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Date: March 19, 2010

Title: Why Go to the Zoo?

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Podcaster: Dr. Alex ‘Sandy’ Antunes

Organization: Project Calliope LLC – http://projectcalliope.com/
http://scientificblogging.com/sky_day–
Email: antunes@nasw.org

Description: Anyone can help discover new stuff in Galaxy Zoo- but why do people bother in the first place? Jordan Raddick responds with some unexpected insight into why people donate their time for open science.

Bio: Born in the heart of a dying star (as we were all), Alex draws from his research, writing, and game design work to bring you the joy of science twice a week at ScientificBlogging.com/sky_day– and to launch the first personal science/music satellite via ProjectCalliope.com.

Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by the Physics Department at Eastern Illinois University: “Caring faculty guiding students through teaching and research” at www.eiu.edu/~physics/.

Transcript:

[Sandy intro] The background sounds you’re hearing are not where I am. But in a moment, I will be at– or talking about– the Galazy Zoo. I’m Alex Antunes, the Daytime Astronomer, here on 365 Days of Astronomy.

[Sandy] I’m here at the 215th AAS, still, and I’m talking with Jordan Raddick about galaxies- but not about Galaxy Zoo. What I’m talking to him about is the motivations he found for why people will contribute to citizen science programs like Galaxy Zoo.

[Jordan] Well, when Galaxy Zoo first started, we had an immediate positive response, within the first week we’d had tens of thousands of people join the site and do millions of classifications of galaxies. And it immediately became clear to us that we had really grabbed onto something powerful within the community of the public.

[Sandy] Well, yes, a lot of people do that, but what’s neat is you went to find out why people were contributing, and used an interesting methodology there too.

[Jordan] We got really curious about it, and wanted to try to find out why people were contributing to Galaxy Zoo in such an amazing way. And so what we did was– we asked people. And we asked them questions, and some themes emerged from the questions that we asked. Some people said they were interested in astronomy, other people said the images were really beautiful, some people said, you know, it was a lot of fun to do it, and so we took all of those…

[Sandy] [interrupting] Those all sound like standard reasons, but, um, for those that can’t see the poster via podcast, some of the titles he came up with for motivating categories are: Astronomy, Beauty, Community, Contribute, Discover, Fun, Help, Learning, Science, Teaching, Vastness, and Zoo.

[Jordan] Vastness and Zoo were particularly fun ones. Vastness it’s what we sometimes call the shock and awe motivation. It’s “the universe is just so big and wow, it’s really amazing.”

[Sandy] It’s why I do astronomy.

[Jordan] Yes, it’s why a lot of us do. And Zoo was just, “I think the Galaxy Zoo project is very cool”, “I think the methodology you’re using of getting people to contribute galaxies is fascinating.”

[Sandy] So that’s sort of your techie-science fan, coming in from a technical aspect, almost?

[Jordan] Yes, exactly. And so we got all these ideas, 12 of them in all, and we put together a survey, where we listed all 12 of those, and we asked people to check the one that they thought most applied to them, so what their most important reason for doing Galaxy Zoo was. And of all those 12 motivations, 10,000 people filled out the survey, a response rate that really amazed us. And of those 10000 people who responded to the survey, 40% of them said just one motivation was most important. And that was, “I’m excited to contribute to original scientific research”. And we’ve done some more analysis and…

[Sandy] [interrupting] That’s it? It could be anything? It could be protein folding, it could be Galaxy Zoo, anything, they just wanted to contribute to science?

[Jordan] When we asked people why they contributed to Galaxy Zoo, that’s what they mostly told us, that they wanted to contribute to science. And I think that’s really encouraging for the future of citizen science.

[Sandy] That’s awesome.

[Jordan] Because it means there’s this appetite out there to make real scientific discoveries and contribute in these small ways. And I think that shows there’s a lot of potential out there for future projects. That as long as we scientists can come up with clever ideas, people will continue to be interested in contributing to them.

[Sandy] Real quick, can you read the statements that define each one? Astronomy simply says “I’m interested in astronomy”, Beauty has ‘I enjoy looking at beautiful Galaxy images’, the other ones?

[Jordan] So Community says “I can meet other people with similar interests”, Contribute says ‘I’m excited to contribute to original scientific research’, Discovery says ‘I can look at galaxies that few people have every seen before’.

[Sandy] Ooh, uniqueness, “I’m there first”.

[Jordan] Yes, and that’s a very exciting thing for a lot of people. And then there’s “I had a lot of fun categorizing the galaxies”, there’s “I’m happy to help”, “I find the site and forums helpful in learning about astronomy”, “I’m interested in science”, “I find Galaxy Zoo to be a useful resource for teaching other people”, “I am amazed by the vast scale of the universe”, and “I’m interested in the Galaxy Zoo project”. Those are the 12 choices that people had on the survey. And among all of those, the contribute-to-original-scientific-research was by far the most popular.

[Sandy] Now you said that you had an “Other” choice that respondents could choose another motivation, what sort of things came up from that?

[Jordan] Whenever you do a survey you always want to make sure that there’s an option you give people when they don’t like your answers, they can fill in their own. and of those answers…

[Sandy] Ah, “none of the above”.

[Jordan] Yes, exactly, in fact we asked it two different ways. We said, one was “your most important reason could be none of the above” and then another way we asked it was “can you think of any other reasons someone might be interested in Galaxy Zoo.” And from those two things, a lot of similar themes came up. One of the big ones was, “I wanted to discover something new”, that people wanted to– rather than making this contribution to science, or in addition to that– people wanted to make an amazing discovery of their own.

[Sandy] Well, I think people go into science as a career for the same motivation.

[Jordan] Yes.

[Sandy] That’s a really potent motivator.

[Jordan] Exactly. And we had some examples of that, there was this famous story of Hanny Van Arkel, this schoolteacher from the Netherlands discovered an entirely new type of object with Galaxy Zoo.

[Sandy] Oh cool!

[Jordan] And the thing I think is so amazing is, we went back and looked at the data, and before she made that discovery, 27 other people had looked at that same image. And all of them had just passed it by.

[Sandy] Oh my goodness!

[Jordan] She was the first one to bring it to the attention of other people on the forum. This was something interesting.

[Sandy] Oh, that’s the ‘many eyes’ school of thought from security, that you need many eyes to find programming bugs or security exploits because one person or two people might miss something.

[Jordan] Yes, exactly. And that came up a lot. [and] Religious and spiritual motivations came up a lot, people saying that…

[Sandy] [laughing] Pro or con?

[Jordan] Pro mostly, that, “this helps me understand god better”, or “this connects me with my faith”. And of course none of these are the exact things people said, but these sort of themes came up a lot.

[Sandy] But still, a spiritual component is heartening to hear.

[Jordan] Yes, absolutely.

[Sandy] And these are some of the other ones here?

[Jordan] Yes, these are the other motivations just…

[Sandy] [interrupts] Okay, I gotta say, ‘respondent is bored often at work’.

[Jordan] Yes.

[Sandy] 29 people out of 10000 said that. [laughs]

[Jordan] And that was something that we… that idea of “I’m bored at work” was something we expected to come up and…

[Sandy] But to have people admit it is actually very interesting.

[Jordan] Yes, and we got that only 29 times out of our 10000 total responses, so we see that it is there.

[Sandy] [interrupts] But you found 20 honest citizens.

[Jordan] Right! [laughs] What that could mean is that there’s 29 honest people in the world.

[Sandy] Exactly.

[Jordan] But I think it also means that everybody does this for different reasons. You know, nobody just comes in with one reason. But when you really ask people what’s the one most important reason to you, this single theme of contributing to research comes out. But all of the other choices combined accounted for only 2% of the data. And this is always an analysis you want to do when you do a survey. Because you want to see, did people think there was something else that was more popular. It would be interesting to repeat this with a different kind of citizen science project. Maybe one of the bird-watching projects that the group at Cornell does.

[Sandy] Yes, or the protein folding one.

[Jordan] Exactly, or SETI at home or any of the others, and see… it would be interesting to compare these data sets. Because you can’t know the answers to these questions until you ask them.

[Sandy] That’s good because scientists don’t often ask people, “well, what do you want” or “why do you do things”, so this really opens the dialog both ways. This is almost the psychology behind Galaxy Zoo.

[Jordan] Yes, that’s exactly what it is, trying to understand why people are participating. The carry-away message is, you can do this type of analysis just by asking people. And when you do that, the one answer people give is ‘contributing to science’. And I think that’s encouraging for the future of citizen science.

[Sandy] Well, thank you for your time.

[Jordan] Thank you!

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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