Page 63 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

062 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.10, 2018

science projects in the realm of digital humanities. For instance, the digital humanities center of
University College London (UCL) launched Slade Archive Project in 2012. With the subject of
historical archives of the Slade School of Fine Art, it built and perfected the metadata database with
the help of collaborative index; National Library of Australia, through its citizen science project,
called on readers to help the library’s physical buildings and virtual venues to design information
commons, better connecting the readers with architects, interior designers and librarians; and the
transcribe activity of “Sheng Xuanhuai’s Archives and Manuscripts” were carried out by Shanghai
Library through the development of the crowdsourcing database of historical documents. However,
compared with the natural science field, the citizen science attempt in the digital humanities field
is still in its infancy.

1.2 Conceptualizing citizen science projects

From 2004, international scholars began to discuss the definition and theoretical underpinnings
of citizen science. Some scholars tend to regard citizen science as a methodological paradigm
(Bonney et al., 2009; Brossard et al., 2005), which assists other disciplines and fields in solving
some problems and challenges they encountered, especially large projects that need to be supported
by multivariate heterogeneous data and emergent science; Some consider citizen science to be
a tool to link people and natural ecosystem (Raddick et al., 2009; Crain et al., 2014; Pilny et al.,
2016), and embed citizen science as a platform or an interface into a series of specific scientific
research projects. Other scholars maintain that citizen science is a specific research branch in
the realm of crowdsourcing (Wiggins & Crowston, 2011; Geiger & Schader, 2014; Zhao & Zhu,
2014b). For example, citizen science projects are viewed as the task processing and solution
mode of crowdsourcing in specific situations. This study tends to perceive citizen science from
an integrated 3P perspective, namely, from the Paradigm at the macro level, to the Process at the
middle level, and to the Platform at the micro level. As for the theoretical exploration of citizen
science, Wiggins and Crowston (2011) classify existing citizen science tasks and attempt to
summarize and analyze their development theoretically. Next Steps for Citizen Science, published
in 2014, pointed out that strategic investments and coordination are the two magic weapons to fully
realize the potential of citizen science in the future (Bonney et al., 2014). Newman et al. (2012)
believe that future citizen science projects need to set up project teams to work together with
government departments, enterprises, associations, journals and network infrastructure to create a
better citizen science service model, and point out that networking, open science and gamification
mechanisms are effective tools for the successful implementation of citizen science.
Meanwhile, some scholars mainly summarized the types and characteristics of citizen science.
Compared with traditional scientific research projects, the openness, participation and interactivity
are the foundations and characteristics of citizen science projects. Scientific research is not only
the task of scientists, but can also be implemented and improved by means of mass participation