Session 1 – What is Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science?
What are Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science?
Crowdsourcing of data, ideas, and action has become a staple concept and practice in the digital society, and is slowly making its way in to various types of research. Crowdsourcing (Howe 2008) brings together ideas from biology (Bollen and Heylighen 1996), and information science (Levy P, 2010; (Brin and Page, 1998) of collective intelligence from, and of human computing (Van Ahn, 2004) and has been popularized with the concept of the ‘Wisdom of the crowds’ (Surowiecki 2004. The concept of crowdsourcing has been retrospectively applied to ‘peer’ production processes that have created Wikipedia and other social computing projects.
Researchers and those wishing to exploit data sources have turned to crowdsourcing to collect data, and to analyse data. Ipeirotis (2010) and Ipeirotis & Paritosh (2011) are among those who have addressed the challenges of turning tools such as Amazon Mechanical Turk into resources for researchers. Business such as Clickworker provide platforms for business to collect data from the real world, and do data cleaning and classification.
Parallel to Crowdsourcing, and with increasing overlaps, is participatory or citizen science. Dating back fto at least the 19th Century, amateur scientists have collected samples and data and sent them to working scientists, museums and scientific societies. In the last 20 years this has become increasingly formalised and 'digital; citizen' science is spreading from biological sciences to humanities, and in to social and political studies.
Reading:
Read at least 3 of these short papers.
Howe's original definition Howe, J. (2006). Crowdsourcing: A Definition. Crowdsourcing Tracking the rise of the amateur. Retrieved from http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html
A brief introduction to citizen science in biological sciences : Silvertown, J. (2009). A new dawn for citizen science. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 24(9), 467–71. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2009.03.017
Catlin-Groves, C. L. (2012). The citizen science landscape: From volunteers to citizen sensors and beyond. International Journal of Zoology, 2012. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/349630
Haythornthwaite, C. (2009). Online Knowledge Crowds and Communities. International Conference on Knowledge Communities, (February), 1–16. Retrieved from https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/14198
Mansell, R. (2013). Employing digital crowdsourced information resources: Managing the emerging information commons. International Journal of the Commons, 7(2), 255–277.
Three readings on data quality and the crowd
A key issue in crowdsourcing data is the quality of data, and whether it is accepted as evidence by the potential users. Citizen science as for a long time struggled with this issue, but now evidence is emerging with appropriate quality control measures data and analysis can be at least equal to existing ways of data collection and analysis.
See, L., Comber, A., Salk, C., Fritz, S., van der Velde, M., Perger, C., … Obersteiner, M. (2013). Comparing the Quality of Crowdsourced Data Contributed by Expert and Non-Experts. PLoS ONE, 8(7).
Kim, M., Jung, Y., Jung, D., & Hur, C. (2014). Investigating the congruence of crowdsourced information with official government data: the case of pediatric clinics. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 16(2), e29. doi:10.2196/jmir.3078
Ipeirotis, P. G., & Paritosh, P. K. (2011). Managing crowdsourced human computation. In Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web - WWW ’11 (p. 287). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1963192.1963314
A short introduction to crowdsourcing is also available on the JISC website, reflecting UK projects
Reflective exercise
Sketch out a diagram that distinguished different aspects of citizen science and crowdsourcing. Consider the tasks (analysis, data collection etc), the goals (science, creating an indicator or a data set, processing data, education), the incentives (payment, learning, fun etc).
Make a table of principal benefits and challenges in crowdsourcing and citizen science - according to different uses and goals.
Some links
Wikipedia list of Citizen Science Projects
Wikipedia List of Crowdsource projects
Opal explore Nature platform
Crowdflower a Major Microwork platform