INFO 200-post 7: Reflection

After watching the Module 14 lectures and internalizing the ideas they present, I wanted to highlight one of the situations I came across in my research.

In 2014, when Flint, Michigan, changed its water source from treated Detroit water to water from the Flint River, and proper corrosion controls were not used, a lead-contamination crisis developed. At that point, some residents of Flint became citizen scientists, testing their own water, researching the chemicals that were in the water, keeping track of the effects of these chemicals on their bodies. For example, after her eyelashes began to fall out and her children were constantly covered in rashes, a 37-year-old mother of four stayed up late into the night, learning everything she could about what might be happening to her family and friends, epitomizing the definition of citizen scientist. She joined her fellow Flint residents, becoming an activist for clean water and accountability.

The Flint Public Library, in partnership with the Frances Willson Thompson Library at the University of Michigan responded to the needs of these citizen scientists and others in the affected community. The Flint Public Library connects the user to links for articles, studies, and updates from the front page of its website. The library at the University of Michigan has a LibGuide which includes free courses for members of the campus and community, a link to the Healthy Flint Resource Coordinating Center, and current Google news feeds and Twitter updates. Through this collaboration, these two libraries meet the needs of their citizen scientists, and they do it with a sense of community, powerful listening, and great compassion.

On a more personal note, as I look through my notes, through the module slides and videos and readings, through the studies and websites and posts and articles I’ve accumulated for my research paper, I realize that I am far more knowledgeable about information communities and the information profession than I ever expected to be at this point. Peter Block’s definition of community gives me pause: “Communities are human systems given form by conversations that build relatedness.” I appreciate the repeated exposure to the characteristics of information communities and the chance to apply them to my chosen community.

I now see communities everywhere I look, and that really is the point, isn’t it? As information professionals we will encounter communities everywhere, communities about things we may be completely unfamiliar with. I feel more confident in my ability to serve them after researching an information community of my own, progressing through the modules, and learning about the communities my fellow students have studied.

INFO 200-post 5: Ethical dilemmas

My earlier posts have considered the information community of citizen scientists from the perspective of volunteers doing online data analyzing. It was only when I read the article “A Framework for Addressing Ethical Issues in Citizen Science” (2015) by Resnik, Elliott, and Miller, did I consider the aspects of citizen science which require volunteers to do such things as go into the field to make observations of the weather, or to provide information about herbal cures passed down from generation to generation, or to give blood samples to researchers. The article defines three such types of citizen science: community mapping and monitoring (CMM), where laypeople assist scientists with data collection in the field; community-based participatory research (CBPR), an approach in which scientists work closely with the local community in developing and implementing research likely to be of concern to members of the community; and interest group research (IGR), an approach in which citizen groups with a particular social, political, or environmental agenda partner with scientists to conduct research.

The field of citizen science faces several ethical dilemmas in the collecting, exchanging, and disseminating of information. These include data quality and integrity, data sharing and intellectual property, conflicts of interest, and exploitation.

Some of these dilemmas are a result of scientists not adhering to their own codes of conduct, as in the problem of data quality and integrity. Research conducted with the aid of lay people may be viewed as subpar because they “may not understand how to collect, record, or manage data properly. . .[or] they might even fabricate or falsify data in an attempt to sway particular outcomes or actions or meet deadlines.” (Resnik, Elliott, & Miller, 2015)

In the area of data sharing and intellectual property, the ethical dilemma is often a result of a communication breakdown. Citizen scientists may be unaware of the importance of data being evaluated by scientists before being made available for others to use. In addition, citizen scientists may feel that the observations they have made are their intellectual property and are unwilling to relinquish that control over to scientists.

Conflicts of interest can occur on both sides of the study. Researchers may have financial or professional ties to an outside organization that may benefit from a specific outcome. Lay participants may be volunteering their time in order to further a political or personal agenda.

The ethical problem of exploitation occurs when the researchers fail to include the citizen scientists in the benefits that they reap from the study.

Information professionals can help mitigate these dilemmas in the following ways:

  • Encourage communication between those who are conducting the study and those who are contributing. Many of the aforementioned issues could be avoided with clear explanations of scientific procedure and expectations of behavior.
  • Provide scientists coming into unfamiliar communities with information about the area, demographics, and a physical location to meet with local volunteers.
  • Assist scientists when explaining best practices in safe citizen participation and study methods, data analysis, and communication of results.

“The best strategy for resolving ethical dilemmas is preparation.” (Garnar, 2015) Information professionals can help with the ethical issues faced by citizen scientists and the researchers conducting the studies by anticipating the dilemmas and taking steps to avoid them in the first place.

References:

Garnar, M. L. (2015). Information ethics. In S. Hirsh (Ed.), Information services today: An introduction (289-299). Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Resnik, D. B., Elliott, K. C., & Miller, A. K. (2015). A framework for addressing ethical issues in citizen science. Environmental Science and Policy, 54, 475-481. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2015.05.008

INFO 200-post 4: Peer-reviewed article

“Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers” (Raddick et al., 2009), was written by eight scientists from Johns Hopkins University, Southern Illinois University, Yale University, Oxford University, and Fingerprint Digital Media, a website design company in Northern Ireland. This study was conducted in 2009 at a time when the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project was only two years old but already had “more than 200,000 people from 113 countries . . . involved in making more than 100 million classifications of galaxies.” (Raddick et al., 2009, Introduction, para. 4) Researchers decided it was time to assess the motivations and demographics of these volunteers in order to “plan future citizen science projects to appeal to these motivations, potentially maximizing their numbers of participants (and therefore their scientific impact), and increasing public understanding of and participation in science.” (Raddick et al., 2009, History of Galaxy Zoo Participation section, para. 6)

The methodology of this study was twofold. First, a new topic was introduced to the Galaxy Zoo public forum entitled “What Makes Galaxy Zoo Interesting?” and more than 800 free-form responses were collected in an allotted time period. Second, volunteers who participated in the classifications but not necessarily the public forums were interviewed. During the 30 minute interview, volunteers were “asked a series of questions about subjects’ demographics, their impressions of the Galaxy Zoo website, their motivations for participating, and their experiences with and definition of science.” (Raddick et al., 2009, Interview Protocols section, para. 1) When the interviews were completed, three independent raters analyzed the responses to identify statements of motivation. These statements were then combined into twelve motivation categories:

Motivation Category Description (used in survey instrument)
Contribute I am excited to contribute to original scientific research.
Learning I find the site and forums helpful lin learning about astronomy.
Discovery I can look at galaxies that few people have seen before.
Community I can meet other people with similar interests.
Teaching I find Galaxy Zoo to be a useful resource for teaching other people.
Beauty I enjoy looking at the beautiful galaxy images.
Fun I had a lot of fun categorizing the galaxies.
Vastness I am amazed by the vast scale of the universe.
Helping I am happy to help
Zoo I am interested in the Galaxy Zoo project.
Astronomy I am interested in astronomy.
Science I am interested in science.

(Raddick et al., 2009, Table 3)

At this point, the 826 responses to the forum question “What Makes Galaxy Zoo Interesting?” were examined to see if any additional motivation categories could be found; there were none. Achieving their research goal of identifying a list of motivation categories of citizen science volunteers in the Galaxy Zoo project, researchers have since “used these categories to construct a survey instrument that uses multiple-choice and Likert scale responses to assess the frequency of each motivation category in our population. We have administered this instrument as an online survey and are now analyzing the responses.” (Raddick et al., 2009, Discussion, para. 6) Results of that survey were subsequently published in the article “Galaxy Zoo: Motivations of Citizen Scientists” in 2013.

As I learn more about Galaxy Zoo and the other Zooniverse projects, I find myself logging into the site and categorizing landforms on Mars or labeling illustrations in 200 year old journals whenever I have the time. Personally I am motivated to contribute to something bigger than myself and to learn something I never thought possible. It is the motivations of my chosen information community which intrigue me the most, and this study and the subsequent 2013 study will be instrumental in my research into the information-seeking behavior of citizen scientists.

Reference:

Raddick, M. J., Bracey, G., Gay, P. L., Lintott, C. J., Murray, P., Schawinski, K., . . . Vandenberg, J. (2009). Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the motivations of citizen science volunteers. Astronomy Education Review, 9, http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/AER2009036.

INFO 200-post 3: High level insights

I landed on the Zooniverse as a possible information community out of my fascination with the Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity. A library patron suggested that I investigate Planet Four, a website where I could actually assist scientists from the jet propulsion laboratory in identifying landforms on Mars. Doing so, I found that Planet Four is just one of dozens of projects grouped together in the Zooniverse, along with projects in the areas of biology, ecology, history, and the arts. In my previous post I put forth Durrance and Fisher’s (2003) definition of an information community and asserted that the Zooniverse fits that definition.

Before heading to the databases to dig up articles and studies about this information community, I needed to define who actually makes up the Zooniverse. The projects are designed by researchers: scientists, doctors, graduate students, museum curators, archivists; basically anyone with a data set to be analyzed can develop a project, which is then listed on the Zooniverse website and advertised to its virtual community through social media outlets reaching 28,000 followers on Facebook alone. While researchers could be considered an information community in their own right, I have decided to focus on these followers, these citizen scientists, and their information-seeking behavior.

In his article “Information Activity in Serious Leisure,” Hartel (2016) describes the liberal arts hobby as “any leisure pursuit that entails the systematic and fervent pursuit of knowledge for its own sake” and those who take up this pursuit as “not employed scholars or researchers but citizen experts with a personal passion to master a subject for leisure.” It is into this category that I would place members of the Zooniverse community. I plan to consult work by Stebbins to delve deeper into the concepts of knowledge acquisition and knowledge expression.

The Zooniverse is able to gather a great deal of information about its participants. In order to work on projects within the Zooniverse, one must register. Whenever a member analyzes a bit of data, it is referred to as a categorization. Categorizations are recorded, as is time spent interacting within the information community. Additionally, researchers often ask volunteers to complete surveys detailing their motivations for working on projects and offering demographic data about themselves. Consequently, several studies have been conducted about the members of the Zooniverse. For example, in the paper “Galaxy Zoo: Motivations of Citizen Scientists,” Raddick (2013) “analyzes results from an online survey of nearly 11,000 volunteers in Galaxy Zoo, an astronomy citizen science project. Results show that volunteers’ primary motivation is a desire to contribute to scientific research.” This study was done in an effort to encourage other researchers to consider the motivations of citizen scientists in their projects.

I was surprised to find that studies that crowdsource data to amateur contributors may not be taken as seriously as studies without citizen science participation, despite the fact that non-scientists have been making legitimate observations throughout history. Researchers are using information about citizen scientists in the age of technology and social media to help legitimize this kind of work. (Booney, 2014) As I hoped when I first decided to focus on this information community, I am becoming more interested and excited the more I learn about this fascinating organization.

Sources:

Bonney, R., Shirk, J. L., Phillips, T. B., Wiggins, A., Ballard, H. L., Miller-Rushing, A. J., & Parrish, J. K. (2014). Next steps for citizen science. Science, 343(6178), 1436-1437.

Fisher, K., & Durrance, J. (2003). Information communities. In K. Christensen, & D. Levinson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of community: From the village to the virtual world. (pp. 658-661). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: http://dx.doi.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.4135/9781412952583.n248

Hartel, J., Cox, A.M. & Griffin, B.L. (2016). Information activity in serious leisure. Information Research, 21(4), paper728. Retrieved from http://InformationR.net/ir/21-4/paper728.html (Links to an external site.)

Raddick, M. J., Bracey, G., Gay, P. L., Lintott, C. J., Cardamone, C., Murray, P., … & Vandenberg, J. (2013). Galaxy Zoo: Motivations of citizen scientists. arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.6886.

The Zooniverse needs our help

I’m studying the information community of the Zooniverse for my research paper this semester. It features projects by the Citizen Science Alliance and other organizations using interested people to analyze data to help with research projects. Currently, the Planetary Response Network and Rescue Global team is working on a project called Caribbean Storms 2017, in which they need help identifying targets for aid operations by comparing pictures taken before and after the hurricane in order to identify floods, damage to buildings and roads, and temporary settlements. If you have any spare time, it’s really interesting and worthwhile to help out. They had over 10,000 responses to help with Irma and were able to close the project in just a few days. For more information, please click the above picture.

INFO 200: Context Book Review/Essay

In his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Clay Shirky, currently Associate Professor at NYU, calculated that Americans spend two hundred billion hours watching television every year, basically two hundred billion hours of free time every year. When one is watching television, one is passively consuming a product developed by producers, advertisers, and manufacturers of television. For decades following World War II, consumption of television has continued to grow as leisure time has increased and social activities have decreased. With the advent of the internet and its increasing ubiquity to the general public, it became easier for people to create content, not simply consume it. As an example of people creating content, Shirky measured the time spent editing, discussing, creating, and monitoring Wikipedia entries as one hundred million hours of human thought. If we take the accumulated free time of society, represented by time spent passively watching television, as raw material and add in the means, motive, and opportunity contributed by our increasing social connectedness made possible by technological innovation, we are given a cognitive surplus, a virtual gift of billions of hours of human thought. “One thing that makes the current age remarkable is that we can now treat free time as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects rather than as a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time.” (p.10)

Shirky’s theory of cognitive surplus aligns with Durrance and Fisher’s (2003) first characteristic of successful information communities, exploiting the information sharing qualities of technology and yielding multiplier effects for stakeholders, as illustrated by the example of patientslikeme.com, a website started in 2005 to connect patients who had ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) so that they could share treatment options and support each other through their devastating disease. The need for and appeal of such a community has increased its number of users to include sufferers of many other diseases and illnesses. Shirky states “PatientsLikeMe uses the word community to denote a group of patients who share a specific condition,…information and ideas, and they produce cultural norms and support for one another.” (p.156) The community of PatientsLikeMe doesn’t only directly benefit itself, however. Combining their cognitive surplus by sharing their experiences and participating in drug trials, data is accumulated which in turn helps researchers improve upon current treatments and develop new ideas about the diseases and potential cures.

In terms of information behavior, when we divert our free time from watching television to contributing creatively to information communities, we are moving from “casual leisure that requires no training” to serious pursuits centered on learning and project-based leisure that is a somewhat complex, time-bound, creative undertaking. (Hartel, 2016) Flickr.com, a photo-sharing website, is an example of serious and project-based leisure. What was once a singular hobby of taking photographs and sharing privately has become a platform for millions of users to edit, enhance, tag, search, and share photographs, and, according to Shirky, is an example of the importance of adaptation in the use of cognitive surplus: “When the photo-sharing service Flickr.com was experimenting most actively with new features, it sometimes upgraded its software every half hour, at a time when traditional software upgrades were released annually.” (p.203)

Visualizing our world and the technological connections between the people in it put me in mind of the H.G.Wells 1937 piece “World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia.” Wells describes the encyclopedia as it existed in the early 20th century as “written for gentlemen by gentlemen,” much the same way that Shirky defines traditional media as created by marketers, producers, and companies for the simple viewing or reading or hearing of the ordinary person. Just as Wells conjures a world brain of the future which will be made accessible to every individual, Shirky conceptualizes our 21st century media as the connective tissue of society. (p.54) Back in 1937, Wells visualizes an “efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements…a complete planetary memory for all mankind” of which a “direct reproduction…can be summoned to any properly prepared spot.” Now, in 2010, all data on the internet is in digital form, letting “anyone in the world make an unlimited number of perfect copies of something they created” and is no longer “something produced by professionals for the consumption by amateurs.” (p.54)

Shirky defines cognitive surplus as the cumulative free time and talents of the developed world, but notes that this surplus is only potential. The population of the world will continue to grow and technology will continue to improve the connections among us, the raw material for cognitive surplus will increase exponentially. What is critical is our imagination. This opportunity is enormous, and what we do with it is “determined largely by how well we imagine and reward public creativity, participation, and sharing.” (p.212)

Sources:

Fisher, K., & Durrance, J. (2003). Information communities. In K. Christensen, & D. Levinson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of community: From the village to the virtual world. (pp. 658-661). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: http://dx.doi.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.4135/9781412952583.n248

Hartel, J., Cox, A.M. & Griffin, B.L. (2016). Information activity in serious leisure. Information Research, 21(4), paper728. Retrieved from http://InformationR.net/ir/21-4/paper728.html (Links to an external site.)

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. New York, NY: The Penguin Press.

Wells, H. G. (1937). The idea of a permanent world encyclopedia.  ischool Berkeley.  Retrieved from https://sherlock.ischool.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.html (Links to an external site.)

INFO 200-post 2: My chosen community

Information communities share five characteristics, according to Fisher and Durrance. (2003) It is the second characteristic that interests me most: “Information communities emphasize collaboration among diverse groups that provide information and may share joint responsibility and resources.” The idea of diverse groups sharing resources is one of the major tenets of the information community I will be studying, the Zooniverse.

The Zooniverse started in 2007 as a collaboration between the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and Oxford University in England, out of a need to aggregate studies that used citizen science participation into one easily accessible place. With the advent of the Internet and the ubiquity of personal computers and smartphones, scientists began to see the potential for interested people, or citizen scientists, to help examine their mountains of data. Initial Zooniverse projects focused on astronomy; researchers possessed millions of photographs and pieces of data gathered by satellites and probes, more information than they had hours or personnel to analyze. Aware of the theory of cognitive surplus, or the “cumulative free time and talents of the developed world,” (Shirky, 2010) researchers put their raw data onto interactive platforms so that the interested public could look at images and classify them, listen to sounds and describe them, or study photographs and count specific features, illustrating the first characteristic of information communities, exploiting the information sharing qualities of technology. (Fisher and Durrance, 2003)

In the past ten years, Zooniverse has connected thousands of studies in the areas of biology, climate science, medicine, history, astronomy, and the arts with one and a half million amateur scientist collaborators from around the world. (Trouille, 2017) The results of the observations or transcriptions are tabulated and published, crediting the citizen scientists and benefiting future researchers, demonstrating the third information community characteristic, “providing value added dimensions that facilitate the access and use of relevant content.” (Fisher and Durrance, 2003)

It is the breaking down of barriers to information, Fisher and Durrance’s fourth characteristic of information communities (2003), that is perhaps the most exciting. The Zooniverse draws ordinary people of all ages to work alongside researchers toward a common scientific goal. Whether it’s looking at cells for a project on antibiotic resistance or identifying pieces of plastic and garbage in satellite photographs of beaches, information is being shared and science is becoming meaningful and real instead of speculative and fake. It is through discussions and blogs and social media that project participants experience social connectedness, with each other, with scientists, and with the public in general, the fifth characteristic of an information community. (Fisher and Durrance, 2003)

The Zooniverse is a dynamic information community, a partnership between institutions and individuals in which information is shared, built upon, and made available for others outside the community to use. It is accessible for anyone with an internet connection, whether through a smartphone app or through one of the many museum and library Zooniverse partners. Its very public nature allows for increased awareness and communication between participants, researchers, and the general public about science, literature, history, and medicine. In only ten years more than one million citizen scientists have participated in projects, tapping into a tiny amount of our collective cognitive surplus; the future potential of the Zooniverse is immense.

Sources:

Fisher, K., & Durrance, J. (2003). Information communities. In K. Christensen, & D. Levinson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of community: From the village to the virtual world. (pp. 658-661). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: http://dx.doi.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.4135/9781412952583.n248

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. New York, NY: The Penguin Press.

Trouille, L. (Guest). (2017, July 18). Morning shift podcast [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from http://www.wbez.org

INFO 200-post 1: Hello from the other side

…of the country!

I’m Gretchen, and I am a Library Technician at Central Connecticut State University where I work in Access Services and Archives/Special Collections. Before working here, I worked at a community college library in technical services and in two public libraries in children’s services. I am currently part of the high school selection committee for the Nutmeg Book Award, a statewide award in which children read nominated books and vote on the winner. As part of the committee, I’m reading 100 YA books this year, of which we will choose 10 to be the 2019 Nutmeg nominees.

I was steered toward library work after leaving my job as a special education teacher with a masters in school psychology to stay at home with my young daughters. I’m here at the iSchool because, to be frank, every time someone refers to me as a librarian, as in “Give your books to the nice librarian,” I feel like a fraud. I desperately want to join the rank and file of professional librarians and information professionals, so here I am.

Although I’ve spent the last 15 years in libraries in one capacity or another, I realize there’s so much about librarianship, and especially information science, that I don’t know. My initial plan was to get an MLIS degree and become a children’s librarian. While I’m still interested in that path, my short time at the SJSU iSchool has opened my eyes to so many other options. I’ve spent most of my life with children; I’m looking forward to learning more about technology, information organization, and user experience.

Libraries have always been a refuge for me, a place where I automatically feel at home. I’m confident that my time spent at the iSchool will give me the tools I need to extend that feeling of refuge and welcome to everyone who walks through the doors of my library.