Staff project based in the Department of Physics

Hilary round 2015

See also Bringing the Zooniverse to Facebook (blog post)

For more information, please contact innovation@it.ox.ac.uk

ABSTRACT

The Zooniverse is home to the Internet’s largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects, spanning a range of disciplines. Zooniverse volunteers have discovered new astronomical phenomena, a new exoplanet, and crunched data that would require hundreds of man-years to do by traditional means.

Currently, our citizen science projects are all standalone websites; and analysis of our audience data has shown that while there’s interest in our projects from younger users on Facebook,  they’re not going on to visit the sites. By adapting some of our existing projects to the Facebook platform, we can bring the projects to them, making it easier to participate in Oxford scientific research. We propose to leverage Facebook’s social features to enable our volunteers to share project data, tasks and achievements with their friends, thereby allowing us to engage with a younger demographic of users that we’d never normally be able to reach.

This project aims to convert four Zooniverse projects to the Facebook platform, allowing us to widen participation in our younger demographics, and generate new data and techniques for carrying out citizen science on social networks.