A research project on how citizens produce scientific knowledge
How did lay citizens become involved in the production of scientific knowledge? Where does this movement fit in the broader history of public participation in science? How did the rise of the “amateur” redefine expertise in a democratic society? And who are these “citizen scientists” today? These are some of the questions we will address in this five years interdisciplinary research project on the transformations of public participation in science.
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Four things Twitter tells us about “Citizen Science” (and 1,000 things it doesn’t)
Figure 1: Followers/following links within Twitter accounts associated with the terms “citizen science.s” or “citsci” (October 2016). Nodes sized according to their number of “citizen science” followers (followers within the dataset). Scientometric studies of citizen...
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Alienation, disenchantment, and an insufficient concept of the public
Some thoughts about the sociological and historical background of the recent participatory turn in science and society Responsible science, public science and citizen science are iridescent concepts. Media and advocates of these concepts link them with positive ideals...
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Towards a Genealogy of the Crowd in Crowdsourcing (3/ Crowds and the Great Fear of 1789)
In 1934, the historian of the French Revolution Georges Lefebvre gave a talk on “Revolutionary Crowds” (“Les foules révolutionnaires”). Looking back on the book he had published two years before, The Great Fear of 1789 – a book which had required more than fifteen...
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