Democratising science: how Linguistics can help us understand citizen science communities

Democratising science: how Linguistics can help us understand citizen science communities

Dr Claudia Viggiano, University of Portsmouth

Citizen science is a rising form of crowdsourced research that uses the contributions of volunteers for the advancement of science, especially with regards to collecting or classifying large bodies of data. While extensive, research on citizen science has mainly focused on quantitative metrics such as success and motivations, rather than on the language used on the virtual platforms that host CS projects. 
This paper uses corpus linguistics to analyse the Zooniverse CS community, exploring the linguistic devices and communication strategies used by members to signal their participation, expertise, and membership within the community. By analysing linguistic interactions, this work argues in favour of integrating approaches from linguistics into the wider study of CS communities, which can help gain better understanding of issues such as motivation, engagement, success, learning and access to science in CS, while also informing the design and maintenance of CS platforms in general.
 

About the Speaker

Dr Claudia Viggiano recently obtained her PhD in Corpus Linguistics from the University of Portsmouth, where she currently works as a part-time Lecturer and a Research Assistant with the Democratic Citizenship research theme. Her research focuses on online citizen science communities, and specifically on the ways users create and employ language to self-identify as members of a community