Methods and guidelines for the design and analysis of online citizen science

Date: April 17,2015

Speaker: Elena Simperl, University of Southampton, UK

Abstract

Online citizen science (CS) has proven to be not only a practical and effective means of solving previously infeasible, large-scale scientific problems, but also a valuable education tool, and, for the scientifically curious, an entertaining, and sometimes addictive, past-time. While we can find exemplars of such systems in many shapes and forms, those that have seen the greatest success have excelled at (at least) two things: first, they managed to accomplish the particular set of scientific objectives sought, and, second, they were able to attract and sustain the interest and support of a critical mass of volunteers over time. In this talk we will introduce a mixed methods approach to study citizen science projects as archetypes of human computation and online communities. We will discuss a series of design guidelines drawn from our collaboration with several CS platforms and present our analytics framework, which allows one to gain quantitative insights into the motivation and behavior of citizen scientists, both at the level of individual contributors and the community as a whole.

References

• O. Feyisetan, E. Simperl and M. van Kleek. Improving paid microtasks through gamification and furtherance incentives. To appear at WWW2015.
• R. Tinati, M. Van Kleek, E. Simperl, M. Luczak-Rösch, R. Simpson and N. Shadbolt. Designing for citizen data analysis: a cross-sectional case study of a multi-domain citizen science platform. Proceedings of ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2014 (CHI2015), pages 1-10, 2015.
• M. Luczak-Rösch, R. Tinati, E. Simperl, M. Van Kleek, N. Shadbolt and R. Simpson. Why Won't Aliens Talk to Us? Content and Community Dynamics in Online Citizen Science. Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM2014), 2014.