Training: Create your own Zooniverse project

As part of our commitment to upskilling HEI staff and students and community members, Alice Sheppard, UCL’s Community Manager, gave a 30 minute webinar on how to create a new citizen science project using the Zooniverse platform, which you can find at https://www.zooniverse.org/lab/.

The Zooniverse is a vast website of online citizen science projects, mostly visual – participants are shown an image (which could be of a galaxy in space, a penguin in Antarctica, a letter written hundreds of years ago, or a slide with bacterial growth, or many other topics) and asked to transcribe what they see or ask a series of questions about it. At the time of writing, it contains 98 separate citizen science projects!

Anyone can build a project on the Zoniverse and it doesn’t require formal training, though of course it won’t be featured on the Zooniverse home page without a rigorous process. They have a great repository of tips and good practices here.

We are not representatives of the Zooniverse project, and we added a disclaimer that what we say does not necessarily represent the Zooniverse’s views – however, often what is needed is not formal training by an official representative, but simply a friendly introduction and an opportunity to give it a try in a relaxed atmosphere!

The Zooniverse is close to Alice’s heart after she moderated the first Galaxy Zoo forum for many years, which was what led to her gaining expertise in community management. She began the webinar by introducing a few Zooniverse projects and telling the Zooniverse’s story. She then went on to show a series of screenshots of the Zooniverse Project Builder, where you upload a stack of images and prepare a decision tree to ask questions, and what happens after each question – for example, further questions, or the next picture. (These questions can be anything – in this case, Alice created a “dummy project” of a series of pictures of Swedish landscapes, asking how much snow they contained!) Finally, the webinar participants were set a series of tasks, reminding them exactly how to create a “dummy project” of their own. As this would not be a serious or real project, the pressure was taken off, and participants were welcome to ask questions as they went along. Alice provided a link to a Google Drive folder of Swedish landscape pictures for participants to use if they wanted.

We held a 15 minute break after this webinar, and then went on to the next one, “Create Your Own nQuire Project”.