All posts by mrniaboc

CitizenScience, New Features, News, Technical

A whole new Zooniverse

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Anyone heading over to the Zooniverse today will spot a few changes (there may also be some associated down-time, but in this event we will get the site up again as soon as possible). There’s a new layout for the homepage, a few new projects have appeared and there’s a new area and a new structure to Talk to enable you to discuss the Zooniverse and citizen science in general, something we hope will bring together conversations that until now have been stuck within individual projects.

Our new platform, Panoptes, is name after Argus Panoptes, a many-eyed giant form Greek mythology.
Our new platform, Panoptes, is named after Argus Panoptes, a many-eyed giant form Greek mythology. Image credit: http://monsterspedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Argus-Panoptes.jpg

What you won’t see immediately is that the site is running on a new version of the Zooniverse software, codenamed ‘Panoptes‘. Panoptes has been designed so that it’s easier for us to update and maintain, and to allow more powerful tools for project builders. It’s also open source from the start, and if you find bugs or have suggestions about the new site you can note them on Github (or, if you’re so inclined, contribute to the codebase yourself). We certainly know we have a lot more to do; today is a milestone, but not the end of our development. We’re looking forward to continuing to work on the platform as we see how people are using it.

Panoptes allows the Zooniverse to be open in another way too. At its heart is a project building tool. Anyone can log in and start to build their own Zooniverse-style project; it takes only a moment to get started and I reckon not much more than half an hour to get to something really good. These projects can be made public and shared with friends, colleagues and communities – or by pressing a button can be submitted to the Zooniverse team for a review (to make sure our core guarantee of never wasting people’s time is preserved), beta test (to make sure it’s usable!), and then launch.

We’ve done this because we know that finding time and funding for web development is the bottleneck that prevents good projects being built. For the kind of simple interactions supported by the project builder, we’ve built enough examples that we know what a good and engaging project looks like. We’ll still build new and novel custom projects helping the Zooniverse to grow, but today’s launch should mean a much greater number of engaging and exciting projects that will lead to more research, achieved more quickly.

We hope you enjoy the new Zooniverse, and comments and feedback are very welcome. I’m looking forward to seeing what people do with our new toy.

Chris

PS You can read more about building a project here, about policies for which projects are promoted to the Zooniverse community here and get stuck into the new projects at www.zooniverse.org/#/projects.

PPS We’d be remiss if we didn’t thank our funders, principally our Google Global Impact award and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and I want to thank the heroic team of developers who have got us to this point. I shall be buying them all beer. Or gin. Or champagne. Or all three.

CitizenScience, News, Science

Call for Proposals

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conscicom

 

The Constructing Scientific Communities project (ConSciCom), part of the AHRC’s ‘Science in Culture’ theme, is inviting proposals for citizen science or citizen humanities projects to be developed as part of the Zooniverse platform.

ConSciCom examines citizen science in the 19th and 21st centuries, contrasting and reflecting on engagement with distributed communities of amateur researchers in both the historical record and in contemporary practice.

Between one and four successful projects will be selected from responses to this call, and will be developed and hosted by the Zooniverse in association with the applications. We hope to include both scientific and historical projects; those writing proposals should review the existing range of Zooniverse projects which include not only classification, but also transcription projects. Please note, however, ConSciCom cannot distribute funds nor support imaging or other digitization in support of the project.

Projects will be selected according to the following criteria:

  1. Merit and usefulness of the data expected to result from the project.
  2. Novelty of the problem; projects which require extending the capability of the Zooniverse platform or serve as case studies for crowdsourcing in new areas or in new ways are welcome.
  3. Alignment with the goals and interests of the Constructing Scientific Communities project. In particular, we wish to encourage projects that:
    1. Have a significant historical dimension, especially in relation to the history of science.
    2. Involve the transcription of text, either in its entirety or for rich metadata.

Note it is anticipated that some, but not necessarily all selected projects, will meet this third criterion; please do submit proposals on other topics.

The deadline for submissions is July 25th 2014. You can submit a proposal by following this link http://conscicom.org/proposals/form/

 

 

 

News

Zooniverse job at the University of Portsmouth

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As part of the increased involvement in the Zooniverse at the University of Portsmouth, we are offering a two-year research position to work closely with the main Zooinverse development team and help foster local Zooniverse projects within Portsmouth and beyond. This new position is part of the official buy-in of Portsmouth into the Citizen Science Alliance and builds on past and present Zooniverse interest at the university. For example, researchers at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation were involved in getting the original Zooniverse project Galaxy Zoo off the ground in 2007, and they have also explored the subsequent data-set from this ground-breaking citizen science project. ICG researchers such as Karen Masters, Bob Nichol and Tom Melvin remain heavily involved in Zooniverse projects related to Galaxy Zoo. Also at Portsmouth, Joe Cox is PI of a funded EPSRC project entitled VOLCROWE, looking at the economics of online volunteering with particular interest in crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding. This project plans to study the motivations of citizen scientists and explore ways to optimise the breadth and depth of user involvement. The new developer would join this diverse team and help build a growing interest in all things Zooniverse at the University of Portsmouth and beyond.

Details of the job, including how to apply, can be found at http://www.icg.port.ac.uk/2014/04/senior-research-associate-zooniverse/

CitizenScience, Fun, News, Statistics

The Elise Andrew Effect – What a post on IFLS does to your numbers

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AP-IFLS

Recenty the Andromeda Project was the feature of one of the posts on the ‘I fucking Love Science’ Facebook page. The page, which was started by Elise Andrew in March 2012, currently has 8 million likes, so some form of noticeable impact was to be expected! Here are some of the interesting numbers the post is responsible for:

I’ll start with the Facebook post itself. As of writing (16 hours after original posting), it has been shard 1,842 times, liked by 6,494 people and has 218 comments. These numbers are actually relatively low for an IFLS post, some of which can reach over 70,000 shares!

AP-IFLS-2
The ‘IFLS spike’ in the Andromeda Project classifications and active users

Let’s now have a look at what it did for the Andromeda Project. The project, which was launched two days previous and was already pretty popular, had settled down to around 100 active users per hour. This number shot up to almost 600 immediately following the post. In the space of 5 minutes the number of visitors on the site went from 13 to 1,300! After a few hours it settled down again, but now the steady rate looks to be about 25% higher than before. The number of classifications per hour follows the same pattern. The amazing figure here is that almost 100,000 classifications were made in the 4 hours following the post. This number corresponds to around 1/6th of the total needed to complete the project!

PH-IFLS-spike
The number of visitors per day to the Planet Hunters site over the last two weeks. Visits increased by a factor of ten on the day of the IFLS post, and three days later the numbers are still greater than before.

Two days after her post about the Andromeda Project, Elise put up a post about the discovery of a seventh planet around the dwarf star KIC 11442793, which was found by citizen scientist on the Planet Hunters project. This post proved even more popular than the previous one with more than 3,000 shares, and led to a similar spike of the same magnitude in the number of visitors to the site (as can be seen in the plot above).

Finally, what did it do for the Zooniverse as a whole? Well there have been over 4,000 new Zooniverse accounts registered within the last four days and the Facebook page, which was linked in the AP article, got a healthy boost of around 1,000 new likes. So all things considered, it seems that an IFLS post can be very useful for promoting your project indeed!

Thanks Elise, the Andromeda Project, Planet Hunters and  Zooniverse teams love you!

News

Chicago-based Zoolovers – The Zooniverse needs you!

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Are you a Zooniverse volunteer over the age of 21 and living in the Chicago area? If so, the Zooniverse needs your help. Next month’s Adler After Dark (the over 21’s night at the Adler Planetarium each month) is going to be about DIY science. There will be a panel session about people who have become involved in science through non-traditional academic routes. We want there to be a Zooniverse volunteer on the panel talking about how they got involved in the Zooniverse.

Venue : Adler Planetarium

Date : Thursday, November 21

Time : 6PM

This is a good experience and a great chance to meet some of the people behind the Zooniverse, along with other like-minded people who love citizen science! If you fit the bill and would like to help us out, please email stuart@zooniverse.org.