Build Your Own Citizen Science Project with Zooniverse
Laura Trouille Adler Planetarium, Zooniverse, Northwestern Univ.
Zooniverse.org is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Galaxy Zoo, its first project, asked volunteers to classify galaxies based on their shapes. Coinciding with its 10th-anniversary celebration, Zooniverse launched its 100th project, Galaxy Nurseries, to help astronomers discover thousands of new baby galaxies in the distant universe.
Citizen science — engaging the public in research — has proved a creative and capable response to the increasing size of scientific datasets, particularly when coupled with machine-learning algorithms and sophisticated task-allocation and retirement rules. Citizen science has enabled researchers to achieve research goals that would not be possible or practical otherwise. Key to this success has been to build up a community of volunteers actively engaged in the projects. Zooniverse.org is a leader in online citizen science, with 1.6 million registered volunteers worldwide. The 100 Zooniverse projects introduced over the past decade have spanned many disciplines, including astronomy, ecology, biomedical research, climate science, history, and the humanities, and have led to more than 100 peer-reviewed publications.
Faced with a rapidly growing demand for the involvement of citizen scientists in data-intensive research, Zooniverse launched its free Project Builder tool to enable anyone to create their own crowdsourced research program using the Zooniverse infrastructure. Through its user-friendly, browser-based interface, project builders select among marking, annotation, and transcription tools, upload their content and data, and export the classification results. Thirty-six of the projects now online at Zooniverse.org/projects were developed this way, and 30 more are currently under review.
Astronomy projects launched and promoted through Zooniverse include hunting for supernovae, brown dwarfs, "Planet Nine," protoplanetary disks, hot stars, exoplanets, meteors, and comets; marking surface features on Mars, radio jets from black holes, warps in galactic disks, and sunspots; mapping the disk of our Milky Way; identifying glitches in LIGO gravitational-wave data, and creating a database of astro-referenced old astronomy images.
Build Your Own Zooniverse Project
Zooniverse is led by the University of Oxford and Chicago’s Adler Planetarium in close collaboration with the member institutions of the Citizen Science Alliance, with particular leadership from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the University of Portsmouth. Zooniverse’s platform for people-powered research has been made possible through federal and private foundation funding, including support from the NSF, NASA, IMLS, NOAA, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a Google Global Impact Award, Microsoft, STFC, the European Union, and the Leverhulme Trust.