Zooniverse

Self-portrait

What is the Zooniverse?

The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. This research is made possible by volunteers—hundreds of thousands of people around the world who come together to assist professional researchers. Our goal is to enable research that would not be possible, or practical, otherwise. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many publications.

At the Zooniverse, anyone can be a researcher

You don’t need any specialised background, training, or expertise to participate in any Zooniverse projects. We make it easy for anyone to contribute to real academic research, on their own computer, at their own convenience.

You’ll be able to study authentic objects of interest gathered by researchers, like images of faraway galaxies, historical records and diaries, or videos of animals in their natural habitats. By answering simple questions about them, you’ll help contribute to our understanding of our world, our history, our Universe, and more.

With our wide-ranging and ever-expanding suite of projects, covering many disciplines and topics across the sciences and humanities, there's a place for anyone and everyone to explore, learn and have fun in the Zooniverse.

We accelerate important research by working together

The major challenge of 21st century research is dealing with the flood of information we can now collect about the world around us. Computers can help, but in many fields the human ability for pattern recognition—and our ability to be surprised—makes us superior. With the help of Zooniverse volunteers, researchers can analyze their information more quickly and accurately than would otherwise be possible, saving time and resources, advancing the ability of computers to do the same tasks, and leading to faster progress and understanding of the world, getting to exciting results more quickly.

Our projects combine contributions from many individual volunteers, relying on a version of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to produce reliable and accurate data. By having many people look at the data we often can also estimate how likely we are to make an error. The product of a Zooniverse projects is often exactly what’s needed to make progress in many fields of research.

Volunteers and professionals make real discoveries together

Zooniverse projects are constructed with the aim of converting volunteers' efforts into measurable results. These projects have produced a large number of published research papers, as well as several open-source sets of analyzed data. In some cases, Zooniverse volunteers have even made completely unexpected and scientifically significant discoveries.

A significant amount of this research takes place on the Zooniverse discussion boards, where volunteers can work together with each other and with the research teams. These boards are integrated with each project to allow for everything from quick hashtagging to in-depth collaborative analysis. There is also a central Zooniverse board for general chat and discussion about Zooniverse-wide matters.

Many of the most interesting discoveries from Zooniverse projects have come from discussion between volunteers and researchers. We encourage all users to join the conversation on the discussion boards for more in-depth participation. (https://www.zooniverse.org/about)

Description

Zooniverse is a citizen science project that connects institutions, academics, and volunteers to develop research in astronomy, mathematics, technology, statistics and programming, produced and maintained by the Citizen Science Alliance, headquartered at Oxford University. Zooniverse began in 2007 with the Galaxy Zoo project. After the Galaxy Zoo success more projects were developed on topics such as space, climate, humanities, nature, biology and physics, involving more than 1 million volunteers around the world identified as "zooites". The "zooties" are supported and coordinated by translators and ambassadors that promote the projects in different countries.

The web site houses a laboratory for experimental research projects and a news section where they publish research advances, curiosities about the experiments and the projects and educational resources. Galaxy Zoo Navigato serves to classify galaxies and identify their characteristics. Zoo Tolos is a place where volunteers observe, collect and analyze data from Zooniverse projects. Solar Storm Watch Resources For Teachers is a Greenwich Observatory site with lesson plans and resources for teachers who want to use the tool with their students. Teachers Professional Development is a training project and workshops for teachers, advised by the Zooniverse Education Team that brings together specialists in education, astronomy and technology that improve the educational experience. There is also a section of publications with scientific articles that can be consulted by the general public and a space in real time that updates minute by minute the events and results of projects worldwide called Zooniverse Live.

Interview

Darren McRoy http://dpya.org/en/index.php/Darren_McRoy

Lucy Fortson http://dpya.org/en/index.php/Lucy_Fortson

Links

URL: https://www.zooniverse.org/

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.zooniverse.org/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooniverse