Another quick post with news on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage, citizen science and citizen history in April(ish) 2016…
Acceptances for our DH2016 Expert Workshop: Beyond The Basics: What Next For Crowdsourcing? have been sent out. If you missed the boat, don't panic! We're taking a few more applications on a rolling basis to allow for people with late travel approval for the DH2016 conference in July.
Probably the biggest news is the launch of citizenscience.gov, as it signals the importance of citizen science and crowdsourcing to the US government.
From the press release: 'the White House announced that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has partnered with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS), a Trust instrumentality of the U.S. Government, to launch CitizenScience.gov as the new hub for citizen science and crowdsourcing initiatives in the public sector.
CitizenScience.gov provides information, resources, and tools for government personnel and citizens actively engaged in or looking to participate in citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. … Citizen science and crowdsourcing are powerful approaches that engage the public and provide multiple benefits to the Federal government, volunteer participants, and society as a whole.'
There's also work to 'standardize data and metadata related to citizen science, allowing for greater information exchange and collaboration both within individual projects and across different projects'.
Other news:
- A new Zooniverse article is out! Science Learning via Participation in Online Citizen Science by Karen Masters, Eun Young Oh, Joe Cox, Brooke Simmons, Chris Lintott, Gary Graham, Anita Greenhill, Kate Holmes (PDF) – there's also a blog post summarising the research if reading scientific papers isn't your thing: 'We were also able to find evidence in the survey responses that project specific science knowledge correlated positively with measures of active engagement in the project. Put plainly, people who classified more on a given project we found to know more about the scientific content of that project'.
- The US Holocaust Memorial Museum's 'U.S. Newspapers and the Holocaust' project has been getting lots of press
- HistoryPin has new location and date suggestion features
- Geoffrey Belknap has an article on Science Gossip in the Guardian: 'People power: how citizen science could change historical research'
- Meghan Ferriter has blogged on Volunpeers: Hashtag, Identity, & Collaborative Engagement and Dreamy Digital Engagement at SXSW Interactive
- On my reading list – a blog post on the importance of community research and participatory research practices, 'Why the future of social change belongs to community research' and another on 'Is citizen science about science or outreach?'
- New Job Opening: Research Assistant/Developer in Extreme Citizen Science (closes May 22)
- Slides on Human-Computer Collaboration at NYPL Labs by Mauricio Giraldo
- The European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) Newsletter is a great source of news about events and publications, and the CitSci list has regular posts from practioners and researchers.
- The Journal of Science Communication has a series of articles on citizen science
- WWW '16 Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web has a number of papers on technical aspects crowdsourcing (nb: I haven't had time to actually read any of them!)
- Citizen science and gene editing! Governance: Learn from DIY biologists by Todd Kuiken in Nature (March 2016)
Have I missed something important? Let me know in the comments or @mia_out.