Within the last decade or two, with the advent of phones with decent cameras, and widespread access to the internet, crowd sourcing for the use of academic investigation has opened widely.
Virtual historical collections allow individuals to write accounts of family members' activity in the War, or picture family relics, letters and other historical artefacts - then send them directly to a virtual collection (See RunCoCo) - these collections are free to access and provide a wealth of information about life in recent historical periods.
Another avenue of crowd sourcing exists in our (the human brains') ability to recognise patterns, or tell objects apart. There are many research projects in which large data sets of images or graphical outputs are produced, though computer analysis alone is not sophisticated enough to recognise data patterns, and so human intervention is required - an example are the spirals in an image of a galaxy.
To analyse this data by an individual, or even an small team, would be laborious, and dreadfully time consuming, but if the task is simplified to yield the most menial parts, for example, tracing the spirals in an image of a galaxy using an image processor, then anyone can get involved! From the earlier link, there have been over 2000 volunteers.
Other projects include transcribing manuscripts from the anti-slave trade, or spotting and highlighting biological cells in electron microscope images. For someone like me, who has an interest in most things scientific, and more recently things historical, projects such as these give me exposure to real data, real experiments - allowing me, someone with little background in physics, biology, or transcription, to get involved! Personally, I think it's great. Many other interesting 'open source' research projects can be found at Zooniverse.
That's it for this blog post - I hope you've enjoyed a brief look at academic crowd sourcing. Try not to get sucked in to analysing gravitational waves!
No comments:
Post a Comment