An increasing number of research projects rely on data provided by citizen scientists and many of these projects collect personal information about the citizen. The Citizen Cyberlab project researched and evaluated on-line collaborative environments and software tools that stimulate creative learning in the context of Citizen Cyberscience. Beyond helping scientists execute laborious tasks, Citizen Cyberscience projects enable citizens to learn about science and take part in the more creative aspects of research. Little is known about the learning and creativity processes stimulated by such projects, even though millions of volunteers participate. Even less is known about how to optimize those processes.
In addition, we know very little about why a citizen scientist would decide to participate in a project or why they would decide to disclose or withhold their data. With data protection becoming one of the most socially salient issues and the focus of a recent legislative overhaul, it is important to understand the complexities of human behaviour in voluntary disclosure scenarios.
Publications
Rudnicka, A; Gould, SJJ; Cox, AL (2022). Citizen Scientists Are Not Just Quiz Takers: Information about Project Type Influences Data Disclosure in Online Psychological Surveys. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice [HTML] [PDF]
Rudnicka, A; Cox, AL; Gould, SJJ; (2019) Why Do You Need This? Selective Disclosure of Data Among Citizen Scientists. In Proceedings of CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings. Paper #392 [PDF] [HTML]
Jennett, C., Kloetzer, L., Schneider, D., Iacovides, I., Cox, A. L., Gold, M., … & Talsi, Y. (2016). Motivations, learning and creativity in online citizen science. Journal of Science Communication, 15(3).
Eveleigh, A., Jennett, C., Blandford, A., Brohan, P., & Cox, A. L. (2014, April). Designing for dabblers and deterring drop-outs in citizen science. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2985-2994).
Eveleigh, A., Jennett, C., Lynn, S., & Cox, A. L. (2013, October). “I want to be a captain! I want to be a captain!” gamification in the old weather citizen science project. In Proceedings of the first international conference on gameful design, research, and applications (pp. 79-82).
Iacovides, I., Jennett, C., Cornish-Trestrail, C., & Cox, A. L. (2013). Do games attract or sustain engagement in citizen science? A study of volunteer motivations. In CHI’13 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1101-1106).
