Pathfinder: an online collaboration environment for citizen scientists
- Kurt Luther ,
- Scott Counts ,
- Kristin B. Stecher ,
- Aaron Hoff ,
- Paul Johns
CHI '09: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems |
Published by ACM
For over a century, citizen scientists have volunteered to collect huge quantities of data for professional scientists to analyze. We designed Pathfinder, an online environment that challenges this traditional division of labor by providing tools for citizen scientists to collaboratively discuss and analyze the data they collect. We evaluated Pathfinder in a sustainability and commuting context using a mixed methods approach in both naturalistic and experimental settings. Our results showed that citizen scientists preferred Pathfinder to a standard wiki and were able to go beyond data collection and engage in deeper discussion and analyses. We also found that citizen scientists require special types of technological support because they generate original research. This paper offers an early example of the mutually beneficial relationship between HCI and citizen science.
Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-246-7/09/04Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies arenot made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copiesbear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise,or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires priorspecific permission and/or a fee.CHI 2009, April 4-9, 2009, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.