Every student has measurable biodiversity underfoot, within walking distance. With the right tools, they could participate in research and monitoring projects that could use their contributed observations on a regional or national scale to answer questions about sustainability. The Biocube project broadens the scope of citizen science by promoting observation of a wider array of organisms, fostering an ecosystem view rather than a species-specific perspective, and providing technological infrastructure to increase its scientific and educational impact. This project aims to provide greater public access to STEM learning experiences while laying the groundwork for data exchange as a step on the way to increasing the scientific impact of citizen science data. Teachers interested in requesting a Biocube kit for classroom use can contact our Smithsonian partners at biocube@si.edu. The Biocubes project involves numerous partners and collaborators working to recruit and train science teachers to use biocubes in their classrooms, build the data infrastructure to alert subscribers to newly available data matching their interests and inform data creators about the use of the data they contribute, and understand the needs of stakeholders in this data sharing ecosystem. Our initial phase of research is exploring the role that the iNaturalist social networking platform plays as a third-party provider of community-based data validation services and data management infrastructure for smaller projects like Biocubes. We are interested in learning whether utilizing platforms like iNaturalist provide additional value for scientific research that justify the tradeoffs inherent in adapting scientific protocols and participation processes to use available tools. There is a clear need for such platforms, but the citizen science practitioner community does not yet have...
The Open Knowledge Lab is co-organizing this workshop at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD on May 6-8, 2015, in partnership with Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor studio and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. “Engaging the Public: Best Practices for Crowdsourcing Across the Disciplines” aims to culminate and then broaden the conversations from a series of regional meetings and webinars taking place through the auspices of Dartmouth’s 2014 IMLS-funded National Forum in Crowdsourcing for Libraries and Archives: Creating a Crowdsourcing Consortium (CCLA), to help advance a truly cross-disciplinary agenda. The 2 ½ day capstone event will bring together 50 scholars and practitioners from several disciplines, spanning the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, as well as representatives from several funding agencies. Through a mix of formal and informal presentations combined with breakout sessions, we will focus on the question of how researchers and institutions might best leverage crowdsourcing strategies for increasing public engagement, integrating data into existing collections, and improving knowledge production in a variety of domains. This event is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (HC-229771), Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Sloan Foundation...
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....
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...
Welcome
The Open Knowledge Lab studies infrastructures supporting open knowledge. We focus on citizen science and open data, which broaden access to scientific knowledge.
The Open Knowledge Lab studies infrastructures supporting open knowledge. We focus on citizen science and open data, which broaden access to scientific knowledge.