Citizen science and its counterpart citizen social science are becoming increasingly established as research tools to address global and societal challenges. However, increased interaction between research and society also presents questions related to…
Category: Citizen Science
New research must be better reported, the future of society depends on it
Academics looking to communicate the findings and value of their research to wider audiences are increasingly going through the media to do so. But, argues Andy Tattersall, poor or incomplete reporting can undermine respect for experts by misrepresenting research, especially by trivialising or sensationalising it, or publishing under inappropriate headlines and with cherry-picked statistics. Proper and accurate communication of science […]
Science is a social process: facilitating community interactions across the research lifecycle
Modern day research practice is incredibly collaborative, increasingly interdisciplinary and a very social process. Sierra Williams underlines the importance of researchers and publishers alike recognising publication as one aspect of a much wider social process. By way of introduction to her role at peer-reviewed open access publisher PeerJ, she reflects on the purpose of community in science communication. Where do […]
“Trust yourself”: how the Citizen Science movement proposes a radical rethink of the relationship between scientists and the public
Was Michael Gove wrong to say the public had “had enough of experts”? Not exactly, argues Peter Dennis. In also appealing to the public to trust themselves, Gove touched a deeper nerve, one running back to Kant, the Enlightenment and intellectual autonomy. However, whereas in Kant’s day the public was the same group of people to whom both political and scientific […]
A snapshot of life on the savannah
Our latest featured data package is from Alexandra Swanson and colleagues at the Snapshot Serengeti project, and accompanies their peer-reviewed article in Scientific Data. It provides a unique resource for studying the one of the world’s most extraordinary mammal assemblages and also for studies of computer vision and machine learning. In addition, data from Snapshot Serengeti is already being used in biology and computer science classrooms to enable […]
Bottom-up citizen science projects are challenging authority of orthodox science through community-led investigations
New approaches to research investigation are looking to go beyond blanket objectivity to include experiential knowledge and local contexts. Dan McQuillan looks at the counter-cultural roots of the citizen science movement where activists strove to put science at the service of the people. He argues the current field of citizen science could catalyse something equally new by explicitly questioning the hegemony of orthodox […]
The great potential of citizen science: restoring the role of tacit knowledge and amateur discovery.
Citizen science is nothing new, but what makes internet-enabled citizen science different, is the sheer scale of amateur involvement. Benedikt Fecher sees great potential for citizen science, but argues a return to smaller-scale, high-involvement projects would be beneficial. This alternative model depends on citizen analysis, rather than just data collection. The core challenges for this kind of citizen science is to motivate and […]
Interns Summer in Review, Part 5: Learning (and teaching) the art of scientific investigations
It has been over two years since I was last in the woods of New Hampshire collecting invasive plant data for my undergraduate research. From then to now, I have thought little about data sets or statistical variability. Instead, I have focused on getting thirteen-year-old kids to simply grasp the concept that Earth has seasons …