Statistics – Applications
Scientific paper
Dec 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufmed14a..03s&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #ED14A-03
Statistics
Applications
[0800] Education
Scientific paper
A particularly successful effort to engage the public in science has been to move the nearly countless galaxies imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to citizen scientists in a project known widely as Galaxy Zoo (URL; http://www.galaxyzoo.org). To everyone’s surprise, the unexpectedly large participation in the website has caused the data set, numbering over a million images, to be classified multiple times, quicker than the project leader anticipated, and continues to boast a high hit count on the website (15 classifications per second). Within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people. In a parallel effort, the Galaxy Zoo forum was created to handle the flood of emails that occurred alongside the flood of classifications, the team hoping that it would encourage the participants to handle each others' questions. By examining the motivations, methods and appeal of Galaxy Zoo to the participating public, other models of citizen science might be purposefully formulated to take advantage of the success exhibited in Galaxy Zoo. In addition, we want to understand the reasons people engage in science in informal settings in order to better enhance teaching methods in formal settings. Although in the past citizen science has primarily been used as a data collection method, there are many new opportunities contained in citizen science motivations and methods that we can use in future applications. This new and innovative method of online citizen science creates data for researchers of galaxies, but there is a parallel set of underlying data that has not yet been deeply analyzed: the motivations and underlying themes within the population of citizen scientists that could lead us to improve future citizen science projects. To address this, we pursued an investigation of the underlying reasons for the success of Galaxy Zoo revealed by inductively analyzing contributor’s posts and discussions through the accompanying Galaxy Zoo online bulletin board forum - When investigating the data interpretively collected from the Galaxy Zoo forum, what sort of trends emerge as motivations which contribute to the overall success of this citizen science model? Using a grounded theory approach, we learned that many of these motivations originate in the aesthetic power of astronomical images, which Galaxy Zoo successfully harnesses while not compromising the scientific value of the project. From within the data emerged several trends of motivation, the primary being: the sense of community created within the project that promotes professional-amateur collaboration; fulfilling a dream of being an astronomer, physicist, or astronaut; tapping into a potential well of interest created during the space race era; the spiritual aspect generated when the imagination interacts with Galaxy Zoo; and uniting them all, the aesthetic appeal of the galaxy images. In addition, a very powerful tool also emerged as a method of retention unique to Galaxy Zoo. This tool, known as variable ratio reinforcement in behavioral psychology, uses the most appealing images as positive reinforcement to maintain classification rates over time.
Center For Astronomy
Mankowski T.
Physics Education Research CAPER Team
Slater Stephanie J.
Slater Timothy F.
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