Creativity in Citizen Cyber-Science: All for One and One for All

Charlene Jennett, Alexandra Eveleigh,

Kathleen Mathieu, Zoya Ajani, Anna L. Cox

University College London Interaction Centre (UCLIC)

WHAT IS CITIZEN SCIENCE?

http://birds.audubon.org/christmas-bird-count

Citizen Cyber-Science

WHY CREATIVITY?

Definitions of Creativity

• Ideas novel to the individual mind (Boden, 1990)• Recognition from external judges

(Csikszentmihalyi, 1996)• ‘Eureka moments’ (Shneiderman, 2000)• ‘Everyday’ creativity (Candy & Edmonds, 1999)

Foldit

http://fold.it/portal/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=foldit-gamers-solve-riddle

What does it mean for volunteers to be creative in citizen cyber-science?

• 12 exploratory interviews with scientists and volunteers– Galaxy Zoo– Old Weather– Transcribe Bentham– Bat Detective– Noise-Map

Galaxy Zoo

http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

Old Weather

http://www.oldweather.org/

Transcribe Bentham

http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/

Bat Detective

http://www.batdetective.org/

Noise Map

http://www.noisemap.org/

WHAT DID WE FIND?

Themes

• Creativity as imaginative self-expression– Artwork – Humour

• Creativity as solving project problems– Suggesting improvements– Creating additional content

Imaginative: Artwork

Old Weather volunteer: • “There is one person I know that has done artwork on the

forums, taking the ships and doing colour formatting, outlining, and I thought ‘Oh we need to get that on T-shirts!’”

Imaginative: Humour

Galaxy Zoo volunteer:• “[…] found a little green galaxy and she started a thread

called ‘Give peas a chance’ with peace spelled p-e-a-s and everyone thought it was funny and we started collecting these green blobs […] then we asked the scientists ‘well is there something special or is it just for fun?’ and apparently they are a special kind of galaxy. And there are papers written about it too, about green peas, and the peas are an accepted term!”

Problem Solving: Suggesting Improvements

Transcribe Bentham researcher• “The volunteers are our experts really in updating the

transcription interface. It’s been suggested by them if we could eliminate the mark-up, if we could introduce an automatic save feature […], improvements to the image viewer […] They’ve certainly offered a lot of input in that regard. And when we update the transcription interface and test it, they will be the key audience for doing so.”

Problem Solving: Creating Additional Content

Old Weather researcher:• “I would say a well-run forum is an extremely important

part of any Citizen X project. And it also has other values in that it generates a lot of additional information and data […] what I’ve done, working with the moderators, is pull together all the naval-related lists that people have developed, like sea-states and types of ice, contacts and whatever, and put them in one single page, which I have now published […] It’s not just ‘Do we have this ship’s log?’, but we will actually have these tools, these glossaries and so on, to actually understand the ship’s logs to interpret them.”

CONCLUSIONS

Researchers should encourage creativity from volunteers because…

• Creativity appears to be an indicator of high engagement in the project

• Creativity can lead to innovation and helping the project to operate better

Being part of a project community helps to motivate creativity…

• Gives you an audience to share your ideas• Allows you to receive validation for your efforts• Improvements can benefit other volunteers as well

as yourself

“All for one and one for all!”

Acknowledgements

• Collaborators:– Galaxy Zoo: http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ – Old Weather: http://www.oldweather.org/ – Transcribe Bentham: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-

bentham/ – Bat Detective: http://www.batdetective.org/ – Noise-Map: http://www.noisemap.org/

• Citizen Cyberlab: www.citizencyberlab.eu

Thank you for listening!

charlene.jennett@ucl.ac.uk

References (Slide 7)

• Boden, M. A. The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1990.

• Candy, L., and Edmonds, E. Introducing creativity to cognition. Proc. ACM Conf. on Creativity and Cognition ‘99, Loughborough, 1999, pp. 3-6.

• Csikszmentmihalyi, M. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Harper Collins, New York, 1996.

• Shneiderman, B. Creating creativity: User interfaces for supporting innovation. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 7, 1 (2000), 114-138.

Image Sources

• Slide 3: http://www.dispatch.com/content/graphics/2011/12/18/bird-count-art-g1ofa8hp-1111217-birdcount04-asf-jpg.jpg

• Slide 4 (left): http://bugguide.net/images/raw/9HFH6HRR2H3HPHRR8LHREHJH4LWZIL9ZUHZRWHZRPHLR6H3HUHUZXLRR4H6Z4H8ZML9ZPH1Z5L1Z5L.jpg

• Slide 4 (right): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/Astronomy_Amateur_3_V2.jpg/250px-Astronomy_Amateur_3_V2.jpg

• Slide 5: http://www.internetworld.de/var/ezwebin_site/storage/images/nachrichten/medien/medien-portale/take-action-google-kaempft-fuer-ein-freies-internet/2413850-1-ger-DE/Take-Action-Google-kaempft-fuer-ein-freies-Internet_article.jpg

• Slide 8: http://fold.it/portal/site_files/theme/science/competition.png• Slide 9: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=foldit-gamers-solve-riddle• Slide 11: http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/archives/GalaxyZoo.jpg• Slide 12: http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/950/598/95059849_640.jpg• Slide 13:http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/files/2011/03/DigXML.jpg• Slide 14: [my own screenshot]• Slide 15: http://uclexcites.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/noise-monitoring_500x300.jpg?

w=256&h=154• Slide 25: http://www.maurilioamorim.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/creativity1.jpg