Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Introduction: Distributed Approaches to Making Science

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Online Citizen Science and the Widening of Academia

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Alternative Education ((PSAE))

Abstract

This chapter explores how developments in information and communication technologies, the development of the Internet, and changes in data production and storage (the so-called ‘data deluge’) have led to the emergence of online citizen science – projects that are carried out exclusively through the Internet, and where participants process or analyse data provided by scientists. Online citizen science projects allow globally distributed access to scientific research and have resulted in some important collaborations between specialists and non-specialists, yet significant gaps exists in our understanding of who participates, how they participate and why they participate. These important questions are addressed in this monograph and the chapter concludes with a description of the research approach.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    A petabyte is one million gigabytes.

  2. 2.

    A terabyte is one thousand gigabytes.

  3. 3.

    This website provides daily statistics on the output and the number of participants in SETI@home and other distributed computing projects: http://www.teamocuk.co.uk/index.php?s=8f315d852c601368eb111539388a9393.

References

  • Anderson, D. P. (2004). Public computing: Reconnecting people to science. In Conference on Shared Knowledge and the Web. Madrid, Spain.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blank, G., & Reisdorf, B. C. (2012). The participatory web. A user perspective on Web 2.0. Information, Communication & Society, 15(4), 537–554.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bonney, R., Cooper, C. B., Dickinson, J., Kelling, S., Phillips, T., Rosenburg, K. V., & Shirk, J. (2009). Citizen Science: A developing tool for expanding science knowledge and scientific literacy. Bioscience, 59(11), 977–984.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bruckman, A. (2002). Ethical guidelines for research online. http://documents.kenyon.edu/provost/irb_ethics_online.pdf.

  • Burgelman, J. C., Osimo, D., & Bogdanowicz, M. (2010). Science 2.0 (change will happen...) First Monday, 15(7.) http://uncommonculture.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2961/2573.

  • Clavin, W. (2013). Managing the Deluge of ‘Big Data’ from space. NASA Jet Propulsion Labratory, http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-299&cid=release_2013-299&utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NASAJPL&utm_content=release+201.

  • Cooper, S., Khatib, F., Treuille, A., Barbero, J., Lee, J., Beenen, M., Leaver-Fay, A., Baker, D., Popovic, Z., & Players, F. (2010). Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game. Nature, 466(7307), 756–760.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cooper, C. B., Shirk, J., & Zuckerberg, B. (2014). The invisible prevalence of citizen science in global research: Migratory birds and climate change. PloS ONE, 9(9), e106508.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Creighton, C. J. (2010). Inaugural Genomics Automation Congress and the coming deluge of sequencing data. Expert Review of Molecular Diagnostics, 10(7), 849–851.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Curtis, V. (2014). Online citizen science games: Opportunities for the biological sciences. Applied & Translational Genomics, 3(4).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Devictor, V., Whittaker, R. J., & Beltame, C. (2010). Beyond scarcity: Citizen science programmes as useful tools for conservation biogeography. Diversity and Distributions, 16, 354–362.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eitzel, M. V., Cappadonna, J. L., Santos-Lang, C., Duerr, R. E., Virapongse, A., West, S. E., Kyba, C. C. M., Bowser, A., Cooper, C. B., & Sforzi, A. (2017). Citizen science terminology matters: Exploring key terms. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, 2(1).

    Google Scholar 

  • Follett, R., & Strezov, V. (2015). An analysis of citizen science based research: Usage and publication patterns. PLoS ONE, 10(11), e0143687.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Franzoni, C., & Sauermann, H. (2014). Crowd science: The organization of scientific research in open collaborative projects. Research Policy, 43(1), 1–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gillham, B. (2000). Case study research methods. London: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grey, F. (2009). Viewpoint: The age of citizen cyberscience. CERN Courier, http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/38718.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grey, F. (2011, August 26). Citizen cyberscience: The new age of the amateur. CERN Courier, http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/46877.

  • Haklay, M. (2011, July 20). Classification of citizen science activities. Po Ve Sham blog post. Retrieved from http://povesham.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/classification-of-citizen-science-activities/.

  • Holliman, R., & Curtis, V. (2015). Online media. In R. Gunstone (Ed.), Encyclopedia of science education. Dordrecht: Springer Reference.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hudson, J. M., & Bruckman, A. (2004). “Go away”: Participant objections to being studied and the ethics of chatroom research. The Information Society, 20(2), 127–139.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Irwin, A. (1995). Citizen science. A study of people, expertise and sustainable development. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kanefsky, B., Barlow, N. G., & Gulick, V. C. (2001). Can distributed volunteers accomplish massive data analysis tasks? Paper read at 32nd Annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, March 12–16, 2001, Houston, Texas.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keel, W. (2010). Welcome to galaxy zoo. Astronomy, 38(9), 30–35.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kimura, A. H., & Kinchy, A. (2016). Citizen science: Probing the virtues and contexts of participatory research. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 2, 331–361.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Könneker, C., & Lugger, B. (2013). Public Science 2.0—Back to the future. Science, 342(6154), 49–50.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography. Doing ethnographic research online. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lintott, C. J., Schawinski, K., Slosar, A., Land, K., Bamford, S., Thomas, D., Raddick, M. J., Nichol, R. C., Szalay, A. S., Andreescu, D., Murray, P., & Vandenberg, J. (2008). Galaxy Zoo: Morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 389(3), 1179–1189. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13689.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McFedries, P. (2011). The coming data deluge. IEEE SPECTRUM, 48(2 (Feb)), 19. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=569306.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miller-Rushing, A., Primack, R., & Bonney, R. (2012). The history of public participation in ecological research. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 10(6), 285–290.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nielsen, M. (2012). Reinventing discovery. The new era of networked science. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nov, O., Arazy, O., & Anderson, D. (2010). Crowdsourcing for science: Understanding and enhancing SciSourcing contribution. In ACM CSCW Workshop on the Changing Dynamics of Scientific Collaborations. Savannah.

    Google Scholar 

  • Prestopnik, N. R., & Crowston, K. (2012). Citizen science system assemblages: Understanding the technologies that support crowdsourced science. In iConference ‘12. Toronto: ACM.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roy, H. E., Pocock, M. J. O., Preston, C. D., Roy, D. B., Savage, J., Tweddle, J. C., & Robinson, L. D. (2012). Understanding citizen science and environmental monitoring. Final Report on behalf of UK-EOF. NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the Natural History Museum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scanlon, E. (2013). Scholarship in the digital age: Open educational resources, publication and public engagement. British Journal of Educational Technology, 45(1), 12–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schawinski, K. (2011). Galaxy Zoo and the wisdom of crowds. Sky and Telescope, 122, 24–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwamb, M. E., Orosz, J. A., Carter, J. A., Welsh, W. F., Fischer, D. A., Torres, G., A Howard, W., Crepp, J. R., Keel, W. C., & Lintott, C. J. (2013). Planet hunters: A transiting circumbinary planet in a quadruple star system. The Astrophysical Journal, 768(2), 127.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shirk, J. L., Ballard, H. L., Wilderman, C. C., Phillips, T., Wiggins, A., Jordan, R., McCallie, E., Minarchek, M., Lewenstein, B. V., & Krasny, M. E. (2012). Public participation in scientific research: A framework for deliberate design. Ecology and Society, 17(2), 29.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stodden, V. (2010). Open science: Policy implications for the evolving phenomenon of user-led scientific innovation. Journal of Science Communication no., 9(1), A05.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomas, G. (2011). How to do your case study. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Westphal, A. J., Stroud, R. M., Bechtel, H. A., Brenker, F. E., Butterworth, A. L., Flynn, G. J., Frank, D. R., Gainsforth, Z., Hillier, J. K., & Postberg, F. (2014). Evidence for interstellar origin of seven dust particles collected by the Stardust spacecraft. Science, 345(6198), 786–791.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wiggins, A. (2010). Crowdsourcing science: Organizing virtual participation in knowledge production. Paper read at Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work, November 7–10, Sannibel Island, Fla.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wiggins, A., & Crowston, K. (2012). Describing Public Participation in Scientific Research. Paper Read at iConference, Toronto.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wiggins, A., & Crowston, K. (2015). Surveying the citizen science landscape. First Monday, 20(1).

    Google Scholar 

  • Wynn, J. (2017). Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, science, and public engagement. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wellcome Centre for Molecular Parasitology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Vickie Curtis

Authors
  1. Vickie Curtis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Curtis, V. (2018). Introduction: Distributed Approaches to Making Science. In: Online Citizen Science and the Widening of Academia. Palgrave Studies in Alternative Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77664-4_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77664-4_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-77663-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-77664-4

  • eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation