Constructing Scientific Communities in the 19th and 21st Centuries: Science Periodicals and the Zooniverse

2014 Seminar Series / Monday 10 November, 2014

This seminar will offer an introduction to some of the issues being explored in ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’, one of the large projects funded by the AHRC under the Science in Culture theme. The project brings together historical and literary research in the nineteenth century with contemporary scientific practice, looking at the ways in which patterns of popular communication and engagement in nineteenth-century science can offer models for current practice. It focuses, in particular on the role of the nineteenth-century science journal, in all its multiplicity, and digitally based forms of citizen science in our own era, as exemplified by Zooniverse.org. Professor Sally Shuttleworth will introduce the project as a whole, and Dr Victoria Van Hyning will give an overview of Zooniverse and demonstrate how crowdsourcing data facilitates both scientific and humanities research. Together they will discuss the new ‘citizen science’ projects that have been selected for development by the Constructing Scientific Communities group and explain how these tie in with the particular research aims of the project.