Page 76 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

ZHAO Yuxiang / A preliminary exploration on citizen science projects based on scientific crowdsourcing perspectives: 075
Conceptualization, pattern design and research opportunities

managers of digital humanities projects to obtain more economical and high-quality solutions from
the outside. Therefore, it is of great practical significance and feasibility to explore the planning
and operation of digital humanities citizen science projects from the perspective of “resource
view”.
2) Build a digital humanities platform to promote the development of citizen science projects.
Currently, citizen science projects mainly rely on two channels: to independently develop
and design related scientific crowdsourcing system, and to take advantage of some developed
crowdsourcing sites like Amazon Mechanic Turk (AMT), Innocentive and so on. With their own
characteristics, these two methods are not able to avoid a common limitation—how to utilize
the platform effect to better promote the successful implementation of citizen science projects.
Instead of being as easy as developing or choosing a website (namely the system platformon the
physical level), “the concept of platform” should fully consider whether the construction and
allocation of resources in the early stage of the platform are enough to support the development
of citizen science projects, and create virtual and practical communities conducive to the
sustainable development and promotion of citizen science projects. In fact, the current digital
humanities platforms and citizen science projects are often developed on their own tracks, lacking
consideration of the nature of the project and reasonable planning of required resources. The author
suggests that future research and practice should be explored from two paradigms as follows. First,
citizen science projects driven by digital humanities platforms. Citizen science projects within
the system will be embedded, integrated into and thus fully supported by the digital humanities
platform. Second, citizen science projects assisted by digital humanities platforms. Citizen science
projects under the system will connect and match with existing digital humanities platforms with
partly employing the resources provided by digital humanities platforms. In terms of the limitation
of this study, the author will probe into these two different service modes of knowledge innovation
in another research.
3) Optimize the research data management and protection mechanism of digital humanities
citizen science projects. Preceding researches on citizen science projects lacked attention to and
in-depth mining of data and failed to effectively manage and utilize the scientific data generated
during the operation of the project as an asset. As for the following researches, the author advocates
applying the theories and methods of metadata construction, associated data analysis and data
monitoring to the management and operation of digital humanities citizen science project platform.
Deeply aggregate research data generated in the digital humanities citizen science projects. By
taking full advantage of open data and associated data mining techniques, resolve problems like
semantic divergence and semantic integration that are generated in the process of task description,
task match, and task recommendation, and make researches on inferential knowledge discovery.
4) Conduct user motivation and science/information literacy training for volunteers. Jordan,
Gray, Howe, Brooks and Ehrenfeld (2011) point out that in citizen science projects, potential
conflicts among scientific goals, education goals and participants’ motivations are the key points