UCL Office of Open Science & Scholarship launch – citizen science webinar

This text and video is reblogged and edited from https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/open-access/2020/10/29/launch-week-summary/

Last week marked the launch of the UCL Office of Open Science & Scholarship which is part of the library at UCL. The office includes support for citizen science activities at UCL, and as such, marks an important milestone in the institutional support for such activities at UCL. On 21st Oct, a webinar that was dedicated to citizen science covered the topic at UCL.

This session began with an overview of the history and development of Citizen Science at UCL by me, and included a wide range of examples of how the principles of Citizen Science can be used in practice. This was followed up by a series of lightning talks where colleagues from across the university shared their projects and experiences of working on vastly different Citizen Science projects:

• First, Rosie Brigham shared with us the details of her PhD study, Monument Monitor. This project invites visitors to historic sites to share photographs of their visits using social media in order to monitor structural and visitor-related changes to the monuments.
• Mayssa Jallad gave us an overview of the work of the Institute for Global Prosperity and the RELIEF Project that trains local people as Citizen Scientists in neighbourhoods in Hamra (Beirut) and Mina (Lebanon).
• Kate Jones followed up with a completely different project, truly highlighting the variety of applications of Citizen Science. The Bat Detective Project used volunteers to collect and then later identify audio recordings of bat sonar, which was used to train a machine learning algorithm for the next stage of the project.
• Danielle Purkiss was our final speaker, talking about the Big Compost Experiment, which is a truly massive undertaking, with numerous participants all contributing to a research experiment looking at compostable and biodegradable plastics in their own back gardens!

This event was recorded and it and all of the slides are available on MediaCentral (use the link below)

https://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/player?autostart=n&videoId=C2bD3636&captions=y&chapterId=0