, citizen science mostly resides in digital environments and depends upon eInfrastructures which not only provide citizens with access to research data management, but also play the role of novel scientific communication tools aiming to engage and support citizens in their research contributions. This paper’s main purpose is to introduce the concept focusing on citizen science within the Humanities where its use is still limited compared to other research domains, as well as frequently confused with crowdsourcing. We also present some initial outcomes of the user studies undertaken within the EC-funded Civic Epistemologies project featuring a set of three international focus groups and a web questionnaire; these help to understand better the current attitudes and challenges in this area. Finally the paper delves into some possible reasons for the slower uptake of citizen science in both the humanities domain and digital cultural heritage and explores to what extent such projects contribute to ‘collective knowledge’ as well as to creativity.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bonne, R., et al.: Public participation in scientific research: defining the field and assessing its potential for informal science education. A CAISE Inquiry Group Report. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED519688.pdf (2009)
Christian, C., Lintott, C., Smith, A., Fortson, L., Bamford, S.: Citizen Science: Contributions to Astronomy Research. arXiv:1202/1202.2577 (2012)
Christmas Bird Count. http://birds.audubon.org/christmas-bird-count
Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries. http://conscicom.org/
Coughlan, S.: Dictionary reaches final definition after century. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-28952646 (2014)
CrowdCrafting. http://blog.okfn.org/2013/09/17/crowdcrafting-putting-citizens-in-control-of-citizen-science (2013)
Dafis, L.L., Hughes, L.: What’s the Welsh for “Crowdsourcing”? Citizen science and community engagement at the National Library of Wales. In: Ridge, M. (ed.) Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage. Ashgate (2014)
Dobreva, M., Azzopardi, D.: Citizen science in the humanities: a promise for creativity. In: Papadopoulos, G. (ed.) Proceedings of the 9th International Conference KICSS, Limassol, Cyprus, 6–8 Nov 2014, pp. 446–451 (2014)
Ellis, S.: A history of collaboration, a future in crowdsourcing: positive impacts of cooperation on British librarianship. Libri 64, 1–10 (2014)
Franzoni, C., Sauermann, H.: Crowd science: the organization of scientific research in open collaborative projects. Res. Policy 43(1), 1–20 (2014)
Georeferencer Project. http://www.bl.uk/maps/
Green Paper on Citizen Science: European Commission. http://www.socientize.eu/sites/default/files/Green%20Paper%20on%20Citizen%20Science%202013.pdf (2013)
Hecker, A.: Knowledge beyond the individual? Making sense of a notion of collective knowledge in organization theory. Organ. Stud. 33, 423–445 (2012)
Hughes, L., Ell, P., Dobreva, M., Knight, G.: Assessing and measuring impact of a digital collection in the humanities: LLC. J. Digit. Scholarsh. Humanities (2013)
Law, E., Dalton, C., Merrill, N., Young, A., Gajos, K.: Curio: A platform for supporting mixed-expertise crowdsourcing. Human computation and crowdsourcing. In: Works in Progress and Demonstration Abstracts. AAAI Technical Report CR-13-01. An Adjunct to the Proceedings of the First AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, pp. 99–100 (2013)
Letters of 1916. Creating history. http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/
Noordegraaf, J., Bartholomew A., Eveleigh, A.: Modeling crowdsourcing for cultural heritage. Museums and the Web 2014, In: Proctor, N., Cherry, R. (eds.) Museums and the Web. http://mw2014.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/modeling-crowdsourcing-for-cultural-heritage/ (2014)
Oomen, J., Aroyo, L.: Crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage domain: opportunities and challenges. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T’11), pp. 138–149. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2011)
Rotman, D., et al.: Dynamic changes in motivation in collaborative citizen-science projects. In: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’12), pp. 217–226. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2012)
Smith, A.M., Lynn, S., Lintott, C.J.: An introduction to the Zooniverse. Crowdsourcing: Works in Progress and Demonstration Abstracts. AAAI Technical Report CR-13-01. (2013)
Wiggins, A., Crowston, K.: Describing Public Participation in Scientific Research, iConference Toronto. http://crowston.syr.edu/system/files/iConference2012.pdf (2012)
Acknowledgments
This research is supported by the EC-funded projects Civic Epistemologies funded under FP7 grant agreement 632694 and AComIn “Advanced Computing for Innovation”, Grant 316087, funded by the FP7 (Research Potential of Convergence Regions).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dobreva, M. (2016). Collective Knowledge and Creativity: The Future of Citizen Science in the Humanities. In: Kunifuji, S., Papadopoulos, G., Skulimowski, A., Kacprzyk , J. (eds) Knowledge, Information and Creativity Support Systems. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 416. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27478-2_44
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27478-2_44
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27477-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27478-2
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)