Dissertation proposal background presentation for the Summer Doctoral Program 2013 run by the Oxford Internet Institute.

1. CITIZEN SCIENCE
Todd Suomela
University of Tennessee
tes@utk.edu
@tsuomela

2. Situating myself
• Early obsession with weather and astronomy
• College education
• Planned to be an astronomer
• But transferred into the humanities: philosophy and English
• “Real world” experience in business technology (MIS)
• Back to the academy
• HCI -> STS
• Currently
• Science communication
• Philosophy of technology and science
• Science/social informatics

3. Problem
• Citizen science
• “Citizen science [is the] participation of the general public in
scientific research”
• RQ: How is citizen science framed in different discourse
communities?
• RQ: How does information travel from experts to non-
experts?
• RQ: How does citizen science alter the relationship
between public(s) and science(s)?

4. Methods
• Research journal papers
• Press releases
• Media reports
Content analysis
• Scientists
• Press officers
• Journalists
• Volunteers
Interviews

5. Significance
• STS –
• Public understanding of science
• Expert and non-expert divides
• Science communication
• Frame creation and diffusion
• Information science
• Everyday information creation
• Amateur information seeking (?)

6. ToC
• Science Communication
• Citizen Science
• The Critical Challenge
• Problems

7. SCIENCE
COMMUNICATION

8. How/Why to communicate science?
• The world is becoming more complex
• Increasing levels of technology and scientific knowledge
• Easier to share across wide areas
• Grand challenges for science
• How do scientists communicate large-scale issues like global
warming among themselves?
• How do scientists communicate to the public?
• Examples: global warming, nuclear power, genetically modified
organisms, vaccine use

9. Science Communication
• Laypeople just need more
education to understand the
issues and concepts
Deficit
model
• Laypeople have local
expertise that can be
harnessed to help
understand a problem
Lay
expertise
Brossard & Lewenstein, 2009

10. Science communication
• Laypeople understand
based on their contextual
experiences
Contextual
model
• Laypeople should be
integrated into science
and technical discussions
Public
understanding
Brossard & Lewenstein, 2009

11. Public understanding
• A more sophisticated understanding of science
communication
• Framing effects are present
• Emotion, class, and other background factors effect the
transmission of scientific knowledge to the public
• Brings in democratic theory and practice
• Builds a forum for communication between scientists and laypeople
• Does not put one group above the other

12. Framing Science
Social progress
Economic
development/competitiveness
Morality/ethics
Scientific/technical uncertainty
Pandora’s box/Frankenstein’s
monster/runaway science
Public
accountability/governance
Third way/alternative paths Conflict/strategy
Nisbet & Scheufele, 2007

13. CITIZEN SCIENCE

14. Citizen science – an opportunity
To bring public and science together.

15. History of Citizen Science
• Introduced in the 1990s
• But earlier antecedents exist
• National Weather Service, Audubon Society Christmas bird
count, AAVSO
• Two traditions
• Critical-emancipatory
• Pragmatic-instrumental
• Factors for growth
• Improvements in technology
• Public is a potential labor source
• Funding requirements for public outreach

16. Projects, Papers
• Recent project counts
• 280 projects from
Cornell lab mailing list
(Wiggins &
Crowston, 2010)
• 500 projects currently
listed at SciStarter.org

17. Typologies
Wiggins & Crowston, 2012

18. Where is the internet?
• Recruitment: Mediator for connecting scientists to non-
scientists
• Data collection and analysis: project websites provide an
interface for the collection and analysis of data
• Data sharing: collected data may be shared with other
scientists or the public via internet data stores or reports
• Infrastructure: wires, routers, mobile, GPS, standards
• Paradigms: 4th paradigm of data intensive science
• But does it create a community, a crowd, or a public?

19. THE CRITICAL
CHALLENGE

20. How critical do I go?
• Balancing act between disciplines and traditions
• Science communication
• STS
• Information science
• Two traditions
• Critical-emancipatory
• Pragmatic-instrumental

21. To be critical =? theory
• Currently working with Habermas
• Communication and rationality
• Technical, practical, and emancipatory inquiry
• Can there be communicative action between citizen scientists and
professional scientists?
• Other options
• ANT, sociotechnical imaginaries, trading zones, social
epistemology, leisure science, participatory culture, user generated
content, sociology of professions, informal learning, common-pool
resources, feminism, rhetoric of science communication
• What other options might work?

22. PROBLEMS

23. Problems
• How critical do I go?
• The problem of online crowd labor.
• Other critical problems you may notice?
• How much theory should I include?
• The problem of scale:
• Micro, meso, or macro?
• What scale do you think would you be interested in hearing about
at a conference or in a reading about in a journal paper?

24. References
• Brossard, D. & Lewenstein, B.V., 2009. A Critical
Appraisal of Models of Public Understanding of Science:
Using Practice to Inform Theory. In L. Kahlor & P. A.
Stout, eds. Communicating Science: New Agendas in
Communication. London: Routledge.
• Nisbet, M. & Scheufele, D.A., 2007. The future of public
engagement. The Scientist, 21, pp.38–44.
• Wiggins, A. & Crowston, K., 2012. Goals and tasks: Two
typologies of citizen science projects. In Forty-fifth Hawai’i
International Conference on System Science (HICSS-45).
Wailea, HI.