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如何处理天文数据以及彼此之间的关系。 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来自地球仪的23万多人，对星系的形态进行了1亿多次分类。 这些分类，总体而言，已经被证明是准确的专业星系分类器的工作，并导致发表或提交14篇论文的主题从星系合并，活动星系核的行为，和机器学习.银河动物园现在正在转变为一个名为Zooniverse的项目，将提供一个框架，一套多样化的公民科学任务. 随着Zooniverse的发展，我们需要找到有效的方法来扩大Galaxy Zoo的用户群，这个项目使用Facebook来解决这个基本需求。 作为世界上增长最快的虚拟社区之一，Facebook可能提供特殊的杠杆作用，以扩大天文学和教育领域可以快速回答的研究问题的数量。该项目将开发前两个Facebook应用程序，以吸引公民科学家。 第一个将集中在让人们做科学，邀请他们从一个“流氓的画廊”挑选星系最匹配的“最想要的”星系。 第二个将利用社交网络，通过链接用户的Facebook和Galaxy Zoo个人资料，建立Zooniverse主网站的用户群，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”建立自己的“星系团”。这些星系分类的结果将用于主成分分析，寻找新的星系分类方法。 大约250，000个星系的样本提供了一个有效的空间来定义星系形态的有意义的类别，首次从大样本星系的外观中导出自然分类类别，这个项目还将为未来的应用程序迁移到Facebook铺平道路，通过定义哪些特性可以吸引用户，哪些不可以吸引用户。在网上参与公民科学。 这将使其他项目能够让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.