Or, Why Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Will NOT Create Nightmare Zombies That Will

Destroy Us All

Andrea Thomer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Robert Guralnick, University of Colorado, Boulder

 

- Biocollections contain critical data for documenting biodiversity, reconstructing how it has changed over time, and investigating the causes of changes. - 3-5 billion undigitized specimens , at least.

IN A WORLD... dominated by anthropogenic change.... 

 

the robots are sad about this too...

 “Many Americans cannot provide correct answers about basic factual knowledge of science or the scientific inquiry process.”  2010 National Science Foundation

(NSF) Science and Engineering Indicators Report 

- Provides us with the workforce we need - Gives back to the community  - Could be highly scalable

- With a "centralized" web interface, it's easy to imagine all benefiting

- Crowdsourcing & citizen science =/= apocalypse 

- Galaxy Zoo Green Peas: Discovery of a Class of Compact Extremely Star-Forming Galaxies - eBird results in 75 peer reviewed pubs a year (Kelling, 2011) 

- We've relied on volunteers and amateurs for centuries 

- Amateurs have time, passion and a different perspective; this leads to discovery.

Annie Alexander didn't just fund the MVZ, but helped collect specimens for it as well

"gentleman scholar" = not actually employed as a scientist

-  Data quality concerns, e.g. esoteric species names. 

- What are the real costs/benefits of this approach vs. others?   - Need data about incentives

-  How to foster community and collaboration?   

 

- We can track volunteers’ expertise levels

 - There are already success stories in dorkier fields  - Research in related domains shows how communication creates better data, knowledge

Percent correct answer on “clicker” question when initially asked (Q1), % correct after class dicussion (Q1ad),and % correct on related but differentquestion (Q2)

- More engaged community by enabling interaction

- Positive feedback loops

- Better data for us!

Crowdsourcing forces articulation work:

    “ ‘Articulation work’ names the continuous efforts required in order to bring together discontinuous elements -- of organizations, of professional practices, of technologies -- into working configurations”

Suchman, 1995

Articulation activities required by crowdsourcing: -The development of stable cyberinfastructure

-The development, maintenance, and deployment of good metadata standards

-Clear explanation of best practices in using those metadata standards

Often in digitization projects we forget about the human cost - the humans involved in the workflow (Mak, 2011)

We've been relying on volunteers for centuries.

Working with volunteers online: it's a new medium, not a new method

Collaborative work leads to better data.

We need to build applications that foster collaboration.

Building good crowdsourcing applications forces articulation work.

Good crowdsourcing =

Infrastructure & good metadata

= reusable, semantically

enriched, linkable data!*

*provided we do the work.

References: Kelling, Steve (2011). "How to identify birds in flight." Keynote address at the 2011 meeting of the Association of Information Science and Technology. New Orleans, LA.

Mak, Bonnie (2011). "The Database and Its Discontents." Paper read at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's monthly History Salon.  Smith, Arfon (2011). Presentation at the Illinois Research Data Initiative Opening Symposium.

Suchman, Lucy. (1995). "Supporting Articulation Work" In Computerization and Controversy: value conflicts and social choices.

Acknowledgements:Thanks to the CIRSS Student Research Group, Dean, Aaron and John W. for awesome and much-needed feedback on this talk, and pretty much anyone who has read/commented/not mocked our blog