Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement (Rhetoric Culture, and Social Critique) - Hardcover

Wynn, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817319433 ISBN 13: 9780817319434

Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A discussion of the benefits and pitfalls of citizen science&;scientific undertakings that make use of public participation and crowd-sourced data collection

James Wynn&;s timely investigation highlights scientific studies grounded in publicly gathered data and probes the rhetoric these studies employ. Many of these endeavors, such as the widely used SETI@home project, simply draw on the processing power of participants&; home computers; others, like the protein-folding game FoldIt, ask users to take a more active role in solving scientific problems. In Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement, Wynn analyzes the discourse that enables these scientific ventures, as well as the difficulties that arise in communication between scientists and lay people and the potential for misuse of publicly gathered data.
 
Wynn puzzles out the intricacies of these exciting new research developments by focusing on various case studies. He explores the Safecast project, which originated from crowd-sourced mapping for Fukushima radiation dispersal, arguing that evolving technologies enable public volunteers to make concrete, sound, science-based arguments. Additionally, he considers the potential use of citizen science as a method of increasing the public&;s identification with the scientific community, and contemplates how more collaborative rhetoric might deepen these opportunities for interaction and alignment. Furthermore, he examines ways in which the lived experience of volunteers may be integrated with expert scientific knowledge, and also how this same personal involvement can be used to further policy agendas.

Precious few texts explore the intersection of rhetoric, science, and the Internet. Citizen Science in the Digital Age fills this gap, offering a clear, intelligent overview of the topic intended for rhetoric and communication scholars as well as practitioners and administrators in a number of science-based disciplines. With the expanded availability of once inaccessible technologies and computing power to laypeople, the practice of citizen science will only continue to grow. This study offers insight into how&;given prudent application and the clear articulation of common goals&;citizen science might strengthen the relationships between scientists and laypeople.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Wynn is an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Evolution by Numbers: The Origins of Mathematical Argument in Biology.

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Citizen Science in the Digital Age

Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement

By James Wynn

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2017 University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1943-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. Citizen Science at the Roots, 
2. Reimaging Risk: Citizen Science and the Development of Citizen-Centered Radiation Risk Representations, 
3. Information for and by the People: The Internet and the Rise of Citizen Expertise, 
4. Warming Relations? The Benefits and Challenges of Promoting Understanding and Identification with Citizen Science, 
5. A Tale of Two Logoi: Citizen Science and the Politics of Redevelopment, 
Epilogue, 
Appendix A: Acoustical Assessment Form Used in Pepys Estate Noise Mapping, 
Appendix B: Sound Level Reference Chart Used by Pepys Estate Citizen Scientists, 
Appendix C: Bar Graph of Qualitative Sound Descriptors for Pepys Estate Sound Mapping, 
Appendix D: Bar Graph of Sources of Noise on Pepys Estate, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Citizen Science at the Roots

To argue that digital technologies are reshaping the interactions between laypersons, science, scientists, and policymakers through citizen science suggests either that citizen science is a completely novel product of the digital age or that digital-age technologies have introduced some significant differences into the practice of citizen science that can account for the changes in these interactions. This chapter shows that citizen science is not a new phenomenon but rather an enterprise with historical roots. Although the scientific community has only recently adopted the phrase "citizen science," early instances of the practices that this phrase currently describes can be identified in a diversity of mid-nineteenth- to late-twentieth-century endeavors including meteorological studies and bird counts (Silvertown 467; Bonney et al., "Citizen Science" 978). In addition to showing that citizen science is not new, this chapter also investigates the changes that digital technologies have introduced into it by assessing the similarities and differences between historical and modern citizen science. In particular, it compares the challenges that have faced researchers attempting to work with laypeople and the strategies they have devised to overcome these obstacles. This comparison suggests that though the challenges of doing citizen science are similar across time, the strategies for addressing these challenges have significantly changed with the introduction of digital technologies. I argue that these changes, along with the growing importance of big data, have motivated twenty-first-century scientists to embrace citizen science as a legitimate part of the scientific enterprise. This acceptance, however, has created the potential for new spaces of conflict between laypersons, science, scientists, and policymakers and challenges to traditional conceptualizations of science.

THE SMITHSONIAN WEATHER PROJECT (1848–1870)

Modern citizen science might arguably be traced back to the birth of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665 when its first secretary Henry Oldenburg circulated a call for correspondents "to impart their knowledge to one another and contribute what they can to the grand design of improving natural knowledge" (Oldenburg 1). In this investigation, however, I trace the predecessors of modern citizen science back to the mid-nineteenth century — a time when science began to institutionalize as governments turned with increasing frequency to science to deal with practical issues of commerce, war, agriculture, and health. It is in this framework of emerging professional scientific identity and institutional involvement in science that the practice of a citizen science involving the participation of nonexpert, noninstitutional actors could emerge as opposed to the more aristocratic gentleman of science of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. It was in this spirit of more democratic participation in science that the Smithsonian Institution was founded with a bequest from James Smithson to support "the increase and diffusion of knowledge." The Smithsonian's first big scientific venture, the study of the weather, epitomized the practice of citizen science because it relied on a mix of government support, scientific expertise, and volunteer labor to achieve its research goals. By examining this early enterprise, it is possible to get a sense of the myriad challenges that accompanied the involvement of laypersons in science as well as the strategies developed to meet those challenges.

Unlike modern citizen science, the Smithsonian's meteorological project was developed to establish the foundations for a scientific field rather than advance the work of an already existent scientific paradigm. In the late 1840s when the Smithsonian project began, meteorology was a fledgling science both in the United States and Europe. There were scattered investigations on different weather phenomena but no agreed-upon paradigm or meteorological institutions to ground the science. In this preparadigmatic period, there were disputes over a variety of issues that involved a range of theories and explanations, few of which could be empirically supported. One of the most famous disputes of the period, for example, was over the nature of storms. This controversy pitted prominent American meteorological researchers William Redfield, James Espy, and Robert Hare, who each held radically different theories of the phenomenon, against one another. In order to make progress on this and other questions involving the weather, scientists realized they needed to collect data on a grand scale. John Herschel, the famous British astronomer and philosopher of science, for example, remarked about meteorology: "[It] can only be effectually improved by the united observations of great numbers widely dispersed ... [it is] one of the most complicated but important branches of science, ... [and] at the same time one in which any person who will attend to plain rules, and bestow a necessary degree of attention, may do effectual service" (Herschel 133).

In sympathy with Herschel's call for mass observation to investigate questions about weather, Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian, dedicated a significant portion of the organization's energy and budget to studying storms and other meteorological phenomena. The Smithsonian's efforts from the late 1840s to the 1870s to study the weather illustrate the challenges that faced scientific institutions who wanted to use laypeople to study nature. The first obstacle was funding. Without financial support it would be impossible to gather and process the mountains of data necessary for studying the weather. Fortunately, the Smithsonian was an endowed institution. Henry, however, still had to persuade the Board of Regents that the project was worthy of funding. In 1847 he made his case to obtain funds to "extend meteorological observations, for solving the problem of American storms" (qtd. in Fleming 76). In response, the board allotted him $1,000 — nearly 6% of the institution's budget — for "the commencement of meteorological investigations" (qtd. in Fleming 76). Although in the late 1840s $1,000 was a substantial sum for the scientific investigation of the weather, it was not nearly enough money to send trained scientific personnel, even if enough could be found, across the United...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0817319433
• ISBN 13: 9780817319434
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar