Page 62 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

ZHAO Yuxiang / A preliminary exploration on citizen science projects based on scientific crowdsourcing perspectives: 061
Conceptualization, pattern design and research opportunities

1.1 The development and current status of citizen science

Although citizen science is a relatively new concept as a term, it possesses certain development
foundation and historical origin. In the 20th century, some large-scale and lasting citizen science
projects emerged in the realm of natural science research represented by ornithology, astronomy,
and ecology, etc. Representative cases are as follows—Christmas Bird Count Project (CBC)
founded in 1900, the north American Breeding Bird survey originating in 1966, Galaxy Zoo
activities in 2008 launched by Oxford University, the Johns Hopkins University and other
institutions, and the citizen science project Evolution Mega Lab started to commemorate the
200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth who is a British biologist and the founder of the Evolution
Theory. In August 2012, the landmark conference on the development of citizen science “Public
Participation in Scientific Research” was held in the United States, which attracted more than 300
participants from all fields in the world to discuss issues of developing citizen science. Then, the
special journal of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a journal of Ecology, summarized
and considered the application and development of citizen science in Ecology, and emphasized
the significant influence and the prospect of citizen science as to ecological research (G.Newman
et al.,2012). Based on the popularity of citizen science projects in natural resources, ecological
environment protection and other fields, Bonney et al. (2014) claimed in Science that this form
can not only make full use of the crowd wisdom to conduct scientific research, but also promote
the public’s scientific literacy and environmental awareness. Crain, Cooper, and Dickinson (2014)
pointed out that citizen science itself has the characteristics of interdisciplinary fields, covering
diverse aspects of natural science and social science. The diverse geographical distribution of
public participants in citizen science projects is just in line with the diverse demand for data in
many natural science researches (Crain et al., 2014). Also, from the perspective of social science
research, the hierarchical structure of participants is more conducive to in-depth and extensive field
observation and data collection. Up to now, over 1,000 projects have been registered on popular
science websites abroad (see: www.citizenscience.org).
It is worth noting that the emerging digital humanities field in recent years calls for more urgent
practical needs on the implementation of citizen science projects (Sula, 2013). As a typical multi-
disciplinary field, the exploration of digital humanities includes not only scholars in the realm
of traditional humanities and social sciences, but also information science researchers who are
proficient in information and multimedia technology (Ke & Gong, 2016). Therefore, the structure
of the research team is relatively complex. What’s more, the characteristics such as massive
calculation, large-scale sample collection and diversity analysis make it impossible to accomplish
such a complicated task merely by means of machine automation and cooperation of scientific
teams in digital humanities field (W.Liu, Xie, L. Zhang, & Y. J. Zhang, 2016). Consequently, the
scientific crowdsourcing model based on collective intelligence will greatly promote the deepening
and breakthrough of digital humanities research. In recent years, there have also been citizen