The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
Since the end of 2015, I’ve been using the following mapping of citizen science activities in a range of talks: The purpose of this way of presentation is to provide a way to guide my audience through the landscape of citizen science (see examples on SlideShare). The reason that I came up with it, is … Continue reading Citizen Science for Observing and Understanding the Earth
Continue reading »One of the aspects that fascinates me about the nature of participation in citizen science and crowdsourcing is the nature of participation and in particular participation inequality. As I’ve noted last week, when you look at large scale systems, you expected to see it in them (so Google Local Guides is exhibiting 95:5:0.005 ratio). I knew … Continue reading Citizen Science & Scientific Crowdsourcing – week 3 – Participation inequality
Continue reading »The first week of the “Introduction to Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing” course was dedicated to an introduction to the field of citizen science using the history, examples and typologies to demonstrate the breadth of the field. The second week was dedicated to the second half of the course name – crowdsourcing in general, and its … Continue reading Citizen Science & Scientific Crowdsourcing – week 2 – Google Local Guides
Continue reading »Today, I gave the opening lectures of the new UCL course ‘Introduction to Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing‘. In a way, it was more work than I originally thought, but I also thought that I’m underestimating the effort – so it’s not completely unexpected. Although I am responsible for the first installation of Moodle, the … Continue reading Launching a citizen science course – week 1
It’s a new year, and just the right time to announce that starting on the 11th January, UCL will run an 11 weeks hybrid (online and face to face) course called “Introduction to Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing“. This course aim is to introduce students to the theory and practice of citizen science and scientific crowdsourcing. … Continue reading Online course – Introduction to Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing
Citizen Inquiry is a new book, edited by Christothea (Thea) Herodotou, Mike Sharples, and Eileen Scanlon – all are education technology experts at the Open University. To celebrate the book, the Institute of Education Technology organised a citizen science impact symposium. These are my notes from the day. The day opened with Eileen Scanlon covered … Continue reading Citizen Science Inquiry event and book launch at the Open University
Hot on the heels of the Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice is the Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography. The handbook was edited by Alex Kent (Canterbury Christ Church University) who is currently the President of the British Cartographic Society and Editor of The Cartographic Journal; and Peter Vujakovic (also from Canterbury Christ Church University) who edited The Cartographic … Continue reading Chapter in Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography – VGI and Beyond: From Data to Mapping
Today, Caren Cooper new book Citizen Science: How Ordinary People are Changing the Face of Discovery is going on sale in the UK. The book has been out in the USA for about a year, and it is a good point to review it. The library of citizen science books is growing – there are the more … Continue reading Caren Cooper’s Citizen Science: How Ordinary People are Changing the Face of Discovery
The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice has been published in mid-September. This extensive book, of 670 pages is providing an extensive overview of scholarly research on environmental justice. The book was edited by three experts in the area – Ryan Holifield from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Jayajit Chakraborty from the University of Texas at El Paso, and Gordon Walker … Continue reading Chapter in Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice – Participatory GIS and community-based citizen science for environmental justice action
In December 2016, ECSA and the Natural History Museum in Berlin organised a workshop on analysing apps, platforms, and portals for citizen science projects. Now, the report from the workshop has evolved into an open peer review paper on RIO Journal. RIO is worth noticing: is “The Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal” and what … Continue reading Defining principles for mobile apps and platforms development in citizen science
The book ‘Understanding Spatial Media‘ came out earlier this year. The project is the result of joint effort of the editors Rob Kitchin (NUI Maynooth, Ireland), Tracey P. Lauriault (Carleton University, Canada), and Matthew W. Wilson (University of Kentucky, USA). The book is filling the need to review and explain what happened in the part 20 years, with the increase use … Continue reading Chapter in ‘Understanding Spatial Media’ on VGI & Citizen Science
Last weekend, I updated my Linkedin page to indicate that I’ve now completed the move between departments at UCL – from the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering to the Department of Geography. It’s not just me – the Extreme Citizen Science group will be now based at the Department of Geography. With this move, … Continue reading Changing departments – the pros and cons of being away from home discipline(s)
A new paper that is based on the PhD work of Valentine Seymour is out. Valentine has been researching the patterns of volunteering in environmental projects at the organisation The Conservation Volunteers. In the paper, we draw parallels between the activities of environmental volunteers and citizen science participants. The analysis demonstrates that the patterns of … Continue reading New paper – Exploring Engagement Characteristics and Behaviours of Environmental Volunteers
Once you switch the smartphone off from email and social media network, you can notice better when and how you’re crowdsourced. By this, I mean that use of applications to contribute data is sometimes clearer as the phone becomes less of communication technology and more of information technology (while most of the time it is … Continue reading Crowdsourced: navigation & location-based services
Notes from two talks from the session on the role of expert knowledge. Details of the session in full are here. The potential of citizen science to inform expert understanding: a case study of an urban river in London Iain Cross (St Mary’s University, UK), Rob Gray (Friends of the River Crane Environment), Joe Pecorelli (Zoological … Continue reading RGS-IBG 2017 – The role of expert knowledge in socio-environmental policy and decision making
These are notes from some of the talks from the two sessions on Just air? during the RGS-IBG conference in 2017. Details of the sessions are available here and here. Passive, reactive and participatory governance of the air: three approaches under scrutiny Nicola Da Schio, Bas Van Heur (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Looking at infrastructures, … Continue reading RGS-IBG 2017 – Just air? Spatial injustices, contestation and politicisation of air pollution (session notes)
Deadline 28th July 2017 UCL Department of Geography and the Ordnance Survey are inviting applications for a PhD studentship to explore the internal systematic biases in crowd-sourced geographic information datasets (also known as Volunteered Geographic Information – VGI). The studentship provides an exciting opportunity for a student to work with Ordnance Survey on understanding the … Continue reading PhD studentship in collaboration with the Ordnance Survey – identifying systematic biases in crowdsourced geographic information
Applications are invited for one PhD studentship as part of the European Research Council (ERC) funded project named ECSAnVis (Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis & Visualisation) aimed at a developer. Citizen Science is the participation of members of the public in a scientific project, from shaping the question, to collecting the data, analysing it and using … Continue reading PhD studentship in Extreme Citizen Science – development of data collection tools with non-literate participants
The Cambridge Conference is an event that is held every 4 years, organised by the Ordnance Survey, and it is a meeting of many heads of National Mapping Agencies who come together to discuss shared interests and learn from each other. The history of the conference is available here. This year, I was asked to … Continue reading Cambridge Conference 2017 – The Willing Volunteer
The second day of the PPGIS 2017 symposium (see Day 1 here) started with a session on METHODS AND TOOLS. The session opened with a keynote from Peter Nijkamp (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland) . The talk is titled “A big data dashboard architecture for computable intelligent city policy“. Peter noted that the … Continue reading PPGIS 2017 – Poznan, Poland (Day 2) – Geodesign, applications and discussion
These notes are from the workshop Modern Methods and Tools for Public Participation in Urban Planning 2017, held in Palac Obrzycko near Poznan, Poland on 22nd and 23rd June 2017 – the outline of the workshop stated “Researchers and practitioners of urban planning have had a variable interest in developing and applying methods of public participation … Continue reading PPGIS 2017 – Poznan, Poland (Day 1) – different notions and tools of public participation GIS
The workshop was organised by the ethics working group of the Citizen Science Association, and organised by Anne Bowser – Wilson Center; Lisa Rasmussen – University of North Carolina, Charlotte; Caren Cooper – North Carolina State University and North Carolina Museum of Nature Sciences. The charter for the working group was to identify what are the ethical … Continue reading Citizen Science 2017 – Filling the ‘ethics gaps’ in Citizen Science research
The afternoon session started with Web development insights Taking on the Challenges of Broadening Participation in Data Visualization and Analysis with FieldScope Daniel Edelson – BSCS – cover fieldscope that allow people to collect data, design the form, and visualise and analyse it. He covered the Chesapeake Watershed Water Quality study. The area that influences the … Continue reading Citizen Science 2017 – Day 2 (Afternoon) – online projects insights and final reception with The Crowd and the Cloud
Keynote by Dr. Ellen Jorgensen is co-founder and Executive Director of Genspace, a community biolab. She brings DIY-Bio to the conference. Her experience from the previous conference was the experience of “people want me only for my visual cortex” – contributory projects that are science led. Ellen interested in Public driven, public analysed of citizen science. … Continue reading Citizen Science 2017 – Day 2 (Morning) – Biohacking, traditional ecological knowledge, and science communication
The Afternoon session started with Tools for people running projects including the presentation about Doing It Together Science project Breaking the Barriers to Citizen Science Artemis Skarlatidou* – University College London; Alice Sheppard – University College London; Muki Haklay – University College London; Claudia Goebel – European Citizen Science Association. Alice Sheppard presented the talk, exploring the … Continue reading Citizen Science 2017 – Day 1 (Afternoon) – Tools, overcoming barriers, and project slam
Shannon Dosemagen introduces the keynote speakers by pointing that citizen science provides a way to question how science is done and how is doing it. Within citizen science, it is important to notice that scientific degrees don’t always translate to leadership. The keynotes speakers where Dr. Marc Edwards (Virgina Tech) & LeeAnne Walters (Coalition for Clean … Continue reading Citizen Science 2017 – Day 1 (Morning): Flint Water Study, EPA use of citizen science and engagement
The Citizen Science Association conference is held at the River Center in St Paul, Minnesota on 17th to 20th May. This post and the following ones are notes that were taken during the meeting in the sessions that I’ve attended. Wednesday was dedicated to workshops, and I joined the Citizen Science at College level workshop. Organised by Thomas … Continue reading Citizen Science 2017 – workshops day and opening panel
Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation is a new open access journal, addressing the interdisciplinary field that links different aspects of remote sensing (the use of different imaging and sensing technologies) and the field of ecology and conservation. It is publishing its papers in Open Access, so the papers are free to download and share. … Continue reading Call for Papers in a special issue of Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation on citizen science
The special issue of the Human Computation Journal (see the details of the editorial here), summarises the result from the EU FP7 “Citizen Cyberlab” project. One of the outcomes of the project is the development of the GeoKey platform for participatory mapping. Therefore, a paper that was written with Oliver Roick and Claire Ellul explains … Continue reading Paper: GeoKey – open infrastructure for community mapping and science
Last December, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) awarded funding to UCL Extreme Citizen Science group and Earthwatch as part of their investment in public engagement. The projects are all short – they start from January to March and included public engagement and training to early career researchers. “Into the Night” highlights the importance of light … Continue reading Into the night – training day on citizen science slides
Several weeks ago, Liz Killen, who is studying for an MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College organised an interview with me and Alice Sheppard about aspects of citizen science, for the I, Science the science magazine of Imperial College. This is the second time ExCiteS is covered in the magazine, after a report in 2013 by … Continue reading Podcast – discussion with Liz Killen and Alice Sheppard on citizen science
As part of a special issue of the open access Human Computation Journal, I am the co-author of the editorial Creativity and Learning in Citizen Cyberscience – Lessons from the Citizen Cyberlab Summit. Following the summit (see blog post here), Egle Ramanauskaite took the blog posts and edited them with her notes, which led to a … Continue reading Editorial in Human Computation Journal – Creativity and Learning in Citizen Cyberscience
As part of the AAG 2015 conference, Bandana Kar, Rina Ghose, Renee Sieber and I organised a set of sessions on Public Participation GIS – you can read the summary here. After the conference, we’ve organised a special issue of the Cartographic Journal (thanks to Alex Kent, the journal editor) dedicated to current perspectives of public participation … Continue reading Public Participation GIS and Participatory GIS in the Era of GeoWeb – editorial for a special issue
Part of the special issue on Public Participation GIS that was published in The Cartographic Journal, was a paper that was led by Jeroen Verplanke (ITC). This paper goes back to the workshop on participatory GIS in 2013, that was the leaving event for Dr Mike McCall in ITC, after which he continue to work in UNAM, Mexico. … Continue reading A Shared Perspective for PGIS and VGI – new paper
‘The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science’ is a fairly slim and small format book. Darlene Cavalier and Eric B. Kennedy edited this short collection of papers that came out earlier in 2016. The book is part of a series, from the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University. The series aims are … Continue reading The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science
About a month ago, on 7th December 2016, DR Kingsley Purdam (Manchester) organised a one day workshop on citizen science, and in particular on citizen science from a social science methodological perspective. The day organised with the support of the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM). The purpose of the workshop/conference was to explore the … Continue reading Crowdsourcing the Future?
An aspect of collaborative projects is that they start slowly, and as they become effective and productive, they reached their end! The COST Energic (European Network for Research into Geographic Information Crowdsourcing) led to many useful activities, with some of them leading to academic papers. From COST Energic, we’ve got the European Handbook on Crowdsourced Geographic … Continue reading The Potential of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in Future Transport Systems
When the new journal about Citizen Science established, one of the articles that the editorial team thought should be included is a paper that describe the development of associations dedicated to the practice of citizen science. There are now several of these: the Citizen Science Association (CSA), the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA), and the … Continue reading New paper: Associations for Citizen Science: Regional Knowledge, Global Collaboration
The “UCL Synergies podcasts” is series of interviews with researchers who are working on a shared problem from two disciplinary perspective. It is part of the activities to demonstrate how UCL addresses the grand challenges. The series itself is an excellent demonstration of the issues that come up in interdisciplinary research and you can find … Continue reading UCL Synergies podcast – Congo Citizen Science
The bi-annual Geographic Information Science conference is one of the focal point on the field. This year, it was held in Montreal. You can find my talk in a long and separate post. Here are some notes of talks that I took during the meeting. The conference started with reasons for the location, and a … Continue reading GIScience 2016 notes