1.
Dr Victoria Van Hyning
Zooniverse.org, University of Oxford
victoria@zooniverse.org
@VanHyningV
Reaching New
Audiences with
Crowdsourcing

2.
Talk outline
• Crowdsourcing
• Origins of Zooniverse
• Gamification and motivation
• Project design principles
• Humanities and transcription projects
• Tate Britain partnership

3.
Citizen Science (Crowdsourcing)
‘In citizen science projects, members
of the public (citizens) collaborate
with professional scientists to
conduct scientific research.’
G. Newman et al, ‘The future of citizen science:
Emerging technologies and shifting paradigms’,
Front Ecol Environment, 10, 6 (2012), 298-304

4.
1.29 million users

5.
Why do people
participate in
Zooniverse
projects?

6.
?
?
?
?

7.
Do we gamify the
projects to incentivize
users?

8.
Principle #1:
Many volunteers want to
further real research:
contributing to knowledge is
an end in itself. Zooniverse
designs for this reality.

9.
Milky Way Project
http://www.milkywayproject.org/

10.
Principle #2:
Be clear about how
volunteers’ time and
effort is useful.

11.
Principle #3:
Strike a balance
between an enjoyable
user experience and
getting useful data.

12.
Principle #4:
Your community
needs to hear from
you!

13.
Humanities
at Zooniverse

14.
Mostly text-based
No audio
No video

15.
Transcription Projects
• Existing projects:
 ‘Ancient Lives’: www.ancientlives.org/
 ‘Old Weather’: www.oldweather.org/
 ‘Notes from Nature’: www.notesfromnature.org/
 ‘Operation War Diary’: www.operationwardiary.org/
• Upcoming Projects:
 ‘Anno.Tate’ with Tate Britain
 ‘Shakespeare’s World’ with Folger
Shakespeare Library

16.
Ancient
Lives
• launched July 2011
• >1.5 million transcriptions
of ancient Greek papyri
• 250,000 unique volunteer
contributors

17.
Principle #5:
A successful User Interface
allows non-specialists to
participate. A great UI allows
them to learn and acquire
new skills.

18.
OWD by the numbers:
• Over 1.2 million page views since launch
• >12,000 registered users
• >73,000 comments on Talk, the project
discussion area
• ~2,000 commenting users
• ~100,000 pages ‘completed’ i.e. tagged
and partially transcribed by 7 users.

19.
http://wd3.herokuapp.com/pages/AWD0000h3c

20.
Anno.Tate =
+

21.
Goals of Anno.Tate
• To democratize access to Tate archives
• to produce word searchable transcriptions
of manuscripts for the online catalogue
• To improve item level descriptions of
archival items in catalogues
• My goal: to create a new workflow for
crowdsourced transcription

22.
Principle #6: Granularize
• break up tasks and make hard
projects more accessible
• less time commitment for users
• mitigate against user fatigue
• minimize repetition of tasks

23.
How do we make
hard tasks
accessible?

24.
Panoptes
The next frontier

25.
How can
Panoptes
help you?

26.
www.zooniverse.org | victoria@zooniverse.org | @VanHyningV
Thanks for listening!