Why won't aliens talk to us? Content and community dynamics in online citizen science
Why won't aliens talk to us? Content and community dynamics in online citizen science
We conducted a quantitative analysis of ten citizen science projects hosted on the Zooniverse platform, using a data set of over 50 million activity records and more than 250,000 users, collected between December 2010 and July 2013. We examined the level of participation of users in Zooniverse discussion forums in relation to their contributions toward the completion of scientific (micro-)tasks. As Zooniverse is home to a multitude of projects, we were also interested in the emergence of cross-projects effects, and identified those project characteristics, most importantly the subject domain and the duration of a project. We also looked into the adoption of expert terminology, showing that this phenomenon is dependent on the scientific domain which a project addresses but also affected by how the communication features are actually used by a community. This is the first study of this kind in this increasingly important class of online community, and its insights will inform the design and further development of the Zooniverse platform, and of citizen science systems as a whole
Luczak-Rösch, Markus
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Tinati, Ramine
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Simperl, Elena
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Van Kleek, Max
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Shadbolt, Nigel
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Simpson, Robert
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Luczak-Rösch, Markus
6cfe587f-e02c-48e8-b2b8-543952ab50a7
Tinati, Ramine
f74a0556-6a04-40c5-8bcf-6f5235dbf687
Simperl, Elena
40261ae4-c58c-48e4-b78b-5187b10e4f67
Van Kleek, Max
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Shadbolt, Nigel
5c5acdf4-ad42-49b6-81fe-e9db58c2caf7
Simpson, Robert
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Luczak-Rösch, Markus, Tinati, Ramine, Simperl, Elena, Van Kleek, Max, Shadbolt, Nigel and Simpson, Robert
(2014)
Why won't aliens talk to us? Content and community dynamics in online citizen science.
Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, , Ann Arbor, United States.
01 - 04 Jun 2014.
10 pp
.
(Submitted)
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Conference or Workshop Item
(Paper)
Abstract
We conducted a quantitative analysis of ten citizen science projects hosted on the Zooniverse platform, using a data set of over 50 million activity records and more than 250,000 users, collected between December 2010 and July 2013. We examined the level of participation of users in Zooniverse discussion forums in relation to their contributions toward the completion of scientific (micro-)tasks. As Zooniverse is home to a multitude of projects, we were also interested in the emergence of cross-projects effects, and identified those project characteristics, most importantly the subject domain and the duration of a project. We also looked into the adoption of expert terminology, showing that this phenomenon is dependent on the scientific domain which a project addresses but also affected by how the communication features are actually used by a community. This is the first study of this kind in this increasingly important class of online community, and its insights will inform the design and further development of the Zooniverse platform, and of citizen science systems as a whole
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Submitted date: 2014
Venue - Dates:
Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, , Ann Arbor, United States, 2014-06-01 - 2014-06-04
Organisations:
Web & Internet Science
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Local EPrints ID: 363523
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/363523
PURE UUID: fecc0d8b-49ce-427f-a2d4-3b2891a8aa4d
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Date deposited: 27 Mar 2014 10:07
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 16:25
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Contributors
Author:
Markus Luczak-Rösch
Author:
Max Van Kleek
Author:
Nigel Shadbolt
Author:
Robert Simpson
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