In early Summer, the PARTHENOS Project launched a new module on “Citizen Science in the (Digital) Arts and Humanities”.
The module, which is the seventh module from the PARTHENOS project, combines original materials written around the theme of Citizen Science (CS) with existing training materials from partner projects and Research Infrastructures. Citizen Science projects are those that involve collaboration with the public, often volunteering their skills and enthusiasm to make a meaningful contribution to the project, such as processing parts of a large dataset, or offering up personal items or stories for research.
It features case studies from successful citizen science projects such as Transcribe Bentham, or the Explore-AT project, that reflect many of the issues and benefits to CS as a research practice. In particular, the module includes a collection of video case studies that feature Prof. Melissa Terras (University of Edinburgh) and Dr. Justin Tonra (NUI Galway) discussing various aspects of the long-running Transcribe Bentham project. The Transcribe Bentham project has been running as a citizen science crowdsourcing project since 2010, and is led by Prof. Philip Schofield at University College London. It has to date transcribed over 22,000 pages of renowned philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s papers through crowdsourcing.
The module was authored by Professor Jennifer Edmond (Trinity College Dublin & President of the Board of Directors, DARIAH), Eliza Papaki (Communications Officer, DARIAH-EU) and Dr. Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (Open Science Officer, DARIAH-EU). It was edited by Vicky Garnett (Trinity College Dublin).
“We wanted to provide a friendly step-by-step guide to the practicalities of creating, launching and analysing a citizen science project, while also taking into consideration the role of the ‘citizen scientist’ volunteer, and their needs in a large-scale project”, says Prof. Edmond.
She continues: “To do this, we spoke to leading experts in the field from across Europe, all of whom gave us great insight into the day-to-day tasks one faces when running a citizen science project, which we have incorporated in this module”.
The module features written content, case studies and audio interviews, all of which are available to reuse free (under a CC-BY license) for training purposes. More information on the PARTHENOS Training Materials, as well as modules in topics such as “Formal Ontologies”, “Introduction to Research Infrastructures”, and “Research Questions and Methods in the Digital Humanities”, can all be found on the PARTHENOS Training Suite.
See the original post on the PARTHENOS website.
