Giving Zooniverse a Face: A Citizen Science Facebook Application

给 Zooniverse 一个面孔：公民科学 Facebook 应用程序

• 批准号: 0958508
• 负责人: Pamela Gay
• 金额: $ 9.76万
• 依托单位: Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-03-01 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0958508&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Giving; Zooniverse; Face; Citizen; Science

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.

互联网正在系统地改变专业科学家和公众处理天文数据以及彼此之间的互动方式。 天文学家和公众合作的新方式最引人注目的例子之一是“银河动物园”。 这个在线公民科学项目吸引了全球超过 230,000 人对星系形态进行了超过 1 亿次分类。 这些分类总体而言已被证明与专业星系分类器的工作一样准确，并导致发表或提交了 14 篇论文，主题涉及星系合并、活跃星系核行为和机器学习等多种主题。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 用户群，而这个项目使用 Facebook 来解​​决这一基本需求。 作为世界上发展最快的虚拟社区之一，Facebook 可能提供卓越的影响力来扩大天文学和教育领域可以快速得到解答的研究问题的数量。该项目将开发前两个 Facebook 应用程序来吸引公民科学家。 第一个将侧重于通过邀请人们从“盗贼画廊”中挑选与“头号通缉”星系最匹配的星系来让人们从事科学研究。 第二个项目将使用社交网络，通过链接用户的 Facebook 和 Galaxy Zoo 个人资料来建立 Zooniverse 主网站的用户群，允许用户在社交上分享其公民科学工作的结果、玩问答游戏，以及为朋友提供“星系”来构建他们自己的“星系团”。这些星系分类的结果将用于主成分分析，寻找星系分类的新方法。 大约 250,000 个星系的样本提供了一个有效的空间，可以在其中定义有意义的星系形态类别，首次根据大量星系样本的外观得出自然分类类别，而不是将它们分类到先验定义的类别中。该项目还将通过定义哪些特征会吸引用户和不会吸引用户在线参与公民科学，为未来的应用程序迁移到 Facebook 铺平道路。 这将使其他项目能够吸引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。