The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse

by Lintott, Chris

  ‘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.

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  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

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  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.

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  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—

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  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.

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  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

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  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

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  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: