Citizen science in the Humanities : A promise for creativity

Abstract

Citizen science is gaining popularity and becoming a new outlet for people who are not professionally trained to be researchers in order to contribute to a wide range of research. Bonney et al. (2009) suggested that citizen science projects differ in the type of involvement of citizens and pointed out that there are three types of projects, contributive, collaborative, and co-created. By their different nature they provide different opportunities for citizen scientists to participate in research, ranging from merely helping with trivial data collection tasks to formulating new research questions. Within the citizen research area, Humanities are still moderately present and tend to tap mainly into crowdsourcing activities which fall under the contributive project type. Our paper starts by outlining some of the key developments in citizen science; then we present some Humanities-related citizen science initiatives, and argue that citizen research in the Humanities is still under-developed compared to other domains of knowledge.