Jennifer Hammock

Dynamic changes in motivation in collaborative citizen-science projects

Online citizen science projects engage volunteers in collecting, analyzing, and curating scientific data. Existing projects have demonstrated the value of using volunteers to collect data, but few projects have reached the full collaborative potential of scientists and volunteers. Understanding the shared and unique motivations of these two groups can help designers establish the technical and social infrastructures needed to promote effective partnerships. We present findings from a study of the motivational factors affecting participation in ecological citizen science projects. We show that volunteers are motivated by a complex framework of factors that dynamically change throughout their cycle of work on scientific projects; this motivational framework is strongly affected by personal interests as well as external factors such as attribution and acknowledgment. Identifying the pivotal points of motivational shift and addressing them in the design of citizen-science systems will facilitate improved collaboration between scientists and volunteers.

The Encyclopedia of Life v2: Providing Global Access to Knowledge About Life on Earth

Abstract The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL, http://eol.org) aims to provide unprecedented global access to a broad range of information about life on Earth. It currently contains 3.5 million distinct pages for taxa and provides content for 1.3 million of those pages. The content is primarily contributed by EOL content partners (providers) that have a more limited geographic, taxonomic or topical scope. EOL aggregates these data and automatically integrates them based on associated scientific names and other classification information. EOL also provides interfaces for curation and direct content addition. All materials in EOL are either in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons license. In addition to the web interface, EOL is also accessible through an Application Programming Interface. In this paper, we review recent developments added for Version 2 of the web site and subsequent releases through Version 2.2, which have made EOL more engaging, personal, accessible and internationalizable. We outline the core features and technical architecture of the system. We summarize milestones achieved so far by EOL to present results of the current system implementation and establish benchmarks upon which to judge future improvements. We have shown that it is possible to successfully integrate large amounts of descriptive biodiversity data from diverse sources into a robust, standards-based, dynamic, and scalable infrastructure. Increasing global participation and the emergence of EOL-powered applications demonstrate that EOL is becoming a significant resource for anyone interested in biological diversity.

Gamifying citizen science: a study of two user groups

Citizen science projects increasingly incorporate the motivational affordances of games. However, the different user groups that gamified citizen science projects may attract are poorly understood. This project examines how two user groups, nature participants and gamer participants, experience Floracaching, a gamified mobile application for citizen science. Both groups enjoyed Floracaching, and were motivated by discovery, education, and social interaction; both were also motivated by competition, but in different ways. Gamer participants desired guidance while nature participants preferred autonomy. Nature participants saw the inherent value in the app; gamer participants needed to understand how the app could be integrated with their other life activities.

TraitBank: Practical semantics for organism attribute data

Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has developed TraitBank (http://eol.org/traitbank), a new repository for organism attribute (trait) data. TraitBank aggregates, manages and serves attribute data for organisms across the tree of life, including life history characteristics, habitats, distributions, ecological relationships and other data types. We describe how TraitBank ingests and manages these data in a way that leverages EOLs existing infrastructure and semantic annotations to facilitate reasoning across the TraitBank corpus and interoperability with other resources. We also discuss TraitBanks impact on users and collaborators and the challenges and benefits of our lightweight, scalable approach to the integration of biodiversity data.

ENVIRONMENTS and EOL: identification of Environment Ontology terms in text and the annotation of the Encyclopedia of Life

Summary: The association of organisms to their environments is a key issue in exploring biodiversity patterns. This knowledge has traditionally been scattered, but textual descriptions of taxa and their habitats are now being consolidated in centralized resources. However, structured annotations are needed to facilitate large-scale analyses. Therefore, we developed ENVIRONMENTS, a fast dictionary-based tagger capable of identifying Environment Ontology (ENVO) terms in text. We evaluate the accuracy of the tagger on a new manually curated corpus of 600 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) species pages. We use the tagger to associate taxa with environments by tagging EOL text content monthly, and integrate the results into the EOL to disseminate them to a broad audience of users. Availability and implementation: The software and the corpus are available under the open-source BSD and the CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 licenses, respectively, at http://environments.hcmr.gr Contact: pafilis@hcmr.gr or lars.juhl.jensen@cpr.ku.dk Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Does motivation in citizen science change with time and culture

Citizen scientists are motivated by a variety of factors to contribute biodiversity data to collaborative projects, and these factors change over time. Initially, citizen scientists tend to be motivated by their own intrinsic interests. However, for them to continue to contribute, other factors are necessary to motivate them: feedback about their contribution, acknowledgement by scientists and peers, a sense of belonging to a community, and often more. Culture is known to have a deep and pervasive influence on all aspects of our lives, but how does it influence volunteering in citizen science? Three separate interview studies conducted in the USA, India, and Costa Rica suggest that cultural norms and institutional structures influence citizen science.

Visually Exploring Social Participation in Encyclopedia of Life

Social network visualization is useful for understanding the complex structure of collaborative efforts such as citizen science projects. It has been widely accepted by social network analysts for exploring and analyzing networks by visually showing their members, the relationships among them, and their behaviors and attributes. The strength of social network visualization can be increased even further, by incorporating the time dimension of evolving networks. We analyzed the conversation network of a collaborative citizen science web platform called the Encyclopedia of Life using dynamic network visualization methods. This paper shows how the temporal visualization was applied to the social collaboration analysis of EOL and presents the findings. We found that some EOL web site features increased the interactive as well as individual member activities. We also found evidence that EOL curator activities encouraged the activities of other members.

A Text Mining Framework for Accelerating the Semantic Curation of Literature

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is the world’s largest digital library of biodiversity literature. Currently containing almost 40 million pages, the library can be explored with a search interface employing keyword-matching, which unfortunately fails to address issues brought about by ambiguity. Helping alleviate these issues are tools that automatically attach semantic metadata to documents, e.g., biodiversity concept recognisers. However, gold standard, semantically annotated textual corpora are critical for the development of these advanced tools. In the biodiversity domain, such corpora are almost non-existent especially since the construction of semantically annotated resources is typically a time-consuming and laborious process. Aiming to accelerate the development of a corpus of biodiversity documents, we propose a text mining framework that hastens curation through an iterative feedback-loop process of (1) manual annotation, and (2) training and application of statistical concept recognition models. Even after only a few iterations, our curators were observed to have spent less time and effort on annotation.

A Journey of Citizen Science Data in an Online Environment

Previous CSCW studies on citizen science have focused on supporting data collection, rather than data sharing among a wider audience. Here we describe the process by which citizen science data are collaboratively shared by individual and organizational social actors. Three sets of collabora-tive efforts are essential for enabling data to travel through the online environments: creating shareable data, assuring data quality, and setting up data sharing partnerships.

VERA: Popularizing Science Through AI

Citizen scientists have the potential to expand scientific research. The virtual research assistant called VERA empowers citizen scientists to engage in environmental science in two ways. First, it automatically generates simulations based on the conceptual models of ecological phenomena for repeated testing and feedback. Second, it leverages the Encyclopedia of Life biodiversity knowledgebase to support the process of model construction and revision.