May
2014
Crowdsourced research
During the past weekend, during a dinner at our house, conversation shifted to how crowdsourced research is helping tackle some of the problems. The traditional research revolves faculty and others in a research group training the students in research methods as well as relationship building with the members of the research group. Implicit in all of this is that when the student researchers brings the results to the faculty, the familiarity of the methodologies as well as trust makes this relationship produce excellent results. Similarly, research collaborations happen between faculty from different areas within the same institution or from others based on common interests, familiarity and trust. Again, familiarity and trust are the basic foundations for the success of research. Of course, this is, like everything else, a gross generalization, but it captures what happens today.
Crowdsourcing of research simply means putting out a research problem out there on the internet and inviting anyone who wants to participate to contribute to the research. There is a lot more to this in that the researcher needs to define up front the process for vetting the contributions and attributions and all that jazz. But the idea, when it works, is brilliant. Instead of a few students or postdocs working in a lab, you now have literally thousands of participants from all over the world. The kinds of research one can carry out this way is certainly limited, but, it is still very powerful!
In “3 Examples Of Crowdsourcing Science“, Julio Peironcely provides a very good summary of some of the crowdsourced projects. There, he mentions “A classic example of this approach is Tim Gowers, who posted in his blog a mathematical question and in a matter of days the commenters had solved it. ” Please note that Tim’s blog post is rather long! This whole idea has resulted in the Polymath Projects blog where complex math problems are posted and solutions can evolve through collaborative discussions. You can visit here to see the currently active projects. They also seem to have already published several papers (presumably peer reviewed). You can find them by searching for the author Polymath in http://arxiv.org/find. Instead of listing all those who contributed towards a Polymath paper, they use the author name – D. H. J. Polymath. Fascinating!
The participatory research in science is also referred to as the “citizen science“, where the contribution from the “crowds” come in different ways, just like how academic research has several aspects to it in terms of support. For traditional academic research, support comes in the form of librarians, lab scientists relying on staff for creating reagents, animal care facilities staff etc. They are essential for supporting the research, but not directly involved in carrying out the core of the research. The “crowds”, in certain projects play that support role, such as helping in transcription. However, in projects such as Polymath, the contributors are actual collaborators helping solve a difficult problem.
Zooniverse is an excellent source for finding and participating in citizen science. Recently, they also point to projects in the Humanities. The “Ancient Lives” project’s research goals are explained here and some of the online tools that they make available are fascinating. I am sure you have heard of crowd sourced work in the humanities in terms of helping transcribe scanned materials. Crowdsourcing of transcription of civil war letters is one of the early applications which continue. Pretty soon, Wellesley LTS will have opportunity for participation in a crowdsourced transcription project! Stay tuned.
Foldit is a fascinating idea whereby research in protein folding is crowdsourced. This is sort of a multiplayer game! The About page states “Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.” You can see how “Foldit Players” are either listed as co-authors or acknowledged in papers as contributors to the research publication. In one such publication in Nature, the authors mention that over 57,000 foldit players contributed to the research and in a supplement they list some of the key contributors – foldidlady, gringer, d_j, to name a few! How cool is that…
Scientific research is also beginning to get some crowdsourced funding. In this Forbes article titled “Crowdfunding for Science and STEM Education”, you can see a few projects that have been funded. In “3 Examples Of Crowdsourcing Science“, Julio Peironcely presents a graph showing phenomenal increase in the crowdsourced funding for scientific research.
I played around with foldit for a while. It is a lot of fun, however, I just don’t have the time!