van hyning - reaching new audiences with crowdsourcing

Dr Victoria Van HyningZooniverse.org, University of Oxford

victoria@zooniverse.org@VanHyningV

Reaching New Audiences with Crowdsourcing

Talk outline

• Crowdsourcing • Origins of Zooniverse• Gamification and motivation• Project design principles• Humanities and transcription projects • Tate Britain partnership

Citizen Science (Crowdsourcing)

‘In citizen science projects, members of the public (citizens) collaborate with professional scientists to conduct scientific research.’

G. Newman et al, ‘The future of citizen science: Emerging technologies and shifting

paradigms’, Front Ecol Environment, 10, 6 (2012), 298-304

1.29 million users

Why do people participate in Zooniverse projects?

?

?

?

?

Do we gamify the projects to incentivize

users?

Principle #1:Many volunteers want to further real research: contributing to knowledge is an end in itself. Zooniverse designs for this reality.

Milky Way Projecthttp://www.milkywayproject.org/

Principle #2:Be clear about how volunteers’ time and effort is useful.

Principle #3:Strike a balance between an enjoyable user experience and getting useful data.

Principle #4:Your community

needs to hear from you!

Humanitiesat Zooniverse

Mostly text-basedNo audioNo video

Transcription Projects• Existing projects:

‘Ancient Lives’: www.ancientlives.org/

‘Old Weather’: www.oldweather.org/

‘Notes from Nature’: www.notesfromnature.org/

‘Operation War Diary’: www.operationwardiary.org/

• Upcoming Projects:‘Anno.Tate’ with Tate Britain‘Shakespeare’s World’ with Folger

Shakespeare Library

AncientLives

• launched July 2011• >1.5 million transcriptions

of ancient Greek papyri• 250,000 unique volunteer

contributors

Principle #5:A successful User Interface allows non-specialists to participate. A great UI allows them to learn and acquire new skills.

OWD by the numbers:

• Over 1.2 million page views since launch• >12,000 registered users • >73,000 comments on Talk, the project

discussion area• ~2,000 commenting users• ~100,000 pages ‘completed’ i.e. tagged

and partially transcribed by 7 users.

http://wd3.herokuapp.com/pages/AWD0000h3c

Anno.Tate =

+

Goals of Anno.Tate

• To democratize access to Tate archives• to produce word searchable transcriptions

of manuscripts for the online catalogue • To improve item level descriptions of

archival items in catalogues• My goal: to create a new workflow for

crowdsourced transcription

Principle #6: Granularize• break up tasks and make hard

projects more accessible• less time commitment for users• mitigate against user fatigue• minimize repetition of tasks

How do we make hard tasks accessible?

PanoptesThe next frontier

How can Panoptes help you?

www.zooniverse.org | victoria@zooniverse.org | @VanHyningV

Thanks for listening!