Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information: Overview and Typology of Participation

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge

Abstract

Within volunteered geographic information (VGI), citizen science stands out as a class of activities that require special attention and analysis. Citizen science is likely to be the longest running of VGI activities, with some projects showing continuous effort over a century. In addition, many projects are characterised by a genuine element of volunteering and contribution of information for the benefit of human knowledge and science. They are also tasks where data quality and uncertainty come to the fore when evaluating the validity of the results. This chapter provides an overview of citizen science in the context of VGI – hence the focus on geographic citizen science. This chapter highlights the historical context of citizen science and its more recent incarnation. It also covers some of the cultural and conceptual challenges that citizen science faces and the resulting limitation on the level of engagement. By drawing parallels with the Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) literature, the chapter offers a framework for participation in citizen science and concludes with the suggestion that a more participatory mode of citizen science is possible.

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

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 169.99
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

References

  • Anderson, D. P., Cobb, J., Korpela, E., Lebofsky, M., & Werthimer, D. (2002). SETI@home: An experiment in public-resource computing. Communications of the ACM, 45(11), 56–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Antoniou, B., Haklay, M., & Morley, J. (2010). Web 2.0 geotagged photos: Assessing the spatial dimension of the phenomenon. Geomatica, The Journal of Geospatial Information, Technology and Practice, 64(1), 99–110.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the America Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • BBC (2006). Citizen science, Radio 4 series. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/citizenscience.shtml. Accessed June 2011.

  • Bonney, R., Ballard, H., Jordan, H., McCallie, E., Phillips, T., Shirk, J., & Wilderman, C. (2009). Public participation in scientific research: Defining the field and assessing its potential for informal science education. In A CAISE Inquiry Group Report, Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), Washington, DC (Technical Report).

    Google Scholar 

  • Bryant, R. L., & Wilson, G. A. (1998). Rethinking environmental management. Progress in Human Geography, 22(3), 321–343.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bryson, B. (2004). A short history of almost everything. London: Black Swan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Budhathoki, N. R., Nedovic-Budic, Z., & Bruce, B. (2010). An interdisciplinary frame for understanding volunteered geographic information. Geomatica, The Journal of Geospatial Information, Technology and Practice, 64(1), 11–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohn, J. P. (2008). Citizen science: Can volunteers do real research? Bioscience, 58(3), 192–197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coleman, D. J., Georgiadou, Y., & Labonte, J. (2009). Volunteered geographic information: The nature and motivation of producers. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, 4, 332–358.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooper, C. B., Dickinson, J., Phillips, T., & Bonney, R. (2007). Citizen science as a tool for conservation in residential ecosystems. Ecology and Society 12(2), 11. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol12/iss2/art11/. Accessed January 5, 2012.

  • Couclelis, H. (2003). The certainty of uncertainty: GIS and the limits of geographic knowledge. Transactions in GIS, 7(2), 165–175.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cuff, D., Hansen, M., & Kang, J. (2007). Urban sensing: Out of the woods. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 51(3), 24–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Elwood, S. (2008). Volunteered Geographic Information: Future research directions motivated by critical, participatory, and feminist GIS. GeoJournal, 72(3–4), 173–183.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Flanagin, A. J., & Metzger, M. J. (2008). The credibility of volunteered geographic information. GeoJournal, 72(3–4), 137–148.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ghose, R. (2001). Use of information technology for community empowerment: Transforming geographic information systems into community information systems. Transactions in GIS, 5(2), 141–163.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Girres, J.-F., & Touya, G. (2010). Quality assessment of the French OpenStreetMap dataset. Transactions in GIS, 14(4), 435–459.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goodchild, M. (2007). Citizens as sensors: The world of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69, 211–221.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grey, F. (2009). The age of citizen cyberscience, CERN Courier, April 29, 2009. http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/38718. Accessed July 2011.

  • Haklay, M. (2010). How good is OpenStreetMap information? A comparative study of OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey datasets for London and the rest of England. Environment and Planning B, 37, 682–703.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haklay, M., Francis, L., & Whitaker, C. (2008a). Citizens tackle noise pollution. GIS Professional, August issue.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haklay, M., Singleton, A., & Parker, C. (2008b). Web mapping 2.0: The Neogeography of the Geoweb. Geography Compass, 3, 2011–2039.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Holling, C. S. (1998). Two cultures of ecology. Conservation Ecology 2(2), 4. http://www.consecol.org/vol2/iss2/art4/. Accessed January 5, 2012.

  • Howe, J. (2006). The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired Magazine,June 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Irwin, A. (1995). Citizen science. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keen, A. (2007). The cult of the amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values (1st ed.). New York: Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Khatib, F., DiMaio, F., Foldit Contenders Group, Foldit Void Crushers Group, Cooper, S., Kazmierczyk, M., Gilski, M., Krzywda, S., Zabranska, H., Pichova, I., Thompson, J., Popovic, Z., Jaskolski, M., & Baker, D. (2011). Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. Published online September 18, 2011. doi:10.1038/nsmb.2119.

  • King, J. L., & Kraemer, L. K. (1993). Models, facts, and the policy process: The political ecology of estimated truth. In M. F. Goodchild, B. O. Parks, & L. T. Steyaert (Eds.), Environmental modeling with GIS (pp. 353–360). New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lintott, C. J., Schawinski, K., Slosar, A., Land, K., Bamford, S., Thomas, D., Raddick, M. J., Nichol, R. C., Szalay, A., Andreescu, D., Murray, P., & van den Berg, 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.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacKerron, G. (2011). mappiness.org.uk. In LSE Research Day 2011: The Early Career Researcher, May 26, 2011, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK (Unpublished).

    Google Scholar 

  • Maisonneuve, N., Stevens, M., & Ochab, B. (2010). Participatory noise pollution monitoring using mobile phones. Information Polity, 15(1–2), 51–71.

    Google Scholar 

  • Migurski, M. (2009). Walking papers. walking-papers.org. Accessed 5 January 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Norman, D. A. (1990). The design of everyday things. New York: Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nov, O., Arazy, O., & Anderson, D. (2011). Technology-mediated citizen science participation: A motivational model. In Proceedings of the AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2011), Barcelona, Spain, July 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pain, R. (2004). Social geography: Participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 28(5), 652–663.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, D., & Barnett, C. (2009). Something in the air: Civic science and contentious environmental politics in post-apartheid South Africa. Geoforum, 40(3), 373–382.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sieber, R. (2006). Public participation and geographic information systems: A literature review and framework. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 96(3), 491–507.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Silvertown, J. (2009). A new dawn for citizen science. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 24(9), 467–471.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stilgoe, J. (2009). Citizen scientists – Reconnecting science with civil society. London: Demos.

    Google Scholar 

  • Turner, A. J. (2006). Introduction to neogeography. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Westphal, A. J., von Korff, J., Anderson, D. P., Alexander, A., Betts, B., Brownlee, D. E., Butterworth, A. L., Craig, N., Gainsforth, Z., Mendez, B., See, T., Snead, C. J., Srama, R., Tsitrin, S., Warren, J., & Zolensky, M. (2006). Stardust@home: Virtual microscope validation and first results. In 37th Annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, League City, Texas, March 2006, Abstract no. 2225.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wiggins, A., & Crowston, K. (2011). From conservation to Crowdsourcing: A typology of citizen science. In Proceedings of the Forty-fourth Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS-44), Koloa, HI, January 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilderman, C. C. (2007). Models of community science: Design lessons from the field. In C. McEver, R. Bonney, J. Dickinson, S. Kelling, K. Rosenberg, & J. L. Shirk (Eds.), Citizen science toolkit conference. Ithaca: Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilsdon, J., Wynne, B., & Stilgoe, J. (2005). The public value of science or how to ensure that science really matters. London: Demos.

    Google Scholar 

  • World Meteorological Organisation. (2001). Volunteers for weather, climate and water. Geneva: World Meteorological Organisation. WMO No. 919.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zook, M., Graham, M., Shelton, T., & Gorman, S. (2010). Volunteered geographic information and crowdsourcing disaster relief: A case study of the Haitian earthquake. World Medical & Health Policy, 2(2). doi:10.2202/1948–4682.1069.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgement

This chapter was written with the support of the ‘Extreme’ Citizen Science – ExCiteS grant, funded by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), EPSRC reference EP/I025278/1 and the EveryAware project, funded by the EC FP7. Special thanks go to the participants of the VGI workshops in GIScience 2010, AAG 2011, Vespucci Summer Institute 2011 and members of the ExCiteS group for their comments and questions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, London, UK

    Muki Haklay

Authors
  1. Muki Haklay
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Muki Haklay .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Geography, Ohio State University, N. Oval Mall 154, Columbus, 43210, Ohio, USA

    Daniel Sui

  2. Dept. Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, 98195-3550, Washington, USA

    Sarah Elwood

  3. College of Letters & Science, Dept. Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, Ellison Hall, Santa Barbara, 93106-4060, California, USA

    Michael Goodchild

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Haklay, M. (2013). Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information: Overview and Typology of Participation. In: Sui, D., Elwood, S., Goodchild, M. (eds) Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4587-2_7

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation