Tag Archives: museums

CitizenScience, Education, News

Museums, whales, and citizen science

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Guest post from Eilidh O’Brien, Staff Scientist, Whales of Iceland Museum

Appropriately located in Reykjavík’s harbour district, Whales of Iceland is the largest museum dedicated to cetaceans in Europe. Much of the space inside is dedicated to life-sized models of the 23 species of whales, dolphins and porpoises that have been sighted in the waters around Iceland throughout history, some very common while others are very rare. When the museum was founded these models were the main focus of the exhibition: a chance for visitors to experience the true size of these gigantic marine animals, and to learn a little about each of the species on display. However, this focus is now evolving and Zooniverse is set to play an important part.

Iceland is a hotspot for cetaceans – and so, also for cetacean researchers! Some remarkable discoveries have been made here in the last decade, from the first recordings of humpback whales singing in their feeding grounds over winter, to the unusual antagonistic interactions between killer whales and long-finned pilot whales. We want to highlight this at Whales of Iceland so that our museum is not just a place to learn about cetaceans themselves, but also how scientists study these fascinating and complex animals, what this research has uncovered, and all the things that we still do not know!

In addition to learning about the research happening here in Iceland, we want to give visitors the opportunity to take part in some real scientific projects. So, thanks to Zooniverse, our newest exhibit will include a citizen science station where anyone can have a shot at being a scientist! We will feature a range of Zooniverse projects for visitors to choose from, giving them a variety of different marine mammal species and different aspects of wildlife ecology to learn about.

Our aim is to make Whales of Iceland a more interactive and thought-provoking experience. We hope that our museum will continue to offer visitors the chance to marvel at the size and beauty of these wonderful creatures, but also to engage with the natural world in ways they may not have before, and to feel that they have not just learned, but discovered.

This collaboration is still in its early stages. With the green light from Zooniverse Co-PI Dr. Laura Trouille, we have already launched a scaled-down version of what we hope the final exhibit will be, and it has been a really promising success! Museums provide a perfect platform for citizen science; we are a small museum relatively speaking, but our footfall in peak season can be more than 400 people in a day. That’s a lot of potential citizen scientists! In ecology, we would call this a mutualistic symbiosis – or, in other words, everyone wins! Our museum guests can provide valuable contributions to scientific projects all over the world, while at the same time gaining first-hand insight into the life of a whale researcher.

We are so excited to develop and expand our collaboration with Zooniverse, as well as other citizen science initiatives. Our finished research exhibit will be unveiled very soon – watch this space!

Education

Insights for Informal Science Institutions from Citizen Science Projects

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Today we have a guest post from Dr. Ryan Cook, Citizen Science Learning Researcher at the Adler Planetarium.  Ryan earned his PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.  His research interests include ethnographic  investigations in Mexico and the US on the intersection of science and religion.

It has been my pleasure to be a researcher for Zooniverse, based at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, since May 2012. This position has exercised my anthropologist’s curiosity about how people understand and engage with science, taking it in an interesting and very productive new direction that I plan to continue. Thus I am pleased to have a chance to share my work on this blog.

At this writing I am close to completing my portion of a federally-funded project studying Zooniverse volunteers.  I have benefitted greatly in this research from the assistance of your esteemed edu-bloggers, Kelly and Laura, as well as my former Adler colleague Jason Reed and former supervisor Karen Carney. Specifically, we tried to determine whether and how much volunteers’ conceptions of and attitudes towards science changed through their participation in virtual citizen science projects.

This week, I presented some of our findings at the Visitor Studies Association’s annual conference in the town that beer built: Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Outfitted with a snazzy poster and a pile of official Zooniverse postcards and stickers, I argued for the relevance of our studies of Zoo volunteers to museums and science centers that want visitors to their websites to learn about science.

To know what could possibly be learned about science in Zooniverse, Karen, Kelly, and I put together a model of understanding science to guide us. We based the model’s criteria on what scholars who theorize, research, and teach science claimed as central characteristics of the sciences — for instance, relying on sense experience, proceeding methodically or logically, and revising knowledge in light of new evidence.

I then spent several months combing through Zooniverse databases and Google Analytics tables, trying to create a quantitative picture of how volunteers engaged with the tasks, blogs, and forums making up each Zoo. Figure 1 shows an example of the data by which we quantified and compared engagement among Zoos.

Fig. 1 - Old Weather visitor flow, Google Analytics
Fig. 1 – Old Weather visitor flow, Google Analytics

Following the lead of some preliminary statistics, Kelly and I applied our model to mapping out opportunities for learning about science in a subset of mature Zoos (i.e., those launched before the shift to an all-in-one-page design strategy). The Zoos were chosen in pairs with similar tasks but different levels of volunteer engagement:

[*Since the Supernovae Zoo was retired during the course of our project, it was included in the engagement variables but left out of subsequent research stages.]

Upon matching these engagement statistics to the range and type of learning opportunities we identified, three main patterns emerged:

  1. Opportunities for science learning were unevenly distributed within and across Zoos’ webpages. Talk and the Forums, for instance, allow a wide range of volunteers to engage in rich communication with each other and with moderators, administrators, and the science teams regarding the scientific import of the Zoos.
  2. The parts of the Zoos where volunteers went in the greatest numbers and spent the most time were typically those with the fewest, most limited, and least obvious learning opportunities. High-traffic, low-opportunity pages included the classification, marking, and transcription tasks at the core of each Zoo, as we can see in Figure 2.

Fig. 2 - average time on page by page type
Fig. 2 – average time on page by page type

1. Of the more than 700,000 volunteers to visit these Zoos at the time of our analysis, only a small percentage stayed long enough or reached enough pages to encounter many of the learning opportunities we identified.

Each of these findings makes sense if we bear in mind that Zooniverse did not start out as a platform for volunteers to learn about science, but rather as a tool for scientists to carry out certain kinds of data-intensive research.

I contended in my VSA presentation that this mismatch offered museums and science centers some guidance in how to (re)design their websites to improve the chances that visitors would encounter opportunities to learn what the institutions decided was important. Laura, Kelly, and the Zooniverse team have been testing out ways to design more learning opportunities into the “stickiest” parts of the Zoos.

And as for me, I have followed up this quantitative work with a series of in-depth interviews of heavily involved volunteers. By coding their responses based on an extended version of our science learning model, I aim to find out what they feel they learned from their Zooniverse engagement and how it helps us to determine how one segment of volunteers engaged with the science learning opportunities we identified. This interview material will appear along with the engagement data and the science learning model in my report, which should be completed by late September. Stay tuned: you will hear about it first!