Citizen Science!

I found this week's online lab portion to be a great deal of fun!  Actually, what I think really made it fun was the fact that I am paralleling in my Astronomy class lessons on galaxies.  I had been learning about the composition of galaxies, the types and characteristics, the physics, etc.  Being able to go on the Galaxy Zoo website helped me in that I got to get some practical application in.  My Astronomy class is online so it is kind of tough sometimes to get the hang of the stuff (especially the physics), but the website we got onto to classify the galaxies showed me that this kind of stuff can in deed be somewhat simple.  Like I said, I thought it was a lot of fun, and I got a little giddy when I was able to identify some characteristics in the pictures, as well as different objects within the pictures or even outside of the galaxies, such as binary systems and so forth.  

This leads me into the rest of our project this week.  I chose the project on the Zooniverse website of exploring an ancient Greek community.  Really, the website asks for help in deciphering the transcripts that they have found of an ancient Greek city.  Here I was thinking that this kind of stuff was only left up to the "professionals", and they want my help?  Cool!  Let us get to it then!  At first, the process was a little confusing, and since I know just about nothing when it comes to the Greek language, some of the writing was a little difficult to look at.  There are a lot of similarities in our language's letter and theirs as well, though.  You can tell that they have put a great deal of effort into helping the average citizen understand the task, though, as there was a click-through tutorial.  Also, the letters on the keyboard would show different examples of written versions of the letters if you hovered over them so you could kind of get the gist of them.  I think I did pretty well, considering I was trying to read an ancient language.  If it was impossible to see the letters, I was happy to see that they let you move on and they have options for you to chose that lets them know that.

Overall, I think citizen science is a great way to get the average public more involved and interested in science.  On the few projects I had skimmed through, they made it really easy for someone who knew nothing about the subject to understand what their task at hand was.  The advantage for the scientific community is obviously having more eyes and brains on the thousands, or millions of pictures and records experts would have to go through in the specific area.  Different view points is also an advantage for the scientific community.  Advantages for the public are that you do not have to have a doctorate in an area to help conduct research and I just think that is so cool!  Who knows?  Maybe someone would stumble upon a project they become really interested in and wish to make it their career?  Maybe even if someone does not take a liking to the project they work on specifically, it would inspire a "tinkering" spirit in them to work on something else, such as DIYbio!