Giving Zooniverse a Face: A Citizen Science Facebook Application

互联网正在系统地改变专业科学家和公众接触天文数据以及彼此之间的方式。天文学家和公众合作的新方式中最引人注目的例子之一是“星系动物园”。这个在线公民科学项目吸引了来自全球的23万多人，他们对星系的形态进行了超过1亿次的分类。总的来说，这些分类已经被证明与专业星系分类器的工作一样准确，并且已经出版或提交了14篇关于星系合并、活动星系核行为和机器学习等各种主题的论文。银河动物园现在正在转变为一个名为Zooniverse的项目，该项目将为各种公民科学任务提供一个框架。随着Zooniverse的发展，我们需要找到有效的方法来扩大Galaxy Zoo的用户基础，而这个项目使用Facebook来满足这一基本需求。作为世界上发展最快的虚拟社区之一，Facebook潜在地提供了特殊的杠杆作用，可以扩大研究问题的数量，这些问题可以在天文学和教育领域迅速得到回答。这个项目将开发最初的两个Facebook应用程序来吸引公民科学家。第一个活动的重点是让人们从事科学研究，邀请他们从“流氓画廊”中挑选最符合“头号通缉犯”星系的星系。第二个项目将通过连接用户的Facebook和Galaxy Zoo的个人资料，利用社交网络建立Zooniverse主网站的用户基础，允许用户在社交上分享他们的公民科学工作成果，玩琐事游戏，并给朋友“星系”来建立他们自己的“集群”。这些星系分类的结果将用于寻找星系分类新方法的主成分分析。大约25万个星系的样本提供了一个有效的空间来定义有意义的星系形态类别，这是第一次从大量星系样本的外观中得出自然分类类别，而不是将它们分类到先验定义的类别中。这个项目还将为未来的应用程序迁移到Facebook铺平道路，通过定义哪些特征能吸引用户参与在线公民科学，哪些特征不能吸引用户参与。这将允许其他项目的用户参与天文学研究，并将告知那些从事非天文学公民科学工作的人如何更好地创建未来的应用程序。

The Internet is systematically changing how professional scientists and the public engage with astronomical data and with one another. One of the most striking examples of new ways astronomers and the public are collaborating is the "Galaxy Zoo." This online citizen science project has attracted over 230,000 people from around the globe to make over 100 million classifications of the morphology of galaxies. These classifications, taken in aggregate, have been shown to be as accurate as the work of professional galaxy classifiers and have led to the publication or submission of 14 papers on topics as diverse as galaxy mergers, active galactic nuclei behavior, and machine learning.The Galaxy Zoo is now transforming into a project called Zooniverse that will provide a framework for a diverse set of citizen science tasks. As the Zooniverse grows, we need to find effective ways to expand the Galaxy Zoo user base, and this project uses Facebook to address this fundamental need. One of the fastest growing virtual communities in the world, Facebook potentially offers exceptional leverage to scale up the number of research questions that can quickly be answered in the realms of both astronomy and education.This project will develop the first two Facebook applications to engage citizen scientists. The first will focus on getting people to do science by inviting them to pick from a "Rogue's Gallery" the galaxy that best matches a "Most Wanted" galaxy. The second will use social networking to build the user base of the main Zooniverse website by linking users' Facebook and Galaxy Zoo profiles, allowing users to share socially the results of their citizen science work, to play trivia games, and to give friends "galaxies" to build their own "clusters".The results of these galaxy classifications will be used in a Principal Component Analysis looking for new ways of categorizing galaxies. The sample of roughly 250,000 galaxies provides a valid space in which to define meaningful categories of galaxy morphology, deriving for the first time natural classification classes from the appearance of a large sample of galaxies, instead of sorting them into categories defined a priori.This project will also pave the way for future applications to migrate into Facebook by defining what characteristics do and do not attract users to engage in citizen science online. This will allow other projects to engage users in astronomical research and will inform those working on non-astronomy citizen science about how better to create future applications.