Life in the Zooniverse: Working with Citizen Science

It has become accepted orthodoxy in Literature and Science studies that relations between the two domains are a “two way street,” and that literature and culture do not meekly reflect the new findings of their dominant partner, science, but are actively engaged in a dynamic, reciprocal set of relations with scientific practice and the development of scientific ideas. It is an attractive position (and one to which I have always subscribed), but such reciprocity is decidedly easier to track in historical context, before the consolidation of structures of institutional and professional science, than in the current period. The call for the AHRC “Science in Culture” large grants scheme was thus challenging: applicants were asked not merely to analyse reciprocal relations between science and culture, but to work directly with scientists, and to develop new insights and new methodologies for both sides. A tall order! Over the years I have participated in numerous workshops and conferences with scientists, trying to discover common ground, but never engaged directly in collaborative research. Originally Gowan Dawson and I had been envisaging a strictly historical project, addressing all those thousands of scientific and medical journals which lie mouldering in library basements (and are still largely untouched by digitisation). As historians we are familiar with the “big names”, those journals like the Lancet, the BMJ or Nature which have survived into the present day, and whose dominance in the historical record is now reaffirmed by the digitisation of back numbers, making it easier for scholars to work with them. But what about all those local natural history journals, or medical or public health journals which have faded from historical memory? Our aim, in working with these journals, was to uncover the networks which operated within Victorian science and medicine, and to rewrite in the process the metropolitan and professional focus of much historiography. Yet, such work would not involve any interaction with contemporary science. I had become aware, however, of the emerging phenomenon of “citizen science,” particularly as supported by Zooniverse, the online citizen science platform run by Chris Lintott in the Dept of Astro-Physics at the University of Oxford. It was clear that there were interesting parallels between, for example, the armies of people who participated in the development of natural history in the nineteenth century, and the “citizens” who now go online to help analyse scientific data, whether of astronomical phenomena, cancer cells, or the behaviour of wildlife. In the resulting AHRC project, “Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries,” based at the Universities of Oxford and Leicester, and run in conjunction with our partners the Natural History Museum, London, the Royal Society, and the Royal College of Surgeons, England, we uncover forgotten histories of large-scale participation in science, and the role of journals in helping to create and consolidate these communities. We also bring such historical knowledge to bear on current practice, exploring ways in which earlier models of scientific communication and community building can help to inform the rapidly changing world of science in the digital age. In addition, the project has also created its own citizen science projects: Science Gossip and Orchid Observers.