Western Citizen Science

We are a group of young journalists from Western University Canada working on a collaborative project in the growing trend of citizen science—where regular people collect or analyze scientific data or observations in order to assist with professional scientific work. Our work will be published in a 7-part series on Rabble.ca and the Tyee. var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-38108443-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

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Katiusha Cuntrera from The Basics Team talks to Jonathan Silvertown from the Department of Life Science at the Open University in England.

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Rebecca Field from our Doc Team met with Rabble.ca Editor Derrick O'Keefe to talk about what he's looking forward to with the citizen science project and what excites him about the movement.

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Rebecca Field from the Documentary Team interviewed Derrick O'Keefe of rabble.ca. In this video, she just finished up the interview, and tells us how it went. Direct clips from the interview will be loaded soon!

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Rubab Abid from the "Is it Science?" team talks about the benefits of using Prezi for her final presentation.

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Rebecca Field from the Documentary Team explains how easy it is to shoot, edit and upload video right on the iPad.

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In our third podcast, we talked to the teams about some of the challenges they've been facing throughout the project. Have a listen!

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Spencer Davis from The Basics team talks about some of the challenges they are facing along the way to their end project goal. A Podcast on challenges facing the project to follow!

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Google+ Hangout - Tuesday, March 12

Tonight we had a Google+ Hangout to talk progress, problems and plans. We were joined by our instructor Wayne, Natalie and Idil from the Social Activism team, Rubab and Alyssa from the Is it Science? team and Madeline, Rebecca and Tyler from the documentary team. We started by catching up on everyone’s progress and talking about the interviews that some of the teams have done in the last few days. Everyone is having positive experiences with their interviews – people are very nice and open to sharing their knowledge and expertise around citizen science.

We talked about ways to decrease post production work after interviews, in other words, getting everything right before the interview so we have less work to do afterwards. This includes making sure the lighting, audio and framing are right, so that the overall quality of the video is clear and easy to watch. One way to do this is to send some pre-interview notes to your interview subjects so they will be prepared. In the next week, our teams will be finalizing their elevator pitches and deciding how they’re going to transform the information and data that they’ve collected into a narrative. Tonight we talked about the different platforms we can use and bounced around the idea of using Prezi as an interactive way to display what we’ve learned. We’re looking forward to seeing what the teams come up with. More video and audio clips from interviews will be posted later this week as well. Thanks for reading, keep sharing! - Doc team

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John Hafernik is a professor of biology at San Francisco State University. He also runs ZomBee Watch, a project that asks citizen scientists to track honey bees. The "Is It Science?" team asked him whether he considers this work "science." Check out his response in the clip above: 

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Amar Shah from the "Is it Science?" team had a Skype interview with Caren Cooper. Here is a clip from the interview. Caren is a research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She uses citizen science to study bird life history, ecology and conservation. She says on her website (http://www.carencooper.com/): “Through citizen science, people, anywhere at any time, can lend a hand in carrying out genuine scientific research.”

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Visit Original Link

What are some challenges facing citizen scientists? Ben Forrest spoke with Phil McLeod, former editor-in-chief of The London Free Press and current author of The McLeod Report. In this clip, McLeod talks about the similarities between blogging and the work citizen scientists do.

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Kristin Duncan had an interview with Western University Professor Shelly McKellar about the history of citizen science. Here is a clip of McKellar discussing how far back we can trace citizen science.

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Groups sat down with the documentary team to update us on what they've been working on, who they've been talking to and what their plans are for the final publication. More clips to come!

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Check out this week's project update. We talk about the history of citizen science and look at the progress of each group. 

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The Takagi Fund

Hey, it's Idil and Natalie here from the Social Activism team. We're really looking forward to speaking with Shoko Murakami from Takagi Fund about the interesting work they're doing in Japan helping to fund citizen science activism projects.

According to their website, Takagi Fund aims to “foster and support independent citizen scientists who propose well-founded criticism and scientific counterarguments about problems and threats caused by present-day science and technology” by encouraging applications from researchers, grassroots groups, NPOs and NGOs in Asia who “share in the spirit of citizen science and possess a practical mind opposing technological threats to people”.

Right now the organization is very busy preparing for the second anniversary of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and as well as the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident. We want to know what work Takagi Fund is doing in preparation for that, examples of the projects they’ve funded in the past few years, why it’s important to have scientific counterarguments and how ordinary people and researchers can counter large nuclear corporations.

Hopefully she'll be able to provide us with some insight about what's happening elsewhere in Eastern Asia, too. For more information, visit: www.takagifund.org

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Hey guys, Josef from the history team here.

Check out our interactive citizen science timeline! We’re tracing the development of citizen science and volunteer data collection over the past 3500 years. We’ve got all your favourites, like Darwin and Newton, plus a bunch of characters you may not be as familiar with. So sit back and enjoy. And if you guys have anything you’d like to add, give us a shout!

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Check out the latest #westerncitsci podcast. Kristina Virro checks in on the "Is it Science?" group and looks at some upcoming google hangouts.