Page 186 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

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186 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.9, 2017

technologies of digitalization, data and data analysis, visualization, VR/AR, machine learning,
and that the theoretical structure is concluded as re-constructing humanities, digitalizing
humanities, imaging humanities, augmenting humanities and smart humanities, with applications
covering resource collection, knowledge atomization, environment reconstruction and augmented
arts.
It is revealed that digital humanities has become an interdisciplinary field, with merging
interdisciplinary knowledge in it. As there are few studies on the overall research for the technical
system and theoretical structure of digital humanities, this approach could aid to probe into the
integrated and interdisciplinary studies of digital humanities, with promoting development and
flourish of humanities in digital age.

A preliminary exploration on citizen science projects based on scientific
crowdsourcing perspectives: Conceptualization, pattern design and research
opportunities

〇a*
ZHAO Yuxiang〇
Citizen Science is an Internet-enabled mass participation and online collaboration mode, which
fully reflects the idea of crowd wisdom and open innovation. To date, the researchers abroad
have extensively investigated the citizen science as a research field, while the topic is still at its
early stage in China. This paper aims at discussing the conceptualization and pattern design of
citizen science projects, and providing some future directions for Library and Information Science
researchers.
The paper firstly reviews the prior studies on citizen science field, and indicates some limitations
from theoretical and practical perspectives. Theoretically, many previous studies did not clearly
figure out the difference between scientific crowdsourcing and citizen science, which may blur the
boundary of conceptualization and lead to some misunderstanding on these two terms. Practically,
so far, most of the citizen science projects focus on the nature science disciplines, while paying
little attention to the humanities and social sciences, especially for the advancement of digital
humanities, citizen science projects may have great potential in facilitating and improving the
relevant research themes and topics. Then, the study emphasizes that scientific crowdsourcing can
be viewed as the theoretical foundation of citizen science research, which means that the successful
conceptualization and design of scientific crowdsourcing mode will better the understanding of
citizen science projects. The study elaborates on the key issues of scientific crowdsourcing and
core driving forces, and then endeavors to propose a typology on the scientific crowdsourcing
into three categories, namely non-emergent, emergent with the quantitative accumulation, and
emergent with the qualitative accumulation. Several dimensions are put forward to illustrate the
* Correspondence should be addressed to ZHAO Yuxiang, Email: yxzhao@vip.163.com, ORCID: 0000-0001-9281-3030