Tag Archives: international

CitizenScience

AAAS Symposium in Feb. 2015: Cutting-Edge Research with 1 Million Citizen Scientists

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Some colleagues and I successfully proposed for a symposium session on citizen science at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Jose, CA in February 2015. (The AAAS is the world’s largest scientific society and is the publisher of the Science journal.) Our session will be titled “Citizen Science from the Zooniverse: Cutting-Edge Research with 1 Million Scientists.” It refers to the more than one million volunteers participating in a variety of citizen science projects. This milestone was reached in February, and the Guardian and other news outlets reported on it.

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As we all know, the Zooniverse began with Galaxy Zoo, which recently celebrated its seventh anniversary. Galaxy Zoo has been very successful, and it led to the development of a variety of citizen science projects coordinated by the Zooniverse in diverse fields such as biology, zoology, climate science, medicine, and astronomy. Most of you are familiar with many of them, and the projects include, for example: Snapshot Serengeti, where people classify different animals caught in millions of camera trap images; Cell Slider, where they classify images of cancerous and ordinary cells and contribute to cancer research; Old Weather, where participants transcribe weather data from log books of Arctic exploration and research ships at sea between 1850 and 1950, thus contributing to climate model projections; and Whale FM, where they categorize the recorded sounds made by killer and pilot whales. And of course, in addition to Galaxy Zoo, there are numerous astronomy-related projects, such as Disk Detective, Planet Hunters, the Milky Way Project, and Space Warps.

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We’re confirming the speakers for our AAAS session now, and the plan is to have six speakers from the US and UK who will introduce and present results from the Zooniverse, Galaxy Zoo, Snapshot Serengeti, Old Weather, Cell Slider, and Space Warps. I’m sure it will be exciting and we’re all looking forward to it! I’m also looking forward to the meeting of the Citizen Science Association, which will be a “pre-conference” preceding the AAAS meeting.

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Zooniverse Translations Update

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Last week I put out a request for translators and the response has been fantastic! There are now 9 different Zooniverse projects being worked on in more than 11 languages (more are being added every day). Specifically the response from Germany and Spain has been enthusiastic and a team of volunteer translators have now completed work, or nearly completed it, on several projects.

Planet Four is now available in Traditional Chinese. The Milky Way Project, Disk Detective, and Sunspotter are now available in German. Disk Detective and Sunspotter are also available in Spanish.

Sunspotter only launched today – and we’re super excited that it can go live in three languages at once! A big thank goes to volunteer translators Katharina Doll from Munich, Germany; Fernanda Piñeiro from Mar del Plata, Argentina; Eva Bunge from Germany; Maite Alonso from Talavera, Spain;  Jasmin Hau from Fulda, Germany; and user Hanibal94. Thank you so much everyone!

Translations are still underway in many more languages and projects. For example we will soon have Spanish and German Radio Galaxy Zoo, Hungarian Disk Detective and Farsi (Persian) Galaxy Zoo.

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To access different languages in projects – look for the globe icon in the top-right of the site – as shown above. On Galaxy Zoo, projects are listed in he ‘Languages’ menu – though we hope to convert this to the globe icon to bring it inline with other projects.

We hope that these new languages will widen participation in citizen science, and help light up new parts of the globe on our live.zooniverse.org map of classifications.

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If you’re interested in translating one of our projects, please email rob@zooniverse.org with your Zooniverse username, the language you want to translate into, and the project you’d like to translate.

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More Languages, More Science: Translating Zooniverse Projects

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For a long time we’ve tried to translate Zooniverse projects and this has often worked out very well. When we have done it, we have definitely seen the benefits. For example, we know that Polish classifiers on Galaxy Zoo did more classifications per-person than their English-speaking counterparts in 2011. About 8% of all our classifications are completed by people using our websites in a language other than English. We think that number should be higher.

In the last year we’ve launched Galaxy Zoo in Spanish, Traditional and Simplified Mandarin, and Italian. Planet Four is also available in Traditional Mandarin. Plankton Portal is available in Polish and French. Planet Hunters is also available in Polish, and Snapshot Serengeti is in Polish and Finnish. Finally, Whale FM is available in Polish, German and Whale.

This has all been possible because of the hard work of colleagues and translators all around the world. We’re currently working on a place to credit them for their efforts so you know who’s been making this magic happen. Particular thanks should also go to Chris Snyder and Michael Parrish, at Zooniverse’s Chicago HQ, for their efforts in making our sites and infrastructure better at handing multiple languages.

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If you take a look at the Zooniverse Community Map we created to celebrate our millionth signup you’ll note the strong English-speaking dominance. Whilst this understandable, it’s still not ideal. We need to light up more of the world on that map. So recently several of our core team have been working to make more and more projects translatable. Currently the list stands at:

  • Galaxy Zoo
  • Disk Detective
  • Radio Galaxy Zoo
  • Plankton Portal
  • Planet Four
  • Milky Way Project
  • Worm Watch Lab

…and more are being added all the time. If you’re interested in helping out, please email me on rob@zooniverse.org and let me know your Zooniverse username and the language, and project(s) you’re interested in translating. We hope to bring you updates soon.