Tag Archives: Talk

CitizenScience, New Features, News, Technical

A whole new Zooniverse

19 Comments

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.

Education

Using Tag Groups to Collect Images on Talk

3 Comments

Hashtags are an important element of how the current generation of Zooniverse’s Talk discussion system* helps to power citizen science. By adding hashtags to the short comments left directly on classification objects, users can help each other (and the science teams) find certain types of objects—for instance, a #leopard on Snapshot Serengeti, #frost on Planet Four, or a #curved-band on Cyclone Center. (As on Twitter, hashtags on Talk are generated using the # symbol.)

One of the ways in which zooites can take advantage of hashtags is by using Talk’s tag group feature. A tag group (also called a “keyword collection”) is a collection that automatically populates with all of the objects that have been given a specific hashtag by a volunteer.

For instance, here is a Galaxy Zoo tag group that populates with all Galaxy Zoo objects that have been tagged #starforming. It will continue to automatically add new images that are given the #starforming tag as well.

Screen Shot 2015-01-14 at 10.48.28 AM

There are two ways to tell that this is a tag-group collection, not a manually curated one. The first is that the fourth letter in the last part of the URL (CGZL000056) is an L, for “live” collection. (The other type will have an S as the fourth letter, for “static” collection.) The second is that under “description,” the conditions for the tag group will be displayed: what tags it includes and excludes.

Users can create a tag group in either of two ways: 1. Click the “create a tag group” button that will appear underneath the “tags” on the right side of any object page that has at least one hashtag (and then edit the conditions to their liking), or 2. Add “/#/collections/new/keywords/” to the end of the Talk URL; for instance, talk.planktonportal.org/#/collections/new/keywords/

Screen Shot 2015-01-14 at 10.57.11 AM

At this point, there is no way to create a collection that includes, say, on Operation War Diary, #casualty or #sniper—only objects that have #casualty and #sniper. You can, however, exclude certain tags: e.g., all #casualty objects not also tagged #sniper, or #casualty and #sniper but no #horses.

Screen Shot 2015-01-14 at 10.55.31 AM

Also, please note that, like all collections, these tag groups are currently capped at 500 total visible images.

It is likely that the next generation of Talk (currently being built) will feature a more refined method of curating collections from hashtags, as well as a more effective search functionality. For now, however, zooites should keep the tag group feature in mind… especially as it will be a critical feature of an upcoming project!

—

* As of January 2015, the Zooniverse projects using the most recent generation of Talk are: Galaxy Zoo, Planet Hunters, Operation War Diary, Milky Way Project, Snapshot Serengeti, Planet Four, Galaxy Zoo Radio, Asteroid Zoo, Disk Detective, Sunspotter, Cyclone Center, Plankton Portal, Notes from Nature, Condor Watch, Floating Forests, Penguin Watch, Worm Watch Lab, Higgs Hunters, and Chicago Wildlife Watch.