OK Lab co-hosts crowdsourcing workshop

A curious thing happened after giving my UMD job talk: Dr. Neil Fraistat of MITH struck up a conversation about how public participation compares in citizen science and digital humanities. I was struck by the observation that almost all of the challenges facing a wide variety of instigators–developers, researchers, project leaders, and organizers–were fundamentally the same. Volunteer management is volunteer management, regardless of humanities or sciences context, and the same crowdsourcing techniques were being used across these intellectual silos. So we decided to start a conversation on how we can best engage the public in scholarship and stewardship across our disciplinary boundaries. We partnered up with Mary Flanagan of Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor Studio, who was leading an effort for a crowdsourcing consortium in libraries, museums, and archives, and designed an event that would serve as a capstone for her workshop series, drawing from an even broader array of practitioners and traditions. Reflecting the diverse communities each of us represents, we pulled together support from 3 fantastic funders (Institute of Museum & Library Services, National Endowment for Humanities, and Sloan Foundation) to bring together people from a wide range of backgrounds. The workshop will bring 60 guests representing a diverse array of organizations, disciplines, and scholarship have been invited to College Park for an intensive 2.5-day conversation from May 6-8, 2015. We’ll be livestreaming some of the sessions to enable broader participation, tweeting with #crowdconf, and creating a professionally-produced proceedings summarizing the wisdom of experts studying and using crowdsourcing in a wide array of contexts. More details about the workshop are available from CrowdConsortium....

ADVANCE seed grant awarded

It’s official: the Open Knowledge Lab’s latest new project, a study of how researchers assess data, has been funded under the UMD ADVANCE seed grant program! Lab Director Wiggins will work with Dr. Melissa Kenney and her team on a study of climate indicators—data visualizations with brief text descriptions and links to provenance describing the sources of data and analysis processes—and how scientists assess the data when these pieces of content are delivered in different ways. Right now, there’s a big push for scientific data to be shared and re-used, but sharing these data effectively is harder than it sounds. First, there’s a lot of “extra work” involved, and the payoff to the sharer isn’t always obvious or direct. Second, without that extra work (or in spite of it), using data collected by someone else is often simply harder from an analytical standpoint, even if it does save you a whole lot of time and money on collecting the data. There are a lot of reasons that it’s challenging to re-use scientific data, but right from the start, you have to figure out if the data set in front of you will be useful. This is an especially challenging task and still a fairly big problem in the area of data discovery, so we hope the results of this study can help reduce this critical bottleneck to effective data discovery and use. At the end of the day, if representing data sets in a particular way helps convey their value to potential data consumers more effectively, then it would clearly be worth the relatively small added effort required to...

Citizen science survey results published

Earlier this year, my first journal publication as faculty at UMD, “Surveying the citizen science landscape”, reported on results of a survey of citizen science projects that I conducted as a PhD student. The most important take-away is that citizen science is incredibly diverse. Just like in the early days of studying open source software, research and media often call attention to a few outliers that don’t really represent the full richness of the broader community of practice. In addition to a few such large-scale projects, our survey results primarily describe small-to-medium sized citizen science projects, mostly in North America, and largely focused on collecting ecological data. There are a few common strategies, characteristics, and feature sets that describe most of these projects for any given variable of interest, such as funding sources, data quality strategies, and the kinds of task-oriented and social activities available to volunteers. But these variables were all uniquely combined for each project, as the design of the entire enterprise has to work within the constraints imposed by resources, scientific standards, and project goals. There was no obvious cookie-cutter pattern of “right answers” to address common questions in project design. Like any other research, doing science with the involvement of volunteers requires designing within specific limitations in order to achieve specific outcomes, and the constraints each project faces are unique. There’s no magic formula to identify which combination of characteristics will create the right conditions for a particular project, of course. However, by describing the range of project characteristics and strategies for key operational considerations, we hope to help practitioners make important decisions about citizen science...

Open Knowledge Lab at UMD is Open!

Organizing a new research lab is a little like growing a garden: it takes a little time for the seeds to germinate. The Open Knowledge Lab* has been incubating over the 2014-2015 school year since Dr. Andrea Wiggins‘ arrival at the UMD iSchool, and we’re finally ready to launch with an exciting crew, a great portfolio of research projects, a few new publications, several grants, and a shiny new website. The first big news actually came months ago, when an NSF grant was awarded for the Biocubes project, which is now in full swing. Since then, we’ve also received seed grant funding and support for a cross-disciplinary workshop on crowdsourcing, so we actually have quite a backlog of great news to share. More importantly, we’re staffing up with a fantastic team. Doctoral candidate Yurong He has been deeply involved in the Biocubes project since before its official launch, and has incorporated the project into her dissertation research, while doctoral student Brenna McNally has been advising us on working with youth-focused technologies. This summer, Dr. Alyson Young will join our team to assist in a new study focused on understanding the role of data provenance in scientific innovation. And in the fall–mere months away now–Jonathan Brier will join the team as a new PhD student, broadening our perspective on social computing in citizen science. We are also pleased to be launching several brand-new projects with some great partners, and there are several events to announce as well–more details to come!   *We’re not the first “open knowledge lab” but it really is the right name for what we study. We’re...