‘citizen science’ can sound like we’re trying to limit who can participate. Whole conferences have been held trying to agree on alternatives, but most suggestions have their own problems. (‘Public Participation in Scientific Research’, or PPSR, is OK but a little unwieldy.) I’ll stick to citizen science, but it is meant inclusively.
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had to rely solely on energy and enthusiasm. Symons was the
assistant at the thennew Meteorological Office in Whitehall
who had responsibility for rainfall (or at least for the measurement and recording of it), and he hit on the same solution to the problem of distributed observation as Glaisher. By 1863, Symons
was confident enough to write to The Times, inviting those ‘of both sexes, all ages and all classes’ to send in their observations.
The result was overwhelming, the equivalent of the servers
crashing under the weight of Galaxy Zoo traffic. Symons received
so many observations that a huge amount of work was dedicated
to analysing them, and he quickly became a victim of this success.
His boss, Robert Fitzroy (of shipping forecast fame), became convinced that this enormous effort dedicated to collecting and analysing data could only detract from Symons’ official duties, and Symons was quickly out on his ear. Shortsighted this may have
been, but there is no doubt that dealing with his everexpanding
network must have been terribly timeconsuming. Anderson
reports that Symons was receiving observations from in excess
of 1,000 observers in 1867, and more than 3,000 by 1900. The longevity of the project as well as its scale underscores the fact that Symons had clearly come to regard this as his life’s work.
In its early years, the network was supported by a grant from
the British Association for the Advancement of Science,* but this
ended in 1875. Perhaps realizing the error of its director’s earlier decision, the Met Office offered to take on the task of organizing
things from there, at which point Symons with some justification told them where to stick it. He felt that the volunteer spirit (and his writings on the subject are everything you would expect
* An organization that is still extremely active, though it is now known as the British Science Association. It was founded in 1831 to promote and encourage science. Its public meetings included the first use of the terms ‘science’ and
‘dinosaur’, though not, sadly, at the same time.
90 No Such ThiNg aS a New ide a
from a patriotic Englishman with a cause, writing at the apex of
belief in the empire) would be lost or illtreated if directed not by that same spirit of voluntary contributions, but rather put in the
service of some ‘Government Office’.
Indeed, he had already been impressively willing to open up
discussion about matters of policy to the participants, rather
than resting on his own authority. If you want to measure rainfall
across Britain, and you rely on volunteers, what should you ask
them to do? Their own lives and preoccupations mean that you
cannot possibly insist on hourly readings from all. Daily readings seem more sensible, but then when should one make them?
Midnight is nice and clean—you’d get a measure of rainfall during a calendar day—but it is hardly respectful of the social lives and sleep of wouldbe scientists. Symons polled his members,
and they decided to observe uniformly at nine in the morning, a
nice example of collective experiment design in action. Perhaps
it was this collaborative spirit that allowed Symons, following
the loss of his grant, to turn to the network’s volunteers for funding. Their donations and subscriptions flowed in enough quantity to allow the network to operate at a modest profit during its later years.
Symons and Glaisher provide two early examples of effective
citizen science. One created an organization driven by its members who shared a common goal, and who presumably felt part of that greater collective effort. Another used prestige—the
Royal Observatory, the Daily News—to stimulate an audience to participate by handing over their data. Both were hugely effective,
but there is a third, alternative route. In passing, Anderson
mentions the story of the Scottish Meteorological Office who,
confronting the highlands and islands, felt more than most the
need for observers in obscure corners of the country. (My own
experience is that such places in Scotland tend to be the wettest,
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but even then I suppose systematic observation is required to lift
such findings much above the level of anecdote.) In 1872, an
observer at Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides was recruited by
the official, Londonbased network as a paid contributor. The net
result of having the value of his observations recognized by
funding was such that he immediately stopped contributing to
the existing volunteeronly Scottish network. Pay, it seems, may
work as an incentive but a hybrid model was very difficult to sustain. Perhaps the lesson is just that anyone running a project involving volunteers should be very careful not to exhaust the
goodwill of those participating.
Due to an unaccountable, or at least unavoidable, lack of
contemporary social scientists interested in such questions, we
have only speculation as to the motivations of the participants
in these protocitizen science projects. Nor would they have
thought of themselves as citizen scientists; the first recorded
use of the term in the modern sense is usually given as appearing in the New Scientist magazine in October 1979, where ‘the citizen scientist, the amateur investigator who in the past contributed substantially to the development of science through parttime dabbling’ is mentioned in the context of an article
about UFOs. There is an ambiguous reference, dear to my heart,
in Collier’s magazine in 1949, which speaks of ‘citizenscientists’
perfecting ‘a technique which brought gin to its peak of flavor
and highoctane potency’, but that seems to be a different thing
entirely. Yet though we can’t be sure why they participated, one
suspects that what united participants was some combination
of wanting to belong to a movement, of wanting to advance scientific knowledge, and of rubbing shoulders with (scientific) celebrity.
We get a better sense of what participants themselves were
thinking from another great scientific endeavour of the age—the
92 No Such ThiNg aS a New ide a
huge and collective burden of keeping Charles Darwin informed
and entertained. Observations of the natural world had been
part of what we’d call scientific activity for many years before the
Victorian naturalist came along, but he was able to draw on a
vast network to gather information from around the world,
informing his own work while he, after his youthful voyages on
the Beagle, remained at home.
As that description suggests, Darwin’s correspondence, much
of which is now available for our enjoyment online, was prodigious. Not quite housebound, but certainly firmly attached to his patch of Kentish soil after his adventures as a young man, he
relied on a network of correspondents from every corner of the
world to inform him of—well, everything. When I first explored
the collection, the first example letter I picked out more or less at random was a note to a Mr Mantell, in New Zealand (Figure 16).
In the
space of a few short paragraphs, Darwin enquires about
some observations of possibly erratic rocks, about whether the
Maori ideal of beauty matches that of Europeans, and about the
possibility of a creature ‘with hair’ that was something like an
otter or a beaver.
Not all the letters are quite that eclectic, but flicking digitally
through the surviving piles gives you a sense of an urgent and
vital exchange of information. On the day I’m writing this, 144
years ago, Darwin received a letter from a Mr George Cupples of
Fife. George was writing to send his eminent correspondent the
‘best wishes of the season’, but judging by the rest of the letter
clearly felt the inequality between their positions, which he
strove to fill with information he thought that Darwin might find
useful. The gap is closed by a note on the breeding of Pyrenean
mountain dogs, one of which Cupples has recently acquired, and
which has ‘six welldeveloped toes on its hind foot’. As if that
wasn’t enough, a postscript mentions notes on the subject of
Figure 16 Letter from Darwin to W. B. D. Mantell, dated 10 April 1856.
Sadly, no reply is known to survive.
94 No Such ThiNg aS a New ide a
inbreeding received from a Mr Wright, which could be forwarded if Darwin was at all interested.
I have no idea if Darwin even responded to this note, but I find
it fascinating. It’s not just that George Cupples could write to this most exalted of scientific men on somewhat equal terms (writing
to Darwin these days is as close as some can imagine coming to
talking to God, after all), but that there was a clear expectation
that he might just be able to convey information that would be of
use. Darwin’s great scientific insights, which still shape so much
of our thought today, rested on careful observation. Many of
those observations were his own, made not least during his
famous tour on the Beagle, but the rest were distributed throughout the world and through his crowd of correspondents.
Darwin clearly valued input from his circle of contacts. It took
me a matter of moments to discover a letter, written more than
130 years ago, in which Darwin writes to Philip Sclater, an early
ornithologist. Darwin was writing to thank him for a correction
to some published work or another: ‘You men who do only or
chiefly original work’, says Darwin, ‘have an immense advantage
over compilers like myself, as you can know what to trust’. I
could scarcely have wished for a better statement as to why you
want to keep those who are the source of your data close to you.
This way of working didn’t end with Darwin. Strikingly similar
examples of this pattern of distributed observation, reported to a
central authority, exist today. My favourite recent example is the
discovery of the ‘ghost slug’, a new species identified by staff at the Museum of Wales following reports from observant gardeners. A
spectral and slimy figure, it owes its name to its nearly transparent appearance, and it can be distinguished from other, similar species by its eyeless eyestalks. It was reported in 2008 as a new species in a Cardiff garden, and has since shown up across South Wales and also—thrillingly for me, though I’ve yet to find one—
No Such ThiNg aS a New ide a 95
as far east as Oxfordshire.* It owes its obscurity to its habit of living a solitary life up to a metre below the ground, but nonetheless someone spotted it and reported it to the museum, where it
gained its scientific name ( Selenochlamys ysbryda—ysbryd is a Welsh spirit or ghost) and a host of attention. Experts reckon that the
most likely origin for this fabulous creature is not Cardiff, but the Crimea, of all places, though nothing of the sort has ever been
found there. It is only thanks to observant citizen scientists out
working in their Welsh gardens has it come to scientific attention.
Today, just as in the nineteenth century, transmitting information from an observer in the field to an established authority is the key to discoveries like this. Yet the relationship between
Darwin and his correspondents could be a rather uncomfortable
one; a letter from 16 April 1856 sees even as exalted a personage
as Baronet Charles Bunbury apologizing for not having written
back to Darwin sooner. He had, he explains, been waiting ‘rather
vainly’ for ‘some remark worth sending’ to turn up. The point,
I suggest, of writing to Darwin was that it might mean something—that Baronet Bunbury and the rest of Darwin’s correspondents wanted to be of use, but that need to be useful puts a huge amount of pressure on a letter writer. Precisely because of
the shared understanding that such correspondence might be
useful, there was pressure to write only things which were ‘worth
sending’.
This paradoxical pattern, in which belief in the potential
usefulness of one’s contribution changes how one views a task,
is something that still exists in many modern citizen science
projects, including Galaxy Zoo. It lies too at the heart of why
* Observations are coordinated by the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, whose aim is to ‘understand, identify, record and conserve molluscs.’ I wish them all the luck in the world.
96 No Such ThiNg aS a New ide a
participation means more than mere crowdsourcing, more than
just trying to get work done. Imagine the response of someone in
rural Devon or Scotland, isolated from the mainstream scientific
community and establishment, receiving a reply from Darwin
praising their work, or the feeling such amateur—citizen—
scientists would have had seeing their name in the (expensively
printed) journals that keep track of the efforts made by observers.
This is a way to understand that participation like this is a way
of transforming how people think of themselves, and of their
capabilities, and even in the nineteenth century it was clear, to
some at least, that in asking for observations you acquired obligations to those who were assisting you to ensure that they got something from the project too.
The example I have in mind involves the Prussian/German
astronomer Friedrich Argelander. He was one of the nineteenth
century’s preeminent observers of the stars, as well as a fine
institutionbuilder and networker. Following time as a graduate
student when he studied with the great mathematician Bessel, in
Königsberg, Argelander moved to Finland in 1823 to head up
astronomical research there. While there, he showed his dedication to observing while watching the city of Turku, home to his observatory, disappear in an enormous conflagration. The event
is recorded in his log, along with a clear sense of priority: ‘Here
the observations were interrupted by a terrible fire, which
reduced the entire city to ashes. The observatory was, thank
God, spared.’
In the aftermath of the fire he moved the observatory to
Helsinki, but soon after ended up in Bonn, where he had persuaded the king to fund the construction of a new, stateoftheart observatory. (It helped in arguing for his grandiose and expensive plans that Argelander had taken care to befriend the
then prince when they were still children; a serious investment
No Such ThiNg aS a New ide a 97
in the future
that perhaps modern astronomers should note.)
At the time of Argelander’s move to Bonn, the science he was
engaged in was undergoing a revolution; it was on the edge of
completing the transformation from astronomy—the measurement of the positions and the movements of celestial bodies—to astrophysics, the attempt to understand them. Argelander was
interested in both, but was essentially a traditional observer.
For a long while, his most famous discovery was what was
called Argelander’s star. An apparently innocuous yellow dwarf,
he found it moved across the sky (relative to the other stars) faster than any other star known at that time. Astronomers call this
relative motion ‘proper motion’; Argelander’s star is still notably
speedy but is now third in the rankings. Its motion is not rapid by
everyday standards, amounting to a degree across the sky every
millennium or so, but it is interesting. It is due partly to the star’s proximity, less than thirty light years from us, but is so high
mainly because the star belongs not to the rotating stellar disc
that houses the vast majority of the Milky Way’s stars including
the Sun, but to the scattered halo of stars we now know surrounds it. As we turn with our neighbours about the galactic centre, Argelander’s star stands still but, secure in the illusion
that we are standing still, we conclude it is speeding by, just as the platform appears to be moving as your train pulls out of the
station.
Stars don’t just change position; as we saw with Leavitt’s
Cepheids they can change in brightness too. Only a handful of
such ‘variable stars’ were known before Argelander began work,
but he introduced the modern system of categorizing them and
understood quickly that watching how a star changes is key to
understanding the physics that underlies its behaviour. The only
problem is that this kind of observation is immensely time
consuming. If you don’t know when a star might behave in an
98 No Such ThiNg aS a New ide a
interesting way, or on what timescales interesting behaviour is
likely to occur, then you are left with no alternative but to monitor the sky as frequently as possible. Furthermore, this work was carried out star by star, and was as a result best shared by a network of widely distributed observers, a point not lost on the new director of astronomy in Bonn, who wrote:
The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse Page 12