The Constructing Scientific Communities project, part of the AHRC’s Science in Culture theme, is inviting proposals for citizen science or ‘citizen humanities’ projects to be developed as part of the Zooniverse.org platform. Proposals are welcome from researchers whose work would benefit from the active participation of tens or even hundreds of volunteers.

The Constructing Scientific Communities project examines citizen science in the 19th and 21st centuries, contrasting and reflecting on engagement with distributed communities of amateur researchers in both the historical record and in contemporary practice. Just as Darwin consulted popular natural history magazines and drew on information provided by an army of two thousand correspondents, modern scientists have worked with volunteers to classify galaxies, discover planets, rescue old climate records and speed up cancer research.

Between one and four successful projects will be selected from responses to this call, and will be developed and hosted by the Zooniverse team in association with the applications. We hope to include both scientific and historical projects; those writing proposals should review the existing range of Zooniverse projects which include not only classification but also transcription projects. Please note, however, we cannot distribute funds nor support imaging or other digitization in support of the project.

Projects will be selected by the project team according to the following criteria:

  1. Merit and usefulness of the data expected to result from the project.
  2. Novelty of the problem; projects which require extending the capability of the Zooniverse platform or serve as case studies for crowdsourcing in new areas or in new ways are welcome.
  3. Alignment with the goals and interests of the Constructing Scientific Communities project. In particular, we wish to encourage projects that :
    1. Have a significant historical dimension, especially in relation to the history of science.
    2. Involve the transcription of text, either in its entirety or for rich metadata.

Note it is anticipated that some, but not necessarily all selected projects, will meet this third criterion; please do submit proposals on other topics.

The deadline for submissions is July 25th 2014.

For more information about the Constructing Scientific communities project and to submit an application, visit http://conscicom.org/proposals/