FEATURES
CITIZEN SCIENCE IN THE EUROPEAN OPEN SCIENCE CLOUD
In 2007 , Michael Longo published a startling result : he appeared to have found a fundamental handedness to the large-scale structure of the Universe , in an asymmetry between clockwise and anticlockwise spiral galaxies . His sample of 22 thousand galaxies had been examined partly by eye and partly algorithmically , and so the challenge was laid down to the community to verify or refute this result .
▲ A selection of letter-like galaxies spotted by volunteers in the Galaxy Zoo citizen science experiment . Created with mygalaxies . co . uk
But eyeballing 22 thousand galaxies , or more , is no small task . I had it on my own whiteboard on a long to-do list of things that ought to be done by someone and that it would be nice to do if I had time , which of course meant never . But the team behind Galaxy Zoo hit on what turned out to be a genuinely brilliant solution : crowdsource the job with the help of volunteers from the general public .
And it was a runaway success . In as little as three weeks , the volunteers classified a million galaxies , with each galaxy being checked at least 20 times . It would have taken a postdoc five years . The evidence for spiral handedness went away , but Galaxy Zoo team hit on a very rich seam : people genuinely want to participate in scientific discovery and are willing to spend their own time doing it . Galaxy Zoo has inspired well over a hundred crowdsourced data mining citizen science projects , hosted on the Zooniverse platform .
This is now a well told story , but there ’ s one message that ’ s often forgotten : from the outset , this citizen science platform has always been intended as a tool for doing research . It ’ s a biological computer , a multi-headed hydra of a hundred thousand human brains or more , all deployed to solve a research goal . In this sense it ’ s no different to a spectrometer , or an accelerator beamline . And as with any other scientific tool or facility , there are science questions that are particularly well suited to the tool , and ones that are not .
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