experimental | Zooniverse

We’re pleased to announce a new kind of partnership, with a group led by old friend and collaborator Mike Walmsley at the University of Toronto. Mike is part of the Galaxy Zoo and Space Warps research teams, among others.

As you know, we take great care in testing any project which appears here on Zooniverse – thanks to expert review and our valuable volunteer panel of beta reviewers — to make sure that it works for a broad range of volunteers and our supported browsers. We believe in this process and remain committed to supporting and advancing the Zooniverse platform and its projects. But sometimes there’s a need for a more experimental approach – for trying out new modes of interaction, for complex projects that integrate machine learning, or just for doing something new. So we’re partnering with Mike’s *Experiment* to provide Zooniverse volunteers with the chance to take part in projects beyond the core Zooniverse platform. Such projects will be run by people we trust, and the goals of any project we link to will be the same as any other Zooniverse project – to provide insight through working with a distributed crowd of volunteers. But it may be that the tech is a little less robust or the projects look less polished than you’re used to. Projects may also come and go much more rapidly than is common in the Zooniverse. Wherever we mention such a project on the Zooniverse site, we’ll clearly tell you that we’re linking to an Experiment Project outside of the Zooniverse platform.

So, welcome Experiment. They have four small projects up already, where you can use a new brush tool to mark features of galaxies from the Euclid space telescope, and there’s more to come. We hope you’ll enjoy this new way of participating in projects.

FAQ

Who built Experiment and who runs and maintains Experiment? Mike Walmsley and his team at the University of Toronto.

What data will Zooniverse share with Experiment? We’re enabling log in with your Zooniverse account. If you choose to use the Zooniverse login this will share only your Zooniverse username and email address with the Experiment project team. You’ll be asked explicitly to approve this before this happens.

Does Experiment share data with the Zooniverse platform? All data submitted via Experiment is outside the Zooniverse platform, is not shared with Zooniverse, and is not subject to the Zooniverse user agreement and privacy policy. You can see the terms of service and privacy policy for Experiment here: Experiment Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Can I track my classifications? Because data is stored outside the Zooniverse platform, participation in Experiment projects is not captured in Zooniverse’s database and will not be included in your Zooniverse stats.

How do I give feedback? For these initial Experiment projects, please share your thoughts on the Talk pages for Galaxy Zoo and Stellar Streams, and the researchers leading each Experiment project will respond. For anything else, you’re always welcome to get in touch with the Zooniverse team: contact@zooniverse.org.

The Community Catalog (https://community-catalog.zooniverse.org) is a custom tool to offer Zooniverse project participants the opportunity to explore a project dataset, and to allow our team to experiment with creating new pathways into classifying.

We wanted to create a digital space that would facilitate not only sharing, but also discovery of participants’ contributions alongside institutional information (i.e. metadata) about the subjects being classified. The result was a data exploration app connected to specific Zooniverse crowdsourcing projects (How Did We Get Here? and Stereovision) that allows users to search and explore each project’s photo dataset based on participant-generated hashtags as well as the institutional metadata provided by project teams.

The Home Page of the *Stereovision* project in the Community Catalog.

The app includes a home page (shown above) with search/browsing capabilities, as well as an individual page for each photograph included in the project. The subject page (shown below) displays any available institutional metadata, participant-generated hashtags, and Talk comments. A ‘Classify this subject’ button allows users exploring the data to go directly to the Zooniverse project and participate in whatever type of data collection is taking place (transcription, labeling, generating descriptive text, etc.).

The Subject Page of the Community Catalog, displaying a subject with multiple Talk comments and community-generated hashtags.

Combined with the Talk (and QuickTalk) features, we’re hoping that this tool will encourage participants to share their experiences, memories, questions, and thoughts about the project photos, the historical events depicted, and the importance of the collection. The Community Catalog offers an approach where a participant can allow their interest in a specific item to lead them to take part in a classification task, rather than classification to Talk being a one-way street.

How Did We Get Here? was the pilot project for the Community Catalog, and is now complete. We have just launched the second project to use the Catalog, Stereovision, which you can participate in either via the Community Catalog site, or by visiting the Zooniverse project here: Stereovision.

The Community Catalog is not available for re-use by other projects in this exact form (i.e. as a standalone app), but we’re planning to incorporate some of its features into the Talk section of the Zooniverse platform in 2025. If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts about this app, please feel free to reply to this post, or email us at contact@zooniverse.org.

The Community Catalog was developed as part of the AHRC-funded project Communities and Crowds. This project is run in collaboration with volunteer researchers and staff at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, United Kingdom, and National Museums Scotland, as well as with the Zooniverse teams at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.