Using network analysis to characterize participation and interaction in a citizen science online community

Abstract

Citizen Science (CS) projects provide a space for collaboration among scientists and the general public as a basis for making joint scientific discoveries. Analysis of existing datasets from CS projects can broaden our understanding of how different stakeholder groups interact and contribute to the joint achievements. To this end, we have collected publicly available forum data from the “Chimp&See” project hosted on the Zooniverse platform via crawling its Talk pages. The collected data were then analysed using Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) techniques. The results obtained shed light on the participation and collaboration patterns of different stakeholder groups within discussion forums of the “Chimp&See” project.