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.
This open access book discusses how the involvement of citizens into scientific endeavors is expected to contribute to solve the big challenges of our time, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, growing inequalities within and between societies, and the sustainability turn. The field of citizen science has been growing in recent decades. Many different stakeholders from scientists to citizens and from policy makers to environmental organisations have been involved in its practice. In addition, many scientists also study citizen science as a research approach and as a way for science and society to interact and collaborate. This book provides a representation of the practices as well as scientific and societal outcomes in different disciplines. It reflects the contribution of citizen science to societal development, education, or innovation and provides and overview of the field of actors as well as on tools and guidelines. It serves as an introduction for anyone who wants to get involved in and learn more about the science of citizen science.
Citizen science, the active participation of the public in scientific research projects, is a rapidly expanding field in open science and open innovation. It provides an integrated model of public knowledge production and engagement with science. As a growing worldwide phenomenon, it is invigorated by evolving new technologies that connect people easily and effectively with the scientific community. Catalysed by citizens’ wishes to be actively involved in scientific processes, as a result of recent societal trends, it also offers contributions to the rise in tertiary education. In addition, citizen science provides a valuable tool for citizens to play a more active role in sustainable development. This book identifies and explains the role of citizen science within innovation in science and society, and as a vibrant and productive science-policy interface. The scope of this volume is global, geared towards identifying solutions and lessons to be applied across science, practice and policy. The chapters consider the role of citizen science in the context of the wider agenda of open science and open innovation, and discuss progress towards responsible research and innovation, two of the most critical aspects of science today.
This open access book offers a summary of the development of Digital Earth over the past twenty years. By reviewing the initial vision of Digital Earth, the evolution of that vision, the relevant key technologies, and the role of Digital Earth in helping people respond to global challenges, this publication reveals how and why Digital Earth is becoming vital for acquiring, processing, analysing and mining the rapidly growing volume of global data sets about the Earth. The main aspects of Digital Earth covered here include: Digital Earth platforms, remote sensing and navigation satellites, processing and visualizing geospatial information, geospatial information infrastructures, big data and cloud computing, transformation and zooming, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and social media. Moreover, the book covers in detail the multi-layered/multi-faceted roles of Digital Earth in response to sustainable development goals, climate changes, and mitigating disasters, the applications of Digital Earth (such as digital city and digital heritage), the citizen science in support of Digital Earth, the economic value of Digital Earth, and so on. This book also reviews the regional and national development of Digital Earth around the world, and discusses the role and effect of education and ethics. Lastly, it concludes with a summary of the challenges and forecasts the future trends of Digital Earth. By sharing case studies and a broad range of general and scientific insights into the science and technology of Digital Earth, this book offers an essential introduction for an ever-growing international audience.
This essential guide to doing social research in this fast-evolving digital age explains how the digital revolution is transforming the way social scientists observe behavior, ask questions, run experiments, and engage in mass collaborations.
A call for informed, responsible engagement with information technology at the local level. The common rhetoric about technology falls into two extreme categories: uncritical acceptance or blanket rejection. Claiming a middle ground, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day call for responsible, informed engagement with technology in local settings, which they call information ecologies. An information ecology is a system of people, practices, technologies, and values in a local environment. Nardi and O'Day encourage the reader to become more aware of the ways people and technology are interrelated. They draw on their empirical research in offices, libraries, schools, and hospitals to show how people can engage their own values and commitments while using technology.
Over the past decades, rapid developments in digital and sensing technologies, such as the Cloud, Web and Internet of Things, have dramatically changed the way we live and work. The digital transformation is revolutionizing our ability to monitor our planet and transforming the way we access, process and exploit Earth Observation data from satellites.This book reviews these megatrends and their implications for the Earth Observation community as well as the wider data economy. It provides insight into new paradigms of Open Science and Innovation applied to space data, which are characterized by openness, access to large volume of complex data, wide availability of new community tools, new techniques for big data analytics such as Artificial Intelligence, unprecedented level of computing power, and new types of collaboration among researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and citizen scientists. In addition, this book aims to provide readers with some reflections on the future of Earth Observation, highlighting through a series of use cases not just the new opportunities created by the New Space revolution, but also the new challenges that must be addressed in order to make the most of the large volume of complex and diverse data delivered by the new generation of satellites. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
The use of digital technology in our societies is growing to meet the ever-increasing challenges of data collection, raising awareness, education and understanding nature. Artificial intelligence, for example, appears to be the answer to collecting massive amounts of data on biodiversity at a global scale and facilitating citizen participation in such data collection. Linking with Nature in the Digital Age explores the reconfiguration of our relationship with nature within this digital framework. This book examines this mediated linking from three angles. Firstly, it shows how digital technology can foster the development of links to nature. Then, it describes in greater detail the materiality of these links and how they have evolved with the developments in information technology. Finally, it questions the belief in the digital as a facilitator and opens up new perspectives on our relationship with nature and the living world
New digital technologies have transformed how scientific information is created, disseminated—and discovered. The emergence of new forms of scientific publishing based on open science and open access have caused a major shift in scientific communication and a restructuring of the flow of information. Specialized indexing services and search engines are trying to get into information seekers’ minds to understand what users are actually looking for when typing all these keywords or drawing chemical structures. Using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and semantic indexing, these "discovery agents" are trying to anticipate users’ information needs. In this highly competitive environment, authors should not sit and rely only on publishers, search engines, and indexing services to make their works visible. They need to communicate about their research and reach out to a larger audience. Driving Science Information Discovery in the Digital Age looks through the "eyes" of the main "players" in this "game" and examines the discovery of scientific information from three different, but intertwined, perspectives: Discovering, managing, and using information (Information seeker perspective) Publishing, disseminating, and making information discoverable (Publisher perspective) Creating, spreading, and promoting information (Author perspective). Presents an overview of the current scientific publishing landscape Shows how users can search for scientific information more efficiently Critically analyses the metrics used to measure the quality of journals and the impact of research Looks at the discovery of scientific information from the perspectives of information seekers, publishers, and authors Delves into the practices used by specialized indexing services and search engines to process scientific information and make it discoverable Recommends strategies that authors could use to promote their research
We now live in a world where all aspects of everyday life are thoroughly mediated by digital technologies. Making sense of digital life is accordingly an essential undertaking for social science and humanities scholars. This multidisciplinary book provides an essential guide to researching digital life: Orienting readers with respect to methodologies, research design, and research ethics. Detailing key research methods, including interviews, surveys, ethnographies, walking methodologies, arts-based and participatory approaches, historical analysis, data visualisation, mapping and data analytics. Demonstrating these methods in action in real-world studies that have investigated apps and interfaces, social and locative media, mobilities, smart cities, and digital labour and work. The authors provide: • Non-Eurocentric perspectives and case studies from diverse disciplines • Annotated further reading to help you situate your research alongside existing research in your field • An outline of future directions for researching digital life. Accessible in style and richly illustrated, the chapters provide a wealth of key insights and practical information to ensure research projects are successfully planned and implemented.
