It is often said that the citizen sciences shift the boundaries between professionals, experts, amateurs and lay people. To understand, confirm or contradict this statement, we must know what it means to be a “professional”, “expert”, “amateur” or “layman” in science. A first step could be a look into the history of the emergence, transformation and power of social roles in science. The following literature shows how heterogeneous the roles were conceptualized in the past. What can we learn from it for today’s discourse about the citizen sciences?
Alberti, Samuel JMM. “Amateurs and Professionals in One County: Biology and Natural History in Late Victorian Yorkshire.” Journal of the History of Biology 34, no. 1 (2001): 115–147. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1010373912743.
Allen, David Elliston. “Amateurs and Professionals,” 15–33, 2009.
Barrow, Mark V. A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Charvolin, Florian, André Micoud, and Lynn K. Nyhart. “La Nature Des Profanes: Pour Une Autre Approche de l’amateur.” In Des Sciences Citoyennes ? La Question de l’amateur Dans Les Sciences Naturalistes, edited by Florian Charvolin, André Micoud, and Lynn K. Nyhart, 7–15. La Tour d’Aigues: Ed. de l’Aube, 2007.
Bont, Raf de. “Poetry and Precision: Johannes Thienemann, the Bird Observatory in Rossitten and Civic Ornithology, 1900–1930.” Journal of the History of Biology 44, no. 2 (2011): 171–203. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-009-9209-9.
Flichy, Patrice. Le Sacre de l’amateur: Sociologie Des Passions Ordinaires à l’ère Numérique. La République Des Idées. Paris: Seuil, 2010.
Jacobs, Nancy J. “The Intimate Politics of Ornithology in Colonial Africa.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 03 (2006): 564–603. http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0010417506000235.
Kelty, Christopher M. “Outlaw, Hackers, Victorian Amateurs: Diagnosing Public Participation in the Life Sciences Today.” Jcom 9, no. 1 (2010). http://thetarrytownmeetings.org/sites/default/files/discussion/Greenfield_Political_Economy_Supplement_Kelty.pdf.
Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory. “The Ninetheenth-Century Amateur Tradition: The Case of the Boston Society of Natural History.” In Science and Its Public: The Changing Relationship. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 33. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976.
Nyhart, Lynn K. “Civic and Economic Zoology in Nineteenth-Century Germany. The ‘Living Communities’ of Karl Möbius.” ISIS 89 (1998): 605–30.
Secord, Anne. “Corresponding Interests: Artisans and Gentlemen in Nineteenth-Century Natural History.” The British Journal for the History of Science 27, no. 4 (1994): 383–408.
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